Hacker News: Tanoc

New comment by Tanoc in "Chopping up books when they're physically too big"

Tanoc — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 09:21:00 +0000

Always assume that something you have, someone will want it after you've had your use of it. They do not want a recreation or approximation with all of it's flaws and compromises, something that provides an altered experience or a skewed view. They want the original. If you treat something as disposable that is a disregard for anyone but yourself. Someone may want your old jacket, your old car, your old book. This consideration for those who come after you is the way things survived, how family heirlooms and sacred relics came to be. It's the idea behind the phrase "Plant a sapling you may never sit in the shade of."

That's what machine generation tries to devalue and bury. Infinite recreations, infinite approximations, with no original to compare to. The perfect tool of someone who wishes to create a reality of their own bias rather than one that is a result of all who came before them.

New comment by Tanoc in "Most people prefer traditional architecture"

Tanoc — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 08:59:31 +0000

Several things are at play here. The first is that pre-Modernist architecture was heavily designed around natural lighting and cooling. Many buildings and houses designed and built before the 1920s used combinations of materials and elements that maximized the use of daylight. Transom lights and polished marble floors for example were often used to allow light to bounce through a room and to induce airflow. The light came in from a high place and bounced from the floor to fill normally unlit spaces, while hot air was pushed up and vented through the transom windows. If you've ever been in an office building built from the 1870s through the 1940s you'll notice every single transom only opens outwards towards the hall, as the hall created a high pressure space that pushed air into the low pressure rooms, an effect that is amplified when paired with ceiling fans. Meanwhile things such as mullions allowed the windows themselves to be set more deeply inside the wall by providing a strengthening member that allowed a larger opening. That larger opening with the windows set further in provided shade while still allowing in diffused light, and helped in preventing glare upon the glass while creating an overhang using the building's facade or cornices to allow the windows to be opened while it was raining because eaves are useless above two stories of height.

People don't understand these individual parts and don't understand how they all work together. But they definitely feel the cumulative effects, and those cumulative effects are much friendlier than Modernist and post-Modernist design. Modernism and all the schools that followed it rely on electric technology to fill in the gaps in the design, which makes them feel less accomodating to humans. Electric lighting, electric heating and cooling, and electro-mechanical traversal. Those things aren't as tactile, and many aren't even visible. The Modernist building does not present itself as something humans made, maintain, and interact with, but instead presents itself as a machine that you are temporarily inside of as a foreign entity because everything designed to outwardly accomodate humans is instead either streamlined down or fully away. The overhead lights shine light that you cannot influence, the hidden vents expel air from a place you cannot see or change, and the hanging facade glass walls provide no palpable separation from the outside world. Your mind tells you that this mid-century tower is a place where you do not belong.

New comment by Tanoc in "Don't Get in a Crash in a Cybercab"

Tanoc — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:05:51 +0000

The issue with just "Flash a badge" is that it can easily be exploited in several ways. Municipal police badges don't have digital identifiers on them in the U.S. A high enough resolution resin 3D printer could have you a close enough approximation that the quality of the camera wouldn't be able to distinguish. Not to mention this would allow negatively motivated officers to be able to hijack vehicles, either in the case of preventing someone from being able to flee a dangerous situation or in order to use the vehicle to their own ends such as creating a roadblock. In whatever case it gives the police (or someone imitating them) and unaccountable-at-the-moment tool to use.

Even someone with a Flipper Zero could likely get into the thing and fling it around like a giant R/C toy.

New comment by Tanoc in "Every novel is boring until it isn't"

Tanoc — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:16:43 +0000

All classrooms had a clock in them at the school that was hooked up to the PA system so it was easy to time it. Once a week, usually Fridays barring any holidays or school events during her class, she would run the first fifteen minutes of the class going over what we were to do for the weekend which was usually homework, and then for the last thirty minutes we'd do the reading. We were required to bookmark where we left off and where we ended, and she'd actually watch us to make sure we were reading rather than just flipping pages.

New comment by Tanoc in "“Tweet” and the bird logo apparently enter the public domain"

Tanoc — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:50:55 +0000

Actually General Motors still holds the Oldsmobile trademark and renewed it in April of last year. They don't have to sell cars to keep it, as they still sell parts related to the vehicles alongside merchandise that carries the brand's name. You still have to get a license from General Motors to feature the Oldsmobile 442 in your videogame for example.

New comment by Tanoc in "Every novel is boring until it isn't"

Tanoc — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 03:19:44 +0000

There was a rule a fourth grade teacher of mine had that she used in her English class to try and get some of the less literate kids up to par. That rule was embodied by the name she gave it, "Thirty minutes thirty pages." She gave them thirty minutes to read thirty pages of a book. A minute a page. Considering most of them were choosing things like Goosebumps that were only a hundred and twenty pages or so it was an easy enough ask. But because she set it as a challenge so many of them went blasting beyond that. Many would finish half the book during that thirty minute reading period. The interesting thing I didn't pick up on until years later as an adult was that it was also slow enough that they could actually understand and remember what they were reading rather than just blasting through it. It left the slower readers with enough time and didn't make them feel like they were falling behind while encouraging them to learn how to read faster.

Many modern adult book series are six hundred pages or more for a single installment with about four hundred words a page versus the maybe hundred and fifty of a children's book like Goosebumps. Since it's three to four times the text that makes thirty pages thirty minutes actually viable as a self challenge even as an adult.

New comment by Tanoc in "Ganon's Mysterious Origins (Revisited)"

Tanoc — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 22:27:34 +0000

Early Nintendo games were sort of like Osamu Tezuka works. There were "actors" that all had the same appearance and sometimes names used across multiple works that filled the role they needed. Of the first five Zelda games only The Legend Of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventures Of Link have a connected story, and even that's questionable as the beginning of Zelda II retcons the ending of The Legend Of Zelda and rewrites the setting extensively.

New comment by Tanoc in "How I feel about AI"

Tanoc — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 19:58:39 +0000

Chess is inherently a leisure activity. The incentive for playing chess is just to be better at chess. But things like woodworking, typesetting, and welding, while all possible to do recreationally, are not leisure activities. They are effort used to produce something. The desire is always there to engage with the thing or idea, but if the resource cost is far too high or the knowledge required is more than one person can reasonably learn the effort will not be expended. A leisure activity will always persist so long as someone knows how to do it because it exists for itself. But many other activities exist in service to something else, and if that something else ceases to exist then the activity will as well. You lose entire domains of useful cross-disciplinary knowledge that way.

New comment by Tanoc in "Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread"

Tanoc — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 17:19:16 +0000

There's a few I could recount from before this current onslaught, but the delineator is that those incidents of corruption were a once a year sort of thing. If you want examples there's the PATRIOT Act in 2001, No Child Left Behind in 2002, the 2004 rewrite of CAFE standards for vehicle emissions, and the 2007 bailouts of General Motors and Wells Fargo. From about 2000 to 2013 every year you would have one big thing that all the major news outlets like NBC or CBS covered, and then about a dozen smaller things that specialized entities with specialized interests like Mother Jones or Chalkbeat would cover. After Citizens United in 2013 things started to accelerate to about twice and two dozen times a year because the perpetrators could argue it wasn't corrupt, merely "politically motivated speech." Since 2017 however that has been shortened to twice a week and a dozen a day.

New comment by Tanoc in "Tetris issues legal warning after White House releases arcade of parody games"

Tanoc — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 16:42:14 +0000

Hydrogenated soybean oil specifically, it seems. Which stems from stupid pseudoscience from about twelve years ago that conflated phytoestrogens that nearly all tubers, nightshades, and legumes have with E2 estradiol estrogen in mammals. It's where the failed insult "soyboy" comes from.

New comment by Tanoc in "Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code"

Tanoc — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:07:01 +0000

Not just the cost of ownership, but the cost of disposal. Removing parts becomes much harder if you have to look through a lot more pieces to determine how they connect to everything else and what still relies on them. Programmers sometimes forget that they aren't just adding and making new things all the time, but that their job also requires digging through multiple older layers to excise obsolete unneeded things.

New comment by Tanoc in "Commercially Available Bike Generators Are Not Sustainable (2011)"

Tanoc — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:26:16 +0000

A recumbent bicycle perhaps? Often has pedals ahead of the front wheel, where you lay down in a hammock or moulded seat?

New comment by Tanoc in "The shrinking landscape of linguistic diversity in the age of LLMs"

Tanoc — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:18:22 +0000

One thing that is distasteful but effective is excessive use of profanity, broken aphorisms, and shattered English. LLMs hate cursing because of their guardrails, and since they don't actually understand language they can never truly piece together a broken aphorism such as the classic "People die if they are killed" because they're too literal. As for shattered English (think of the caveman speak from The Office with the quote "Why waste time say many word when few word do trick?") because it is intentionally mangled, has no rules, and the understanding is extremely context specific it gets your brain to pay more attention, and if you are the speaker brain do work more clever make thing say funny.

It's not lost on me that the lowbrow humour of some too strict translation and a throwaway sitcom joke people thought was funny back in 2007 could be a way to stave off linguistic homogeneity.

For the use of profanity the data in the paper seems to indicate that swearing is retained in the LLM rewritten examples. Profanity however is rather subjective could be anything from saying the more mundane "oh my god" and "damn" to the extreme "shit eating fucklungerer" or use of slurs, but it's unstated in the paper as to the severity of the profanity. It's the severity of it that's important though, as LLMs restrain themselves from using something like "shit eating fucklungerer" unless explicitly told to.

New comment by Tanoc in "Judge rules Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal"

Tanoc — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 08:36:36 +0000

There's also the benefit of following the strategy the Democrats as a larger party have followed since at least George W. Bush. Let someone stupider or bolder break a system that's hampering you, and then just never fix it because it benefits you. Disregard that with it broken your opponent can, will, and does cause more harm to everyone. We've been in a cycle of one side smashing whatever makes them upset at the moment, and then the other side just walking over the shards now that they don't have to detour around it.

New comment by Tanoc in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

Tanoc — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 02:56:53 +0000

ALT+TAB, TAB, ↓, ↓, ↓, CTRL+HOME.

For a lot of people this is a recognizable pattern. Switch window, select element, scroll down, then snap back to the very top. The keyboard commands above should do the same thing no matter if it's your text editor or your web browser. People should know these are going to work regardless of what they're using. Because these aren't key commands going to the program, these are key commands going to the operating system. The program shouldn't be able to arbitrarily choose whether it abides by these. Consistency is important not only for speed, but for human understanding and capability. If every door had a different way of opening it such as drawing a series of lines or tapping a certain rhythm or belching thirty feet away people would be mentally taxed discovering that particular door's interfacing method, and common tools would not be able to help those who couldn't find the interface or use it because of disability or differing ability. It's only doors with extremely specialized designs like blast doors that have an unusual interface and interfacing method, because they're designed to do one very specific thing that lies far outside of common use cases. Your chatroom program, image viewer, or archive unpacker is not a blast door. Put a door handle on it where everyone expects it to be.

New comment by Tanoc in "“It works better in the app”"

Tanoc — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:12:30 +0000

I've been trying to figure out for years how to keep specific bits of Javascript like that from triggering. But so many modern webpages are procedurally generated messes born from frameworks that I can't reliably track down a way to do it. On Reddit for example there's reddit.com, redd.it, redditstatic.com, and cdn-apple.com that are all subdomains that load on the page, and each pull Javascript from dozens of different sources. If you disable Javascript entirely the page won't load and instead nags you to enable it. I don't want to go digging through the page inspector in my dev console just to track down which .js file is causing that, and then figure out how to only stop it from killing the scrollbar. If you can even do that. Some pages are so labyrinthine that you can't.

New comment by Tanoc in "Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down"

Tanoc — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 21:32:27 +0000

Spite for others can overpower any self interest. If the person has been shaped by past experiences to rely on spiteful actions as a coping mechanism they will struggle to do anything else. The reward centers in their brain respond more to the disadvantage their actions have caused the other party rather than any advantage they create for themselves. Rebecca Kazinka's actually been doing studies on this for a few years now if you want some reading.

New comment by Tanoc in "There's no reason for software to be slow anymore"

Tanoc — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 15:59:40 +0000

I feel like you're hitting at the real reason why so much of this happens. Not necessarily the piracy, but centralized control of the data and data flow. Even if it's slow as hell to send off that data to proprietary company servers (or rented cloud servers) to verify it, you're still verifying it. You, as in you the company, can't do that if it's local compute only. You can't control whether the user installed your paid plugin or some free alternative. You can't control someone stripping out libraries or code to remove intentional friction points designed to annoy them into a higher tier of the software. You can't control whether or not they update, or whether or not you can force the software into end-of-life with an update despite it still functioning.

If there's a connection to your services outside of the user's machine you can control all of that.

New comment by Tanoc in "WPD won't replace stolen Flock cameras, citing public trust"

Tanoc — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:12:00 +0000

There are plenty of exceptions police can get to bypass warrant requirements. Think for example of stingers and other cell spoofing systems or the license plate readers they have on the front of their cruisers. Even if they do have to get a warrant judges are far more likely to simply grant any warrant request if it has to do with digital surveillance. Carpenter v. United States and Chatrie v. United States have outlined this behaviour, and in the wake of their rulings created the bias towards what are basically automatically approved warrants for such data.

New comment by Tanoc in "Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers"

Tanoc — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:35:44 +0000

We built maybe two of the older less dense ones every year in most states, and that was driven by SaaS and cloud storage. The expected rate these AI datacenters would be built at if we just let these people go unopposed would be one every single week for the next four years. Something the size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter that uses the equivalent electricity of fifty to sixty four person households and depending on if it's open or closed loop cooled could use the equivalent of thirty households' worth of water.

That doesn't sound like a panic, that sounds like people wanting some consideration and moderation of infrastructure that's extremely disruptive and tied to a technology that's causing more damage than it's helping currently.