Hacker News: TurkTurkleton

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

TurkTurkleton — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:38:07 +0000

Dude, are you for real? We've had the supposed inevitability of AI rammed down our throats since the minute LaMDA convinced Blake Lemoine it was sentient, we've watched CEOs hype up AI as if it were production-ready while it was still barely beta quality, LLM-driven chatbots have been stapled to the side of every product no matter how little sense it makes since OpenAI published an API, and we've been told to prepare for the inevitable "agentic future" even as Claude 3.5 had to have its hand held more than a wet-behind-the-ears freshman summer intern. We're told that this technology is going to eat the entire world economy and render human labor obsolete, starting with our jobs, but if it's genuinely supposed to do that, I think it's more than reasonable to expect it to write superhumanly perfect code, not just code that's incrementally better than the last model release but still bad; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, after all. To liken AI skepticism to the obstacles faced by women and minorities in tech is a category error that trivializes actual human struggles against human prejudices.

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Bitwarden scrubs 'Always free' and 'Inclusion' values from its site"

TurkTurkleton — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:20:30 +0000

Oh yeah, I love having to manage sync conflicts in my password database because I was dumb enough to edit it on two separate computers that weren't both online at the same time.

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Codex Hacked a Samsung TV"

TurkTurkleton — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:18:33 +0000

For what it's worth, the Creative Commons organization recommends against using CC licenses on software: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#can-i-apply-a-creative-comm...

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Darkrealms BBS"

TurkTurkleton — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:53:00 +0000

As I recall, Wildcat was one of the more expensive BBS packages that was still within reach of hobbyist budgets--I want to say a license for a single-digit number of nodes was between $200 and $300 in mid-90s dollars (around $450-$650 in 2026 dollars)--so it's not surprising that it would have been mostly older people running it. IIRC, it was pretty popular where I grew up, and the demographics in that area definitely skewed a bit older.

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "I ported Linux to the PS5 and turned it into a Steam Machine"

TurkTurkleton — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:40:50 +0000

> it has somehow become not just commmon, but accepted that a vendor can tell us and force us to use something in the way they want.

The PS5 is a games console and is marketed as such, not a general-purpose computer. Of course they want, and "force", you to use it to play PS5 games. I have a hard time seeing this as coercive when computers still exist, even if architecturally a PS5 is virtually identical to a general-purpose computer in most of the ways that matter, because at least since the Fairchild Channel F, it's always been the case that consoles are just constrained computers.

> Imagine, for instance, if you bought a flat head screwdriver, but the manufacturer told you that you could never, ever, under any circumstances use it to pry something open. It was stricly to be used for installing or removing screws.

> We would all laugh that vendor out of the room and tell them they're insane. Somehow we stopped doing that with all sorts of newer technologies.

Imagine, for instance, if that flat head screwdriver had a means to prevent you from using it to pry things open. Some kind of magical negative mass in the handle that kicks in to cancel out leverage but not torque, or an explosive charge that blows your hand off if more than a certain amount of force is applied non-rotationally, or something. It might seem a little less risible then, and you would probably just opt to buy a screwdriver that doesn't have such restrictions (especially if those restrictions were explosively enforced).

Like, I get it. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the argument that we should be able to do whatever we want with hardware that we own. At the same time, being upset about the PS5 making it impossible to run arbitrary software without hacking feels a little like being upset that your washing machine doesn't clean your dirty dishes as well as it cleans your dirty laundry: it's not made for that, and it's not really reasonable to expect it to be able to do that well if at all.

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Bugs Apple loves"

TurkTurkleton — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 16:52:24 +0000

GOG has a Steam-like client application that you can use instead of downloading the installers (which, in the case of Cyberpunk 2077, would be more convenient because its installer is in 28 parts, with another 11 for the Phantom Liberty expansion). It may be that if you install games through that, GOG can remove them if they revoke a license for any reason. I don't know that for sure, though. Just pointing out that they may, in fact, have the ability, at least in principle. But to be clear in case there's any doubt, I think we're on the same side: I think if nake89 had downloaded and installed CP2077 manually instead of through GOG Galaxy, and had continued to play it even after GOG decided the license was fraudulently acquired, they would have been in the right in every way that matters, and at least from a moral perspective, GOG could go pound sand.

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Bugs Apple loves"

TurkTurkleton — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:17:20 +0000

Let me guess, you think GOG was perfectly justified in unilaterally taking away nake89's copy of--excuse me, I meant unilaterally revoking nake89's license to play Cyberpunk 2077--when they judged the gift transaction to be fraudulent, just because it could have been a conspiracy between nake89 and their wife to defraud GOG of the princely sum of eighty United States dollars[0]?

I don't dispute that GOG has the right, from a strictly legal standpoint, to revoke a license for any reason their terms of service allow, and that someone continuing to play a game after their license was revoked would be in breach of contract. What I do dispute is that this is a correct, fair, or desirable state of affairs, especially when the license in question was received as a gift and believed in good faith by the recipient to have been acquired non-fraudulently.

And in particular, if GOG wants the absolute and irrevocable right to prevent consumers from using products for which GOG has decided to revoke the licenses, they shouldn't advertise themselves as a DRM-free platform, nor claim that "Here, you won't be locked out of titles you paid for, or constantly asked to prove you own them - this is DRM-free gaming." -- advertising copy may not have the force of law, but courts tend to take a dim view of ad claims that are provably false.

[0]: the list price of the Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on GOG as of this writing (though it is currently on sale for 38% off)

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Cowork: Claude Code for the rest of your work"

TurkTurkleton — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 21:36:15 +0000

And if they were releasing Cowork for RSX-11M, that might be relevant.

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "How the Atomic Tests Looked Like from Los Angeles"

TurkTurkleton — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 17:07:34 +0000

As a native English speaker who learned a foreign language (German) in high school, I have a pet theory about this, which is that I suspect most other languages use a word roughly equivalent to English "appear" (with which it would be correct to use "how", such as "how the atomic tests appeared from Los Angeles") even in colloquial speech, whereas English tends to reserve those synonyms for more formal registers of speech; in casual conversation in English, you wouldn't ask someone "how did he appear?" (unless you meant the other sense of "appear", as in "become visible"), but you would in, say, German (wie hat er ausgesehen? or wie sah er aus?). Of course, I'm sure learners of English as a foreign language are taught to say "what does he look like?" and not "how does he look like?", but I can imagine them struggling with remembering that just like I struggle with remembering genders and cases and declined forms in German.

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "How the Atomic Tests Looked Like from Los Angeles"

TurkTurkleton — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:07:23 +0000

Hi, American here and "how" + "to look like" makes my teeth itch. However, people generally find grammar corrections to be needlessly pedantic when the erroneous grammar does not impede comprehension, so I've personally decided to choose my grammatical battles and simply fume about people talking about "how something looks like" in private instead.

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "How AI hears accents: An audible visualization of accent clusters"

TurkTurkleton — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 13:24:59 +0000

I mean, if you want to be like that, you could generalize that statement to "the fact that they believe there to be a single `$LANGUAGE_OR_REGION` accent means this can be quickly discounted as nonsense". Other languages, and other varieties of English, have regional variation as well, after all--although in the case of other languages, I'll grant that the accents of, say, two German speakers from different regions might not be as distinct from each other in English as they are in German.

At any rate, I was looking forward to finding out what the accent oracle thought of my native US English accent, which sounds northern to southerners and southern to northerners, but I guess it'd probably just flag it as "American".

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Games Look Bad: HDR and Tone Mapping (2017)"

TurkTurkleton — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 15:57:45 +0000

Agreed. Immersion in a game world, at least for me, is less about how accurately it visually reflects reality and more about how detailed the overall world feels -- whether the designers have crafted worlds that feel like they live and breathe without you, that you could imagine inhabiting as someone other than the protagonist. For instance, I can imagine what it would be like to live in Cyberpunk 2077's Night City, whether I was a merc like V or just one of the nobodies trying to get by that you pass on the street; I can imagine living in Dishonored's Dunwall (or the sequel's Karnaca) in the chaos and uncertainty of their plagues; I can put myself in the shoes of one of the faceless, downtrodden members of the proletariat of Coalition-occupied Revachol in Disco Elysium; a lot of AAA games, on the other hand, feel like theme park rides--well-crafted experiences that are enjoyable but don't stick with you and discourage you from thinking too deeply about them because they don't withstand much scrutiny. But Cyberpunk 2077 is evidence that they don't have to be that way, and Dishonored and Disco Elysium are equally evidence that you don't need a half-billion-dollar budget and photorealistic graphics to create immersive worlds.

(edited to clarify that I'm not laboring under the misapprehension that Cyberpunk 2077 isn't a AAA game)

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic"

TurkTurkleton — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 13:50:24 +0000

Can confirm as well, although to my recollection it just shows up as if it's a word the transcription model heard, not "[foreign]" in brackets like with "[Music]" or "[Applause]". It's especially weird to me because I recall the auto-transcriptions being reasonably serviceable when they first rolled them out, only to degrade over time to the point where it was hallucinating the word "foreign" and dropping letters from words or using weird abbreviations (like "koby" for "kilobyte", "TBTE" for "terabyte", or, most memorably weirdly, transcribing the phrase "nanosecond-by-nanosecond" as "nond by nanc") if it didn't decide it heard another one entirely.

I also noticed a couple of months ago that YouTube seems to have quietly rolled out a new auto-transcription model that can make reasonable guesses at where capitalization, punctuation, and sentence boundaries should go. It seems to have degraded even more rapidly than the old one, falling victim to the same kinds of transcription errors. Although the new one has a different hallucination in silence and noise that it wasn't able to classify (which, incidentally, its ability to recognize things like music and applause seems worse than the old one's): where the old model would have hallucinated the word "foreign", the new one thinks it's hearing the word "heat", often repeated ("Heat. Heat.").

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "“Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps"

TurkTurkleton — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 14:02:04 +0000

The game came first, and the TV shows were spun off from it, which is probably why the game feels more fully developed. It grew into a whole media franchise -- there were Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego? game shows on PBS, as well as a Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? Saturday morning cartoon, and more recently, an animated series on Netflix. I don't remember there being Carmen Sandiego segments on Square One but I also don't remember Square One all that well in the first place.

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "After 53 years, a failed Soviet Venus spacecraft is crashing back to Earth"

TurkTurkleton — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 16:37:00 +0000

There's a collection of images returned by the various Venera probes (including the surface photos from Venera-9, -10, -13, and -14) restored from tapes of the original transmissions here: http://mentallandscape.com/C_CatalogVenus.htm

Edit: Oop, missed that someone else posted a link to that same site (different page) a while before me. Well, nevertheless.

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Who's behind the SWAT USA reshipping service?"

TurkTurkleton — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 15:24:26 +0000

Can't speak for any other Americans, but for me, the objection is rooted in having to watch a video at all. Reading the subtitles in a video is still more time-consuming than reading a transcript (which, mercifully, someone else here in the comments did provide).

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Don't use DISTINCT as a "join-fixer""

TurkTurkleton — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 04:08:26 +0000

Indeed, I would be surprised if there exists any RDBMS where the content of the select list in an EXISTS subquery matters. Postgres's SQL dialect even lets you use an empty select list (`... WHERE EXISTS (SELECT FROM related_table WHERE related_id = id_from_outer_query)`). In T-SQL, however, a non-empty select list is required, and in my experience, developers writing T-SQL tend to prefer a constant value like `1` or `NULL` over `*` -- I suspect there's some superstition there related to both the common wisdom that `SELECT *` queries are to be avoided (which is true -- you really should only ever select the columns of interest) and a lack of truly understanding that EXISTS only reads enough of the table to ascertain whether rows exist that satisfy the subquery's predicate, and returns a boolean value, not a result set.

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Easter egg in flight path of last 747 delivery flight"

TurkTurkleton — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 01:06:14 +0000

Personal satisfaction, like exposure, is not legal tender.

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Doors of McMurdo"

TurkTurkleton — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 18:30:51 +0000

Unless you're a scientist or researcher in a field that would be performing research at McMurdo, your best bet is probably to apply for a support position with one of the organizations or parner institutions listed here: https://www.usap.gov/jobsandopportunities/

Though as the blog mentions in an earlier post[0], you may have to re-apply repeatedly over the course of several years.

[0]: https://brr.fyi/posts/basics

New comment by TurkTurkleton in "Will we finally see Neuromancer on the screen?"

TurkTurkleton — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 21:27:49 +0000

I think the The Expanse's TV adaptation turned out so well thanks in large part to the involvement of the original authors as writers and producers on the show.