Hacker News: VanTheBrand

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)"

VanTheBrand — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 02:07:59 +0000

The option is you have to buy another machine. There are mac ec2 instances and several mac cloud hosts that all would abuse this if they could, instead to stay compliant they buy more machines.

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

VanTheBrand — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:12:07 +0000

Okay post a really funny LLM joke about potatoes and post a great piece of LLM poetry about lemons.

I’ll wait. You should be able to do it quickly though since LLMs are so good at it.

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music"

VanTheBrand — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:00:02 +0000

AI training

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance"

VanTheBrand — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:25:31 +0000

That’s just so you don’t sue the over your lost dog

New comment by VanTheBrand in "I put a real-time 3D shader on the Game Boy Color"

VanTheBrand — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 01:18:55 +0000

No the US government does that. He just takes the money taxpayers gave the government to blow people up with, and unlike the other defense contractors, also indirectly finances the production of gameboys with some of the money. The idea that giving money to ModRetro finances arms is essentially backwards from how money actually flows.

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing"

VanTheBrand — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 20:50:49 +0000

Most people using LLMs wouldn’t even know you could tell it not to produce emoji. You are thinking about this like a coder not like a doctor.

New comment by VanTheBrand in "My Home Fibre Network Disintegrated"

VanTheBrand — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:25:15 +0000

I don’t disagree but your comment made it sound impossible which it isn’t.

New comment by VanTheBrand in "My Home Fibre Network Disintegrated"

VanTheBrand — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 08:10:34 +0000

Radon is radioactive. The alpha particles it emits can break down polymers and degrade plastics.

New comment by VanTheBrand in "A closer look at a BGP anomaly in Venezuela"

VanTheBrand — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 07:02:04 +0000

This article existing at all is a bit suspicious IMO

New comment by VanTheBrand in "There were BGP anomalies during the Venezuela blackout"

VanTheBrand — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 05:10:40 +0000

Some pretty spooky comments in this thread from accounts with pretty low comment histories too…

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Apple releases open-source model that instantly turns 2D photos into 3D views"

VanTheBrand — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 17:57:23 +0000

Yes this seems more about protecting them from a lawsuit. I don’t think they actually give a shit about the weights or they wouldn’t release them at all. I suspect they just know they’re training dataset isn’t perfectly “clean” and don’t want to accept any more liability than they already have.

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for THC: Study"

VanTheBrand — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 23:29:15 +0000

I think there is definable a connection between cannabis use and auto accidents. It slows your reaction time and that’s a known factor with accidents. That said, substance use data is notoriously underreported[1] in surveys. So that 20% data point is not very helpful. Also 12-15 year olds are bringing that number down in your data and also can’t drive making it even less useful for comparison.

[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089085672...

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Backing up Spotify"

VanTheBrand — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 20:51:36 +0000

They are too big to fail but they aren’t too big to have to pay out a huge settlement. Facebook annual revenue is about it twice that of the entire global recording industry. The strategy these companies took was probably correct but that calculation included the high risk of ultimately having to pay out down the line. Don’t mistake their current resistance to paying for an internal belief they never will have to.

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Backing up Spotify"

VanTheBrand — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 20:47:59 +0000

The metadata is probably more useful than the music files themselves arguably

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Backing up Spotify"

VanTheBrand — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 20:46:40 +0000

True but What.cd had a tremendous amount of notable music not available on Spotify though because it was also sourced from cds, bootlegs, vinyl, tape etc whereas Spotify only includes music explicitly licensed for streaming.

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo"

VanTheBrand — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 02:51:38 +0000

It’s so stupid but what I do is click forward which reveals the email in the compose window.

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Paramount launches hostile bid for Warner Bros"

VanTheBrand — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:28:56 +0000

David Ellison was an intern at Pixar in college and has a personal relationship with Lasseter. Annapurna games was under his sister and has no management connection to Skydance.

I guess if there is any common denominator it’s a familial default to loyalty vs fear of public perception? Not the worst trait in the world despite leading to this outcome.

Also to be fair Lasseter’s “serial harassment” (while real and I’m not trying to discount) consisted of his insistence that everyone hug him when greeting him. So while you can make the argument his firing had merit, his ”issue” is pretty easy to prevent at a new firm: No hugs policy

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Paramount launches hostile bid for Warner Bros"

VanTheBrand — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:03:57 +0000

That’s not correct. Paramount wants everything (including the parts Netflix wants). Netflix wants just tv and movie studio. So the paramount hostile bid would be for the part Netflix wants and the part they don’t.

New comment by VanTheBrand in "Paramount launches hostile bid for Warner Bros"

VanTheBrand — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:01:41 +0000

It’s all one entity with subsidiaries for tv and movies, etc.

New comment by VanTheBrand in "California DMV approves map increase in Waymo driverless operations"

VanTheBrand — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 02:28:04 +0000

I was skeptical about Waymo but then I had the opportunity to ride a Waymo and an Uber the same day. The Waymo trip was uneventful but the uber driver drifted into oncoming traffic then jerked the wheel back and said “whoah,” when I alerted him.

It made me realize that even though Waymo is not at level 5 yet, neither are a lot of Uber drivers…