Hacker News: WastedCucumber

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

WastedCucumber — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:29:25 +0000

>They could make huge improvements in safety by actively preventing the use of illegally modified e-bikes that travel too fast.

Or by regulating bicycle food delivery services so thatheir employees' continued employment and wage magnitude doesn't hinge quite so thoroughly on how rapidly they deliver.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

WastedCucumber — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:11:57 +0000

In Germany we have rules, and one of those rules is that pedestrians on the sidewalk who are in the cyclepath (usually a too-subtle red stone) do, in fact, have to get out of the way for cyclists.

I imagine there's also a rule about directing airhorns against law abiding cyclists.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

WastedCucumber — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:59:33 +0000

Or else they'll eventually alienate a majority of their patron state's voting population, and finally get hemmed in / risk losing your military (and other) funding that their state is dependent on.

Heavens to Betsy please don't be so passive.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Slovenia becomes first EU country to introduce fuel rationing"

WastedCucumber — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:57:08 +0000

I was just talking to a kiwi yesterday about diesel. The price has more than doubled already there. So there goes large chunk of the US beef supply.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Slovenia becomes first EU country to introduce fuel rationing"

WastedCucumber — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:51:44 +0000

I think the point is that a world with renewable electricity wouldn't need as much oil, thereby making smaller sources of carbon sufficient.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

WastedCucumber — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:59:42 +0000

At first I took the comment about transferring nukes as a bit of a joke, but you make a fair point. Let Iceland have em!

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Grandparents are glued to their phones [video]"

WastedCucumber — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:07:04 +0000

The article in question:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/do-your-paren...

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis"

WastedCucumber — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:03:55 +0000

I don't watch a movie a day, but I'm at my friendly local indie theater at least once a month. It's got a more comftorable audience, more consistently interesting films, and it costs less than the big theater. If I went just a bit more often, I'd for sure get a subscription. There's already so many good films, and so many good indie films being made, I just don't need the big cinemas.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "The government uses targeted advertising to track your location"

WastedCucumber — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:00:19 +0000

Just one more example here, which I think is a big one for some people - chat apps. Without Whatsapp, Telegram, and Signal, I can't really use my phone as telecommunications tool with friends and colleagues, because everyone is on them. The group chats are where a lot of discussion happens, so I can't just switch to SMS/calls.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Number Research Inc"

WastedCucumber — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 06:34:21 +0000

Oh lord I feel old, I couldn't figure out why 67 was special until I read this.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Guilty Displeasures"

WastedCucumber — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:42:19 +0000

+1 For Untilted Goose Game, it's wholesome and brilliant, also as a solo game.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

WastedCucumber — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 08:37:39 +0000

People want to determine if the inportant events surrounding them are bad or good, even if they don't have a say in them. Perhaps it's even a way to cope with the lack of influence we have.

But I do like the idea of imagining how to limit the executive branch. Spitball here - we use sortition, and permission to use force of any kind has to go through a council of say, ten, randomly chosen, representative citizens.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Nature's many attempts to evolve a Nostr"

WastedCucumber — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 00:16:13 +0000

For who might be pulled in by the vague title, not knowing what a nostr is, thinking this article has anything to do with evolution - it has nothing to do with evolution or nature. Not one example of nature trying to evolve a nostr is descibed.

Maybe like... the author thought a nostr is similar to, I dunno, a pack or tribe or something?

New comment by WastedCucumber in "The Checkerboard"

WastedCucumber — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 08:50:24 +0000

I think the point is that private owners might run into the same issue of needing to cross private land to get to their private parcel.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "The Checkerboard"

WastedCucumber — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 08:46:10 +0000

I wonder if they really have all that much value now. Barring any particularly lucrative natural resources, if one publically owned square is surrounded by private owners, who have the right to restrict travel, then that kind of heavily limits the market, doesn't it? And by that, presumably the price is limited as well.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri"

WastedCucumber — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 04:26:15 +0000

I think the comment points to the other possible motivation - undo everything that was done under the Biden admin out of principle/spite.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Discontinuation of ARM Notebook with Snapdragon X Elite SoC"

WastedCucumber — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 22:47:34 +0000

I ran into this problem on a Slimbook some years ago now. I found that my battery drained way too fast in standby, and I remember determining that this was some (relatively common) problem with sleep states, that some linux machines couldn't really enter/stay in a deeper sleep state, so my Slimbook's standby wasn't much of a standby at all.

But that's just one problem, I bet.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "CBP is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with suspicious travel patterns"

WastedCucumber — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 08:28:18 +0000

I'm sure they don't think exposing adultery is inherently bad, but rather that the method employed feels like an excessive violation of privacy.

If you'd like a different example, imagine a man is angry that his ex wife is with someone else now, and uses such a service to figure out where he can find the pair.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Microsoft AI CEO pushes back against critics after recent Windows AI backlash"

WastedCucumber — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 08:19:00 +0000

> The fact that people are unimpressed that we can have a fluent conversation with a super smart AI that can generate any image/video is mindblowing to me.

The image and video generation capabilities of AI is the most unimpressive part of AI's! It's the LLM's that are the most inpressive. Those might, just might, even make some sense in an OS, since plenty of people are happy to outsource a quick email or script to AI. Hell, what if your OS had a built-in AI to troubleshoot bugs for you? That might even conceivably be an improvement.

> Over in the comments, some users pushed back on the CEO's use of the word "unimpressed," arguing that it's not the technology itself that fails to impress them, but rather Microsoft's tendency to put AI into everything just to appease shareholders instead of focusing on the issues that most users actually care about, like making Windows' UI more user-friendly similar to how it was in Windows 7, fixing security problems, and taking user privacy more seriously.

I'm sure adding AI to Windows would make privacy problems even worse. Not to mention agentic AI could create a whole new class of security problems if not implemented carefully.

New comment by WastedCucumber in "Streaming platform Twitch added to Australia's teen social media ban"

WastedCucumber — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 08:04:44 +0000

Are they going to do age verification? And how?

The only way I can think of would effectively require identity verification as well.