Hacker News: Wiretrip

New comment by Wiretrip in "The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble"

Wiretrip — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:24:49 +0000

Not just Altman, but also Amodei, Pichai and Nadella. These guys are desperate now.

New comment by Wiretrip in "The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble"

Wiretrip — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:23:19 +0000

Yes but the main thrust of his criticism is the fragility of the whole 'AI' stack, where every part of the stack is unprofitable, unstable and inter-reliant - if any one of those parts goes tits up - everybody else goes with them.

Also, a lot of AI 'users' arrive, search for an actual use case, find none, and then move on.

New comment by Wiretrip in "British 5G towers are being set on fire because of Covid conspiracy theories"

Wiretrip — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 08:56:34 +0000

Actually I think it's 52% :-)

New comment by Wiretrip in "British 5G towers are being set on fire because of Covid conspiracy theories"

Wiretrip — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 09:20:22 +0000

You've got to remember that the average IQ is 100. There are a lot of people in the UK below this, just look at Brexit and who we elected, sigh....

New comment by Wiretrip in "WhyTheName"

Wiretrip — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 08:15:09 +0000

I would love to see an article about how people pronounce some of the strange names and acronyms we have ended up with. Quick survey? 'etc', 'gif', 'uefi', 'wget', 'cifs' ?

New comment by Wiretrip in "Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?"

Wiretrip — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 15:56:12 +0000

Yes it was real. My fav phrase to describe the work was 'KY2K Jelly - helps you insert 4 digits where only 2 would go before' :-)

New comment by Wiretrip in "What's so hard about PDF text extraction?"

Wiretrip — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 14:01:35 +0000

PDF is, without a doubt, one of the worst file formats ever produced and should really be destroyed with fire... That said, as long as you think of PDF as an image format it's less soul destroying to deal with.

New comment by Wiretrip in "What's so hard about PDF text extraction?"

Wiretrip — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 13:59:25 +0000

Totally agree. I worked on a project that had to try and extract tables from PDFs. It is much harder that it would first appear.

New comment by Wiretrip in "Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students"

Wiretrip — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 10:02:21 +0000

Agreed. I discounted that becuase of the cost but I guess there's the community edition!

New comment by Wiretrip in "Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students"

Wiretrip — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 13:39:28 +0000

Actually a very good alternative would be Java and JavaFX, maybe using Eclipse as the IDE.

New comment by Wiretrip in "Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students"

Wiretrip — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 13:38:15 +0000

Positive reasons: 1) It runs out of the box without and Internet ocnnection. 2) The IDE is extremely good. 3) It teaches OOP and memory management (something often forgotten by today's programmers). 4) It is capable of giving very low level access to the host machine (like C). 5) You can even use (and teach) tricky things like pointers.

New comment by Wiretrip in "Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students"

Wiretrip — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 13:35:11 +0000

I am a professional programmer and I still use Delphi. It's great!

New comment by Wiretrip in "Turkey buys Delphi licenses for an estimated one million students"

Wiretrip — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 13:34:27 +0000

Agreed. I still use Delphi (7) to write Windows apps (and Lazarus to port them to Linux MacOS). Not everything is web based.

New comment by Wiretrip in "Tesla Cybertruck"

Wiretrip — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 09:53:40 +0000

They may be slightly safer for the occupants of the car, but the height factor kills 30% more pedestrians and in actual fact accident fatalities are up as a result of SUVs as they incite risk-taking behaviour and roll over in accidents much more readliy. Additionally, they only have to accede to truck safety regulations with are less stringent than those for cars. I can point you to loads of papers and articles on this. They purely are a marketing ploy as they are more profitable vehicles for the manufacturers. BTW those MPG ratings are shit by today's standards; most cars do 45MPG+.

New comment by Wiretrip in "Tesla Cybertruck"

Wiretrip — Sat, 23 Nov 2019 11:06:32 +0000

Yes of course. But nobody would ever argue that a van is a better vehicle than a normal sized car for moving people around (unless you have a massive family). SUVs are a profitable marketing trend for car companies and nothing more. We are literally burning the planet and people's insecurities are being exploited to persuade them into oversized and (thus poorly performing) vehicles.

New comment by Wiretrip in "Tesla Cybertruck"

Wiretrip — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 14:07:22 +0000

Yes true, but I was really referring more to SUVs. Worldwide there is a real problem with this trend, and it is nearly all marketing. Certainly the average school run in the UK does not benefit form the extensive use of SUVs.

New comment by Wiretrip in "Tesla Cybertruck"

Wiretrip — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 12:37:18 +0000

It looks like something my son would have designed when he was 5.

New comment by Wiretrip in "Tesla Cybertruck"

Wiretrip — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 12:36:33 +0000

The problem is, they're just bad vehicles. They don't handle well, they guzzle fuel and they kill more pedestrians. There is no point in them unless you're a farmer.

New comment by Wiretrip in "The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking"

Wiretrip — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 12:05:48 +0000

A classic example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY&feature=youtu.be...

New comment by Wiretrip in "The Hidden Costs of Automated Thinking"

Wiretrip — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 11:07:14 +0000

Ha! Superb! That neatly describes the state of politics in the USA and the UK at the moment....