Hacker News: _w1tm

New comment by _w1tm in "Europe is scaling back GDPR and relaxing AI laws"

_w1tm — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 18:22:20 +0000

> I have some side projects that I don’t really care about making money from but some people do use and it’s easier for me to just block all European users than worry about complying with all the random laws and regulations.

GDPR fines scale based on annual turnover so blocking EU users on a non-commercial product is utterly pointless and just being mean.

New comment by _w1tm in "Nvidia is gearing up to sell servers instead of just GPUs and components"

_w1tm — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:14:00 +0000

Sometimes building a new organization is easier than trying to improve a legacy one.

New comment by _w1tm in "Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not"

_w1tm — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 07:12:50 +0000

That’s not what the poster meant.

What treating this biometric info as public means is that it won’t be accepted as valid proof of identity. Just because you posted a video on TikTok shouldn’t mean that a scammer can take out a loan in your name.

New comment by _w1tm in "Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not"

_w1tm — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 07:09:50 +0000

Why bother with the scan if you can have a perfect guard in place?

New comment by _w1tm in "The Digital Markets Act: time for a reset"

_w1tm — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 12:32:51 +0000

> How big and politically connected are you?

I’m not allowed to divulge that information. Can you tell me where to apply?

New comment by _w1tm in "OpenAI Needs a Trillion Dollars in the Next Four Years"

_w1tm — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 12:30:11 +0000

> but this is a can worse than climate change we are kicking towards future generations.

That’s just nonsense. Even if we turn a large area into a radioactive waste dump, that problem pales in comparison to the massive external and internal migrations, food crop failure and wars that climate change will cause in our lifetimes.

New comment by _w1tm in "AI Investment Is Starting to Look Like a Slush Fund"

_w1tm — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 12:17:15 +0000

If these things really become good enough to automate software engineering then it’s just a matter of time before they are used to automate all information work.

That would be such a radical societal transformation that I’m not sure we would come out of the other side even having a capitalist society.

New comment by _w1tm in "The Digital Markets Act: time for a reset"

_w1tm — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 05:50:14 +0000

First time I hear about this funding. Where can I apply?

New comment by _w1tm in "EU age verification app not planning desktop support"

_w1tm — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 11:54:05 +0000

Maybe off-topic but I remember when people were worried about services becoming digital and older users no longer being able to access them without a personal computer.

Fast forward a few decades and now the old users are on desktop and we’re worried about services only being available for smartphones.

New comment by _w1tm in "Show HN: Dayflow – A git log for your day"

_w1tm — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 10:57:22 +0000

Wouldn’t you? If I switch context and interrupt my flow to answer a question I’m losing at least 20 mins to regaining focus, why shouldn’t that be reflected in billing?

Knowledge work is knowledge work, no point belittling colleagues in a different profession.

New comment by _w1tm in "Themis (European Reusable Rocket) is assembled on launch pad"

_w1tm — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 12:24:46 +0000

> I think that often theres a difference in ability to put capital to work between the US and europe.

It’s because the EU is 27 different countries with different regulations while the US is 1. Some work is being done to fix this but remains to be seen if we can reach a point where we have unified capital markets instead of national ones.

New comment by _w1tm in "The Culture novels as a dystopia"

_w1tm — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 23:54:06 +0000

> I recall reading somewhere that, in the Culture novels the Sapir Worf hypothesis was true to start or the AIs re-engineered the people to make it true, and the language of the regular biological citizens is designed to control how they think through its structure.

You read that in Consider Phlebas, where the anti-Culture protagonist claimed it. You’ve fallen for propaganda in a work of fiction.

New comment by _w1tm in "A new experimental Go API for JSON"

_w1tm — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 09:36:23 +0000

Eternal or not, right now JSON is used everywhere which means the performance gains of a more optimized Stalin would be significant. Just because we don’t know if JSON is around in 10 years doesn’t mean we should settle for burning extra compute on it.

New comment by _w1tm in "European Commission fines Google €2.95B over abusive ad tech practices"

_w1tm — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 09:46:58 +0000

The EU has a homegrown tech industry that could pick up the slack, though it would be expensive.

The real problem is that the US would leave Ukraine and Europe alone against Russia which has a real chance of turning into WW3. Most likely this isn’t discussed in the US media but feels like every week some notable politician or high-ranking military is warning that Russia will invade NATO after Ukraine. Trump knows our weakness and is squeezing hard.

The mood here in eastern Europe is very much that we’re talking when, not if, Russia attacks us.

New comment by _w1tm in "Over 80% of sunscreen performed below their labelled efficacy (2020)"

_w1tm — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 07:28:54 +0000

Certainly a flawed system is better than an outright broken one? At least the former can be improved.

New comment by _w1tm in "Is 4chan the perfect Pirate Bay poster child to justify wider UK site-blocking?"

_w1tm — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 07:06:21 +0000

> I do think the Elon Musk approach (“just let people decide for themselves”) is very naive at best.

I thought the Elon Musk approach was to control the algorithm and decide for his users what they see. Or just ban journalists he dislikes.

New comment by _w1tm in "AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem"

_w1tm — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 09:21:09 +0000

Billions of humans did that over hundreds of thousands of years. Maybe it would only take thousands of years for AGI?

New comment by _w1tm in "AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem"

_w1tm — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 06:24:43 +0000

> But seriously, I get why free will is troubleaome, but the fact people can choose a thing, work at the thing, and effectuate the change against a set of options they had never considered before an initial moment of choice is strong and sufficient evidence against anti free will claims.

Do people choose a thing or was the thing chosen for them by some inputs they received in the past?

New comment by _w1tm in "Open Source Maintenance Fee"

_w1tm — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 06:18:27 +0000

Engineering time is money and going through internally the process of building, testing and distributing binaries for every release is a lot of engineering time. Paying a sum of money to make the problem go away is a reasonable solution.

New comment by _w1tm in "AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions"

_w1tm — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:52:32 +0000

What has happened when the same thing happens without AI involved?