Hacker News: aetherson

New comment by aetherson in "Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game"

aetherson — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:50:14 +0000

Not really. It's turn-based and hex-based.

New comment by aetherson in "We automated everything except knowing what's going on"

aetherson — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:02:52 +0000

People also do some really stupid things, I'll just throw out.

But it also kind of sounds like you're just saying that there's a scalar of "get a little better" before you'd trust AI with something.

New comment by aetherson in "We automated everything except knowing what's going on"

aetherson — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:02:35 +0000

Genuine question: is there a big inherent difference between "I don't understand this thing but I think this other human does," and "I don't understand this but I think this other AI does"?

If your answer is "yes," do you think that's inherent to the (metaphysical?) fact of it being AI or to specific limitations to current AI? If the latter, what changes to AI would let you trust it?

New comment by aetherson in "Bcachefs creator insists his custom LLM is female and 'fully conscious'"

aetherson — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 18:23:50 +0000

Quick heuristic for someone who claims that their AI is conscious: do they claim it's "a gender that they are not attracted to"?

New comment by aetherson in "Warren Buffett dumps $1.7B of Amazon stock"

aetherson — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 09:08:32 +0000

Amazon isn't a monopoly, it has 8% of retail in the US.

There's no real evidence that this trade was made by Buffet himself, and it's part of a general major sell-off of Amazon that transparently did not temporally align with the idea that Amazon's retail business has suffered a decline in quality.

This is the market making a (reasonable!) judgment that it lacks confidence that Amazon's capital expenditures will pay off.

New comment by aetherson in "Warren Buffett dumps $1.7B of Amazon stock"

aetherson — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:30:49 +0000

These just aren't the relevant concerns behind Amazon's stock performance in the last month. It's the capex.

New comment by aetherson in "Mark Zuckerberg Lied to Congress. We Can't Trust His Testimony"

aetherson — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:38:44 +0000

Nonsense. There are lots of things that you need more than three strikes for, especially on a platform that you expect to use for decades.

I'm not here to say that Facebook's enforcement behavior is optimal, and I don't know that a "17 strike policy" is a full description of their enforcement behavior. But there are plenty of behaviors that you want to discourage but not go nuclear about.

New comment by aetherson in "Mark Zuckerberg Lied to Congress. We Can't Trust His Testimony"

aetherson — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:12:23 +0000

No?

Like, I'd think that was a bad policy for murder in particular, but "we don't allow things but we give you a lot of chances to correct your behavior" is ordinary.

New comment by aetherson in "U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025"

aetherson — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:28:32 +0000

Native population is declining (and prime-age workforce is retiring), and the Trump admin has been extensively working to reduce the size of the immigrant workforce.

So the unemployment rate is staying low, but the absolute number of workers is flat or declining.

New comment by aetherson in "The behavioral cost of personalized pricing"

aetherson — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 03:21:17 +0000

The in-industry terms for these are "brand marketing" and "performance marketing," FWIW. Brand marketing is the first thing, performance marketing is what you're calling sales.

New comment by aetherson in "The behavioral cost of personalized pricing"

aetherson — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:55:57 +0000

Price discrimination is bad. It's worth trying to ban. You'll never stop 100% of it (and trying to go too over-the-top in terms of stopping it would not be worthwhile), but this is a useful area for regulation.

New comment by aetherson in "When employees feel slighted, they work less"

aetherson — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 13:25:03 +0000

On some level the headline is like "yeah, no shit," but the surprising thing is the claimed strength of the effect. 50% absenteeism increase for missing a birthday congratulations? Really?

New comment by aetherson in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

aetherson — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 04:02:23 +0000

Apropos of nothing besides the mention of Disco Elysium, I present to you the best item in a CRPG: https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Volumetric_Shit_Compres...

New comment by aetherson in "Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday"

aetherson — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:38:41 +0000

The US has enriched a vastly larger number of software engineers through at will employment that Europe has through making it very hard to fire people who aren't adding value.

New comment by aetherson in "Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday"

aetherson — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:35:34 +0000

The founders are probably not the owners of a large majority of the business. Most of the owners are not drawing any salary.

Look, lying is bad sure. It would be better if they had been honest in November. But nobody here is actually arguing that the layoffs are fine, they're only mad about the comms.

New comment by aetherson in "Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday"

aetherson — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 03:23:19 +0000

I mean, if your argument is, "Bending Spoons made a bad investment," then sure, okay. That's not implausible! Companies make bad investments.

But I don't really see what overall lessons there are here.

New comment by aetherson in "Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday"

aetherson — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 03:20:54 +0000

Yes, the owners were paid by the sale. The argument by other people was that the sale shouldn't happen, or vice versa that the sale should happen only to people who were committed to continuing to spend the company's money on supporting employees who are stipulated to not be adding much value (and, thus, are not willing to pay much for the company).

Guys, I totally get it. Nobody likes to be laid off. I was laid off a month ago. But the money that is being soaked up by employee who are, again, stipulated to be not doing anything productive goes somewhere else. This may be a tragedy for an individual person, but it's good for society overall.

New comment by aetherson in "Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo yesterday"

aetherson — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 21:06:59 +0000

And honestly this is probably fine. If the main business can't grow and there have been a few years of attempts to produce complementary businesses with no success, that's a good sign that the business should be moved into a "return money to owners" model.

New comment by aetherson in "California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years"

aetherson — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:34:52 +0000

California is big! That's also why there have technically been small parts of California which have been in drought for the last few years while most of the state is in good shape.

This year, Southern California is having a wet year while most of Northern California is having a relatively dry one.

New comment by aetherson in "The data center boom is concentrated in the U.S."

aetherson — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 19:01:35 +0000

People who build data centers. Strong data protection laws (in a relatively stable democratic country) so that customers will feel okay putting their workloads in a data center, and then low regulatory burden and cost to the inputs to making a data center work (mainly electricity and water for cooling).

There would obviously still be things that would make a data center builder feel less-than-great about locating in a developing country, but there's also a LOT of money sloshing around in the data center buildout right now, if you could get people to just try it out with a small minority of their money it could be a very big deal for some countries.