Hacker News: aragilar

New comment by aragilar in "Everyone should slow down AI development except for me"

aragilar — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 02:16:57 +0000

Pretty sure it's supposed to be parody.

New comment by aragilar in "A Small Telescope That Surprised Me"

aragilar — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:16:38 +0000

Planets travel along the ecliptic, so they're pretty easy to map.

New comment by aragilar in "Hang on to Your Firefox"

aragilar — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:30:42 +0000

No, that is not what I said, and you repeatedly misreading what people write is noticeable.

New comment by aragilar in "Hang on to Your Firefox"

aragilar — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:39:30 +0000

Except Thunderbird now does run on donations (though is looking a relevant additional funding sources, e.g. providing hosted email: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/). This is not to say Mozilla can't seek out other sources of money, or develop appropriate ancillary services, but the absence of an option to just give money for Firefox (and Firefox only) is noticeable.

New comment by aragilar in "Hang on to Your Firefox"

aragilar — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:28:02 +0000

And killed its add-on ecosystem. If the choice is between (as it was then) a slower browser missing the add-ons you were used to, and a faster browser missing the add-ons you were used to, then you're going to need some other motivation to stick with (as I did, to be clear) the slower browser.

New comment by aragilar in "Hang on to Your Firefox"

aragilar — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:23:06 +0000

Pocket (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_(service) for those who aren't aware of it) is an excellent example:

1. Pocket was an external company, which Mozilla bought (and claimed they would open source), which already had a web extension. There was no need for the pre-acquisition integration, or to buy it later on.

2. After buying it, Mozilla did nothing with it, including failing to open source it, and seemingly failed to get enough revenue from that they shut it down last year.

This saga provided no benefit to Firefox users who did not use pocket, and at best for pocket users left them with a dying solution that they would need to migrate from (given the failure to open source it). It's not clear how much Mozilla paid for Pocket, but those funds could have been spent on something more valuable.

New comment by aragilar in "Hang on to Your Firefox"

aragilar — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:11:00 +0000

Then let me pay for Firefox. I don't need a resold Mullvad (which incidentally took forever to come to my country) or an AI chatbot (which seemingly are the options Mozilla provides to give them money), and donations to Mozilla don't go to Firefox. It took them ~20 years to work out that was the solution for Thunderbird, they shouldn't spend another 20 years flailing about for Firefox.

New comment by aragilar in "Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope"

aragilar — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:19:40 +0000

The questions is, how much are you willing to pay (because the cost of this is not free, especially in this cloud era), and what is the scientific return for access to the uncalibrated data? There is significantly more value in a well designed pipeline for everyone (which is where anyone who would work on the pipeline would slot in) than bespoke pipelines which are poorly built and unmaintainable.

New comment by aragilar in "UC Berkeley indefinitely suspends international student work authorizations"

aragilar — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:50:35 +0000

This isn't normal?

New comment by aragilar in "AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward"

aragilar — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:01:42 +0000

The obvious question is what limits getting more data? Astronomy (especially in Australia) has been quite good at designing surveys to answer multiple scientific questions with reasonable amounts of data (and then fed into ML systems like the cannon). Sadly one of the consequences of the LLM hype is the increasing cost of doing this, so "AI" is actually making things worse not better.

New comment by aragilar in "Facebook is paying controversial creators to produce rage-bait content"

aragilar — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:51:09 +0000

"an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts." implies this is only available to a subset of people?

New comment by aragilar in "Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta"

aragilar — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:47:01 +0000

I think it depends on whether what Meta states about the "Content Monetization" program being invite only is true? If it is, that's effectively commissioning, if it's not, well Meta is lying and then the question is why lie?

New comment by aragilar in "Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center"

aragilar — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:16:19 +0000

I'm not aware of the issues with the SF <-> LA high speed rail, but I had in mind https://www.abc.net.au/news/2006-03-30/many-factors-behind-t... (where an apartment block started collapsing causing the whole of northern Sydney to lock up for multiple days, delays to the project which nearly bankrupted the owners, and residents naturally suffered significantly) and https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-19/nsw-government-strike... (which hasn't caused as many issues thankfully). Both were pushed through quickly and suffered for it.

As for fast tracking, there's a reason property developers are banned from donating to political parties here (corruption findings relating to property developers are fairly common, the latest one has caught up the opposition leader of Australia). Make the process open, make it fair, have a proper plan and then less money need be wasted.

New comment by aragilar in "Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center"

aragilar — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 13:52:26 +0000

But if new evidence comes in which changes the basis for approval (e.g. lets say you need to do some earthworks and as part of performing them it becomes apparent these earthworks will damage nearby buildings), presumably the approval can be revoked until suitable changes can be made (or if that's not possible, the approval no longer holds)? The linked Wall Street Journal appears to give more details, suggesting this went through a fast-track process (with seemingly minimum community input). I'd argue fast-tracking projects is always a bad idea, as is trying to route around community consultation (given it's likely more expensive in the long run).

New comment by aragilar in "Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center"

aragilar — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 13:43:04 +0000

I think it's the zoning rules (based on https://www.wsj.com/us-news/how-amazon-built-a-data-center-i...), which seem to provide an expedited process (which for large scale projects like this always seems a bit odd, and seems like it would increase the risk of corruption)?

Arguably if new information arrives which changes the risks or impacts of a project, especially if the project was initially on some kind of fast-track process, then projects should be subject to re-reviewed and scrutiny (which I would expect to have a standard legal process).

New comment by aragilar in "Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library"

aragilar — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 08:59:27 +0000

Why not give everyone access for free?

New comment by aragilar in "LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals"

aragilar — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:57:47 +0000

Copyright law varies across jurisdictions, and it's not obvious how training for AIs would align with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_dealing (and it appears a recent push to re-examine copyright law in Australia ended due to AI companies getting involved).

Victora proposes new laws to target big tech and online trolls

aragilar — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 08:34:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-19/victoria-social-media-big-tech-laws/106932668

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966057

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by aragilar in "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making"

aragilar — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 08:20:40 +0000

I think it's not clear from the article why they left (e.g. could be anything from retirement to going to work at another firm/contracting to being fired to switching careers), and likely it's going to be a mix, plus not all were previous Ford employees. Similarly the "AI" isn't clearly defined (but like you I would be surprised if it were LLMs). I suspect though why the article exists (and a possible source of your downvotes) is signalling against "AI", which if Ford wants more expert employees (given their issues), is something Ford wants to present.

New comment by aragilar in "Real-Time LuaTeX: Recompiling Large Documents in 1ms [pdf]"

aragilar — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 07:09:31 +0000

The answer is fairly obvious, Typst (like ConTeXt) is not LaTeX. Typst is a perfectly fine solution if you're giving the typeset output (i.e. a PDF) to someone, it not a solution if you need to give the document source to someone (if the person expects LaTeX, or .doc(x), or some other format). Many of the issues people raise with LaTeX are due to needing to pass on the document source to someone (otherwise you could use whatever packages or engines you wanted), but that is fundamental to interoperability and why LaTeX (and Markdown) stick around.