Hacker News: arkensaw

New comment by arkensaw in "No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In"

arkensaw — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 23:11:55 +0000

you drove home drunk?

New comment by arkensaw in "No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In"

arkensaw — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 23:09:38 +0000

> I think it would be easier to list everyone running the government who isn't some kind of a lunatic:

I'm struggling to start that...

New comment by arkensaw in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

arkensaw — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:56:29 +0000

> I generally only attempt to scrutinize government action, and not government reason for action

This might be the wildest opinion I've read.

You're onboard with the US bombing another country ("I like the war"), but you don't know, or care WHY. You just think it was a good idea.

"Random citizens are at such an information disadvantage that I think it would be impossible to have an informed opinion as an outsider on the reasoning."

I'm trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but if you re-read your own words, you've just said a random citizen like yourself can't possibly know enough to have an informed opinion, yet you gave us your opinion, which is that you think they should have bombed Iran.

New comment by arkensaw in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

arkensaw — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 11:07:29 +0000

Trump casually talks about destroying the energy infrastructure, power plants, desalination plants etc. This is one of the most controversial things that the Russians do in Ukraine - attack the grid when it's cold to try and freeze people to death. To willingly deprive a country of 100,000,000 people of water and power coming into summer would surely be a war-crime.

New comment by arkensaw in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

arkensaw — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:58:14 +0000

> The Gulf coastline is almost 1000 miles long, there would have to be a gigantic occupation of an area the size of a small country

If you want to secure even 5 miles inland over 1000 miles, that's 50,000 square miles, or an area bigger than more than half the countries on earth, including North and South Korea,

Iran is the 18th largest country in the world

New comment by arkensaw in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

arkensaw — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:52:56 +0000

> while Iran seems to do just enough to keep America from actually shutting the Strait.

Uhm, why would America shut the strait?

New comment by arkensaw in "America Is Now a Rogue Superpower"

arkensaw — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:37:53 +0000

if he was a magical wizard (good or bad) surely Ukraine would be part of Russia by now, and not a 4 year long quagmire

New comment by arkensaw in "72% of the dollar's purchasing power was destroyed in just four episodes"

arkensaw — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:29:44 +0000

I'm trying to read this and not feel like an idiot.

Can someone explain to me how post-covid is considered one of the 4 episodes?

it looks to me that the dips at 1933-1936 or 1956-1958 are much more significant - are these just "regular" inflation? Are we ignoring these because we can't tie them to some specific current event?

New comment by arkensaw in "Midnight train from GA: A view of America from the tracks as airports struggle"

arkensaw — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 23:28:21 +0000

came here to post this!

New comment by arkensaw in "The Cognitive Dark Forest"

arkensaw — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:13:31 +0000

I don't know, I think it's an overreaction.

> No more sharing my project work as open source. No more open discussion. I don't care how badly I want to show the world; if I'd like somebody to see, I will have it printed in a physical book, or I will give them access to my private repository not reachable via the public Internet.

If you have a project you would have open-sourced, and you don't do that for fear that the LLM god will steal it, what's the point of building it at all? We shouldn't be afraid to share things with other humans just because LLMs will possibly use it as training data. So what if they spam out a copy of it, or a derivative?

If we all stop sharing things with each other in case one of us is a robot, we might aswell just lie down and die

New comment by arkensaw in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

arkensaw — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:13:25 +0000

> Take desalination plants as an example. Yes Iran has those too but Iran also has significant snow melt as a source of water, Mountains, remember? Iran has ski resorts they have that much snow.

Iran has suffered six consecutive years of drought, which has been bad enough that they were considering (before the war) moving the capital from Tehran to Makran on the coast of the Caspian

New comment by arkensaw in "So where are all the AI apps?"

arkensaw — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:24:22 +0000

Not to get too political, but there's a lot of talk this week about the US military using AI to select targets and be more effective in Iran, which is not un-similar.

In both cases, AI is making people think they can achieve things that were previously judged to unachievable, whether those things are building an app without any effort and getting rich, or effecting regime change without any actual strategic planning.

New comment by arkensaw in "Is it a pint?"

arkensaw — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:42:00 +0000

ah yes, the guinness vans, I do often see them out and about

New comment by arkensaw in "Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts"

arkensaw — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:54:31 +0000

best HN headline of 2026

New comment by arkensaw in "Iran launched unsuccessful attack on UK's Diego Garcia"

arkensaw — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 20:07:49 +0000

> civilian uncles program

I know its just a typo but lol'ed so hard

New comment by arkensaw in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

arkensaw — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:51:50 +0000

Just last week they were talking about the future of Irelands energy generation, and the pressure between now and 2028 from data centers and EVs. Reopening moneypoint as a backup has been discussed. It's been kept as a oil fired backup station, but given the current surge in oil prices I could see it turning to coal again.

I really hope they just turn heavily toward renewables. We have enough offshore wind in Ireland to power most of the world, if we could just build enough turbines and harness it. We could become a net exporter of green power

New comment by arkensaw in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

arkensaw — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:47:39 +0000

ironically it's been converted to run on Oil now, as a backup

New comment by arkensaw in "Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)"

arkensaw — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:47:16 +0000

I think they meant China

New comment by arkensaw in "Revealed: UK's multibillion AI drive is built on 'phantom investments'"

arkensaw — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:39:58 +0000

arent they all?

New comment by arkensaw in "Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]"

arkensaw — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:40:10 +0000

My guess is HP makes such an enormous amount of money already from movies, games, toys, and other tie-ins, that they can't be bothered to chase down the odd digital infringement of a plain text copy of the original books.

I'm sure the scripts of Star Wars would be similarly ignored if they were used.