Hacker News: babymetal

New comment by babymetal in "Mornings and nights no longer exist at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India"

babymetal — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:56:48 +0000

I started reading history hoping to learn how to avoid the mistakes of the past, and instead came to the conclusion that history inexorably repeats itself, over a cycle just long enough for the current generation to forget the last event. (I'm trying to indicate similar kinds of mistakes in judgment, the details are always different of course.)

New comment by babymetal in "Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels"

babymetal — Sun, 10 May 2026 02:13:47 +0000

Probably in the minority here but I, too, went to the article hoping for objective quantification of the change in cortisol levels corresponding to the input, i.e. trying to distribute Mac software from scratch.

New comment by babymetal in "Our principles"

babymetal — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:02:05 +0000

Apologies for the naive question (because I haven't read the book). I grew up with the Evil Empire waiting to nuke me until Gorbachev provided a brief respite before the KGB returned. As I recall, they were presented as an enemy with almost but just barely not quite unlimited capacities. I still don't understand what happened in terms of global geopolitics in the last forty years.

Does the book suggest that the Soviet collapse was caused by rather than delayed by their Orwellian perversion of language?

New comment by babymetal in "Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys"

babymetal — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:39:24 +0000

I was contacted by Palantir recruiters about 15 years ago. I found the name troubling along with the gov't contracts, as well as learning that spending one night a week at the office was encouraged.

New comment by babymetal in "Dead Internet Theory"

babymetal — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 03:40:39 +0000

Just my two cents: We use em-dashes in our bookstore newsletter. It's more visually appealing than than semi-colons and more versatile as it can be used to block off both ends of a clause. I even use en-dashes between numbers in a range though, so I may be an outlier.

New comment by babymetal in "Schizophrenia sufferer mistakes smart fridge ad for psychotic episode"

babymetal — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 18:20:52 +0000

My parents were architects and my sister and I lived our first few years in Honolulu before moving to the SF Bay Area. There were no billboards in Hawaii, and I recall distinctly the first drive from SFO the the East Bay. I was unable to avoid reading and staring at every billboard next to the freeway and it literally made me throw up. I didn't understand what was happening.

Of course, I was quickly conditioned off of that response to billboards, which I consider natural.

New comment by babymetal in "A Suicide Cult's Surviving Members Still Maintain Its 90s Website (2016)"

babymetal — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 23:27:17 +0000

One of my earliest jobs in tech required driving southward into Sunnyvale for a 5AM shift. Seeing Hale-Bopp each morning for weeks on that commute was amazing. All of the images I can find fail to capture the visible confirmation that we're all on a rock floating in a vast universe with myriad amazing things nearby.

New comment by babymetal in "Ozzy Osbourne has died"

babymetal — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:19:48 +0000

Damn. I'm visiting my sister in Birmingham next week. It's a big city with a lot of history (industrial revolution, modern geology), and a lot of pride in ordinary people doing their best. RIP Ozzy.

New comment by babymetal in "Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system"

babymetal — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:55:08 +0000

I clicked to the comments to see how far down this observation would appear. It was my first thought, although I can understand why the more energetic discussion is around human-centered energy collection and management.

New comment by babymetal in "I don't think AGI is right around the corner"

babymetal — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:28:34 +0000

I've been confused with the AI discourse for a few years, because it seems to make assertions with strong philosophical implications for the relatively recent (Western) philosophical conversation around personal identity and consciousness.

I no longer think that this is really about what we immediately observe as our individual intellectual existence, and I don't want to criticize whatever it is these folks are talking about.

But FWIW, and in that vein, if we're really talking about artificial intelligence, i.e. "creative" and "spontaneous" thought, that we all as introspective thinkers can immediately observe, here are references I take seriously (Bernard Williams and John Searle from the 20th century):

https://archive.org/details/problemsofselfph0000will/page/n7...

https://archive.org/details/intentionalityes0000sear

Descartes, Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein are older sources that are relevant.

[edit] Clarified that Williams and Searle are 20th century.

New comment by babymetal in "The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public"

babymetal — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 17:57:09 +0000

Very recently their "advanced search" page was redone with a totally different and slightly more modern styling (prior to addition of the chat expert overlaid in the corner). The rest of Ingram's ordering site is still the same as five years ago and is clearly older than that.

That's objective; subjectively, it feels like there are individuals who were given the ability to "try new stuff" and "break things" who chose to follow the hype around features that look like this. The chat button seems to me to be an exercise in following-the-herd which actually sucks for me as a user with it blocking my old buttons.

New comment by babymetal in "The force-feeding of AI features on an unwilling public"

babymetal — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 13:41:23 +0000

I'm a bookseller who often uses Ingram to buy books wholesale when I'm not buying direct from publishers. I've used them for their distribution service since opening 5 years ago because they are the only folks in town who can help bootstrap a very small business with coverage of all the major publishers (in the U.S.). They're great at that, for a small cut in revenue.

Six-plus months ago they put a chatbot in the bottom right corner of their website that literally covers up buttons I use all the time for ordering, so that I have to scroll now in order to access those controls (Chrome, MacOS). After testing it with various queries it only seems to provide answers to questions in their pre-existing support documentation.

This is not about choice (see above, they are the only game in town), and it is not about entitlement (we're a tiny shop trying to serve our customers' often obscure book requests). They seemed to literally place the chatbot buttons onto their website with no polling of their users. This is an anecdotal report about Ingram specifically.

New comment by babymetal in "RFK's proposal to let bird flu spread through poultry"

babymetal — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:09:08 +0000

In the spirit of HN I will only point out here this fact: RFK Jr's attack book on Fauci was extremely poorly produced. Specifically, the text rolled up to the top and bottom edges of the pages as well as the sides. As a bookseller this was a big red flag for me: either the book was poorly self-published, or no-one big (and sometimes reputable) wanted to publish it, and it looked like they were trying to save paper and ink. Also, it has an inordinate amount of footnotes which makes it very difficult to imagine a person following them all. I didn't read the book. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58063409-the-real-anthon... 4.49/5.0 on Goodreads with 8.5K reviews.

[edit]: misspelled "imagine"

New comment by babymetal in "AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings"

babymetal — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 01:14:25 +0000

These comments are creating exactly the feeling that troubled me about in-person engineering meetings and I still can't quite express it. It's like we all know we don't want to discuss this topic and can't help but do so. I get the same feeling whenever I see a bot introduce itself and then someone immediately replies "read stop". It's pretty close to a mixture of regret and disappointment.

New comment by babymetal in "Add "fucking" to your Google searches to neutralize AI summaries"

babymetal — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 02:37:57 +0000

Thank you. Showing tidbits like this from HN to my kids has seemed to help guide them to be be more curious and creative in how they use the internet, instead of treating it like a magical black box.

New comment by babymetal in "A Second Search for Bash Scripting Alternatives"

babymetal — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 02:33:42 +0000

It's been useful to me for slapping together solutions during ops emergencies. Luckily, I have usually had real programmers around to take the few bits of insight in those scripts to fix their code.

New comment by babymetal in "Discarded delights: The joy of ex-library books (2021)"

babymetal — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 18:51:38 +0000

I opened a bookshop after a long run in tech to try to slow down, and one of the pleasant surprises was the joy in accepting used book donations. I re-donate most of them, but have found some wonderful bookmarks and inscriptions in many. The words matter most, of course, but the tangible evidence of people decades or centuries ago is something that speaks to me profoundly. One inscription in a tiny book of prayers mentioned a friend passing it on after it had been placed under her deceased infant sister's chin, which was both morbid and moving. Autographs of spooks like J. Edgar Hoover conjure up other feelings. One other comment: the very old books will probably be around for a few centuries more after the newer ones have turned to dust.

New comment by babymetal in "The new science of meditation"

babymetal — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 19:37:07 +0000

Interesting that this replies to a comment quoting Thich Nhat Hanh, who practiced "engaged Buddhism" and whose name means "one action" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%ADch_Nh%E1%BA%A5t_H%E1%B...).