Hacker News: benwad

New comment by benwad in "Welcome to the Wasteland: A Thousand Gas Towns"

benwad — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:20:33 +0000

It reminds me of the time the band KLF burned £1 million in cash as a performance piece. They obviously regretted it afterwards.

New comment by benwad in "Containerization is a Swift package for running Linux containers on macOS"

benwad — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:16:39 +0000

I've always wondered why only Linux can do 'true' containers without VMs. Is there a good blog post or something I can read about the various technical hurdles?

New comment by benwad in "Tesla seeks to guard crash data from public disclosure"

benwad — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 11:27:51 +0000

Personally I think the strategy of starting with luxury cars and getting cheaper was a good one. The bigger profit margin of luxury cars could be fed back into R&D to make cheaper electric cars viable.

Of course, that's the ideal situation. Tesla in 2025 is very different from what they were talking about in 2014.

New comment by benwad in "When will tech workers start creating Unions?"

benwad — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:04:27 +0000

Which union are you talking about?

New comment by benwad in "Stop over-thinking AI subscriptions"

benwad — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 13:24:55 +0000

If you buy a machine to play the piano for you, you won't learn how to play the piano. You'll just become really good at using that machine.

New comment by benwad in "Google's Veo3 Is Already Deepfaking All of YouTube's Most Smooth-Brained Content"

benwad — Fri, 23 May 2025 14:37:03 +0000

That's not the case at all. People all around are constantly making art just for the sake of it. Most of it won't ever even be seen by other people. Removing the financial incentive will definitely change the landscape (for the worse, imho) but creativity for its own sake is enough for most people.

New comment by benwad in "Ethically sourced "spare" human bodies could revolutionize medicine"

benwad — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 09:54:07 +0000

How did gay marriage revolutionise the market for involuntary marriage?

New comment by benwad in "An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip"

benwad — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 07:58:58 +0000

The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of Peter Jackson's LOTR movies released in 2001, made $887 million in its original theatrical run (on a $93 million budget). It would absolutely still have been made if copyright was only 20 years. And now it would be in the public domain!

New comment by benwad in "DOGE will use AI to assess the responses of federal workers"

benwad — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 14:27:29 +0000

I wonder which will come first - total government automation, AGI or full self-driving?

New comment by benwad in "OpenAI fails to deliver opt-out system for photographers"

benwad — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 13:20:45 +0000

Because Hunter S Thompson is a talented writer, and an LLM is a statistical method for generating text that looks like other text. An LLM isn't going to ingest all of Hemingway and write Hell's Angels.

New comment by benwad in "47% of 160 Top Selling Protein Powders Tested Exceed P65 Limit for Toxic Metals [pdf]"

benwad — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 17:35:56 +0000

Then why bother making this site?

New comment by benwad in "VR Has Had a Phase Change and I Didn't Know It"

benwad — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 15:59:54 +0000

Does the Vision Pro support SteamVR or OpenXR or anything for games? Because if not then it's not really competing with the Quest 3. I only use my Quest 3 for games, and the Vision Pro's selling point seems to be as a way of looking at really big spreadsheets. The passthrough does look impressive though.

New comment by benwad in "Apple auto-opts everyone into having their photos analyzed by AI for landmarks"

benwad — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 14:16:51 +0000

The purpose of the homomorphic encryption is that they can compare similar landmarks without seeing the unencrypted image data on the server side.

New comment by benwad in "I am rich and have no idea what to do"

benwad — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 08:56:01 +0000

The guy who started a video conferencing app called Loom (2 years after Zoom came out) then miraculously sold it for almost a billion dollars has no business calling anyone an "NPC".

New comment by benwad in "Germany Opened Its Doors to Migrants. Now It's Struggling to Cope"

benwad — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 10:45:18 +0000

We have a similar issue in the UK. The government has refused to provide enough resources to process the backlog of asylum applications, so people are left in limbo being housed in hotels with no legal rights to work or anything. It costs way more than just processing their applications and allowing them to work, but the government are too scared of looking 'soft on immigration'. And these hotels are often in poor and disenfranchised communities, so people understandably ask "why are they getting hotels paid for by the government when we have such a lack of social housing?". It just creates more tension and doesn't help anyone.

It's also important to separate the different kinds of immigration. Refugees are a very different category from other migrants, because we have international obligations to grant them asylum in legitimate cases. So lumping them all under the banner of 'immigration' isn't really helpful.

New comment by benwad in "Türkiye Bans Roblox"

benwad — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 13:14:10 +0000

I'm guessing Turkish residents probably use a VPN.

New comment by benwad in "Coq will be renamed into 'The Rocq Prover'"

benwad — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 14:52:17 +0000

In the 00s there was a popular wine called "old git". It generally means someone grumpy and cantankerous, but in a playful way (otherwise you'd just call them a c***). So it makes sense for a self-effacing joke about Linus Torvalds.

New comment by benwad in "OpenAI: Cofounders Greg Brockman, John Schulman, along with others, to leave"

benwad — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 14:26:09 +0000

They've been saying this for years, I'll believe it when I see it.

New comment by benwad in "The UK's Brexit dream is dead"

benwad — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 13:25:58 +0000

We've had four: May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak.

New comment by benwad in "EU says Apple has serious issues for not complying with DMA"

benwad — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 08:54:03 +0000

Proprietary charging cables lead to more e-waste, which is a public externality as well.