Hacker News: bigDinosaur

New comment by bigDinosaur in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

bigDinosaur — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:52:49 +0000

There's plenty of evidence that it's tens of thousands, but it's absurd to even argue over those numbers when a government massacring any number of its own citizens is morally reprehensible (whether it's 5k or 50k). Iran has a long history of executing its own citizens en masse.

Iran has admitted outright to 6k deaths, by the way.

New comment by bigDinosaur in "Show HN: I built a small app for FSI German Course"

bigDinosaur — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 07:31:22 +0000

I simply don't believe that it generally produces graduates who 'cannot order food in a restaurant'. The phrases required for that are almost always simple. Perhaps you mean that the graduates do not necessarily know certain vocabulary (in the sense of not knowing how to precisely specify a 'rack of lamb' whatever) or the correct register/politeness level for every possibility?

New comment by bigDinosaur in "Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it"

bigDinosaur — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:30:57 +0000

Nothing with email can ever be an easy fix, although the idea is amusing. It is inherently the problem.

New comment by bigDinosaur in "Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial"

bigDinosaur — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 03:15:15 +0000

You dropped the second half of my sentence which pointed to a specific harm. You consequently argued against something which I didn't say. You are not arguing in good faith and this 'conversation' has clearly run its course as you are not capable of engaging the actual points someone is making.

Someone saying that someone shouldn't be able to promote specific harm x is not saying that the idea of 'promotion' of anything in general is necessarily bad, exactly in the same way that we restrict certain harmful things from being sold without being against the idea of selling things in general.

New comment by bigDinosaur in "Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial"

bigDinosaur — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 02:59:23 +0000

If you mean 'should network TV be allowed to use behavioural psychology to manipulate people into being couch potatoes' then the answer is yes, that should be regulated against.

Anyway, the way you talk about shorts reminds me of drug addicts who talk about how they can control their consumption. Some can. Many cannot but delude themselves. The way I see people interact with shorts/TikTok/reels is very much not restrained. They're optimised for addictive scrolling in the same way a slot machine is - the fact that some people can use a slot machine without becoming addicted is besides the point.

New comment by bigDinosaur in "Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial"

bigDinosaur — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 02:49:56 +0000

I'm genuinely curious how one can look at someone using an app like TikTok and conclude that's not addictive. It's optimised in every way to engage people in behaviours that look like outright addiction.

Anyway, sometimes 'panic' is justified. Sports betting has been a total disaster, for example.

New comment by bigDinosaur in "A Faster Alternative to Jq"

bigDinosaur — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 09:06:59 +0000

Certain people/businesses deal with one-off things every day. Even for something truly one-off, if one tool is too slow it might still be the difference between being able to do it once or not at all.

New comment by bigDinosaur in "GitHub appears to be struggling with measly three nines availability"

bigDinosaur — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:11:20 +0000

Email?

New comment by bigDinosaur in "You are not your job"

bigDinosaur — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:06:35 +0000

I don't think your initial claim is well supported considering the size of domestic travel and entertainment sectors in most of the world (although I'll admit that the way people allocate non-work activities in many places may not lead to a relaxed life in the way, say, a Swiss person on a sabbatical has). Points 1 and 2 in this recent comment are different ones again, though and not ones I disagree with.

New comment by bigDinosaur in "You are not your job"

bigDinosaur — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:57:21 +0000

Domestic tourism is massive even in countries with terrible work culture like China, so your claim is not particularly strong. Either way, hobbies and holidays are certainly not unique to NA and Europe.

New comment by bigDinosaur in "You are not your job"

bigDinosaur — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:22:09 +0000

This article seems to hinge on a rhetorical flourish whereby the literal meaning of 'you are not your job' is substituted with a criticism of 'you are not what you do'. Well, of course it doesn't make sense and isn't true if you redefine it like that - the original aphorism is instead more literal: your identity should not be conflated with the identity of your employer. The substituted argument leads to some fascinating philosophy, but doesn't deal with the more literal fact that plenty of things you can do for value to the world are still negatives, either net negative for the world or to the individual. Conflating one's identity with an employer is the latter, since the employer and the employee almost always have different requirements for well-being (in the case of a corporation then of course the employer in that sense has no requirement for well-being at all).

New comment by bigDinosaur in "Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age"

bigDinosaur — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:26:27 +0000

All discussion of foreign affairs is the discussion of domestic affairs somewhere.

New comment by bigDinosaur in "How important was the Battle of Hastings?"

bigDinosaur — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 01:51:54 +0000

Describing Germany's loss in WW2 as 'affecting their foreign policy a little' represents a profound disconnect with reality, which is that WW2 fundamentally reshaped the entire world, cemented the US as a superpower, set up the USSR for its rise, split Germany in two (with major political effects to this day), ended European empires (UK, French), and ultimately brought about the EU. And those are just some of WW2's effects, which would have all gone completely different directions if Germany or Japan had won.

New comment by bigDinosaur in "PC processors entered the Gigahertz era today in the year 2000 with AMD's Athlon"

bigDinosaur — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:05:28 +0000

You really didn't feel Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo was a 'game changer'?

New comment by bigDinosaur in "Dulce et Decorum Est (1921)"

bigDinosaur — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 07:31:11 +0000

To say this is simplifying is understating just how 'not even wrong' this is...

New comment by bigDinosaur in "iPhone 17e"

bigDinosaur — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:00:54 +0000

Can confirm - I go for the cheapest and smallest iPhones possible (e.g. 13 mini) and could not care less about >60Hz on my phone, although I care about it quite a lot for laptop or desktop displays. 17e will likely be my next upgrade (if I can bear to part with my 13 mini).

New comment by bigDinosaur in "The happiest I've ever been"

bigDinosaur — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 09:35:40 +0000

I didn't say the Shakers had a bad idea, it just was an idea that led to them removing themselves from further existence that was not genetic. Whether that was a good or bad decision is an entirely separate judgement call.

New comment by bigDinosaur in "The happiest I've ever been"

bigDinosaur — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 05:29:26 +0000

It doesn't have to be genetic to be 'self-removing'.

What happened to the Shakers?

New comment by bigDinosaur in "I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978"

bigDinosaur — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 03:17:51 +0000

Obviously the concept is different from the execution, and you provided an idea on execution (which anyone can do) which would need to be actually, you know, proved out to help with any kind of brand loyalty. Just doing random things that sound good is not a great strategy.

New comment by bigDinosaur in "OpenAI – How to delete your account"

bigDinosaur — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 12:33:53 +0000

How is that not a line of principle? Principle doesn't mean where we'd all agree, nor does it mean what we'd deem acceptable, it just means there is a line somewhere - and mass surveillance or fully autonomous AI in the kill chain is a very clear principle.