Hacker News: bluebarbet

New comment by bluebarbet in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

bluebarbet — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:46:13 +0000

If you or OP suspect (suspect) that a blogger's taking shortcuts, and that's a problem for you or OP, then you or OP can just skip that blog and find another that appears (appears) to meet some criteria for labor input. To the extent that this is all unfalsifiable, it just should not matter.

I'll go further. Even if it were falsifiable, why should it matter? An example: I subscribe to a reputable US publication and I enjoy its journalism. If it turned out that one of its writers had (somehow) used AI to generate their article (which I enjoyed) in a click, here's what I would say to them: Hats off to you! How did you do it?!

I don't care if the article took them two minutes or if they used AI any more than I care if they used a spellchecker or wrote it while standing upside down. Why should I? The author put their name to the article and I got something out of it. That is all I was ever looking for.

New comment by bluebarbet in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

bluebarbet — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:58:12 +0000

The former. As did everyone else who read it, including you. Capitalization and punctuation are not decorative extras, they were invented for a reason.

New comment by bluebarbet in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

bluebarbet — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:56:10 +0000

So blame whoever signed off on it. AI or not-AI is their problem.

New comment by bluebarbet in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

bluebarbet — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:54:23 +0000

Ironic anecdote. Although I don't care about AI, I'm triggered by your own carefree attitude to orthography (no capitalization, unpronounceable words like "llms"). At least AI is easy to parse!

New comment by bluebarbet in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

bluebarbet — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:44:15 +0000

Sure, I get that argument. I just don't buy it. What counts is whether the article helps you fix your brakes. If it doesn't, it seems immaterial to me whether or not the bylined author sweated over it for hours. Not least because I have no means of knowing.

New comment by bluebarbet in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

bluebarbet — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:53:09 +0000

Am I really the only one who doesn't care whether or not prose was written by AI? Assuming that a text is signed off on by a person, then surely what counts is its substance, not who or what actually strung the words together. I'm constantly surprised by this obsessive need to falsify what is unfalsifiable. And among nerds of all people. It feels religious, like a modern form of heresy-purging.

New comment by bluebarbet in "France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls"

bluebarbet — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:32:41 +0000

>Americans are Legion and have a lot of money

And perhaps also (unironically) more persuadable due to the rampant commercialism and historic openness (to ideas, strangers, everything) of their society.

New comment by bluebarbet in "My server is a phone now"

bluebarbet — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 11:47:17 +0000

You meant, "people say interesting stuff only on hackernews". Theme vs rheme.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Donate to GrapheneOS"

bluebarbet — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:32:57 +0000

Still too complicated for just about anyone except the kind of people who frequent this forum.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Donate to GrapheneOS"

bluebarbet — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:38:13 +0000

>All you need to install graphene is a web browser and USB cable.

Outside a section of the Western middle class, ordinary people in 2026 only own one computer and it's in their pocket.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Donate to GrapheneOS"

bluebarbet — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:52:18 +0000

This is surely the closest to a solution we have, IMO. An alternative to the Android-iOS duopoly that involves futzing with cables and command lines is never going to go mainstream. By contrast, a vertically integrated FOSS(ish) hardware-software stack might eventually get to 5% market share, like desktop Linux. At which point companies and governments will be forced to take software freedom slightly more seriously. That's my optimistic take.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History"

bluebarbet — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:42:07 +0000

And above all too quickly. Per kilometer, flying is roughly as polluting as driving, but nobody would think to drive across a continent to go to the beach.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Over 150k Flights: Airlines Just Flew the Busiest Day in Recorded History"

bluebarbet — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 19:40:12 +0000

Per person, it is reliably the single most polluting thing you will do. The reason it accounts for a "small proportion" of emissions is that most people in the world do not fly at all. Indeed, a tiny (<1% IIRC) elite of the world's population account for most of the world's flight kilometers. Flying is an absolutely unscalable form of transport in a world of 8 billion people.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

bluebarbet — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:46:34 +0000

It is almost entirely mortgage debt backed by the collateral of housing.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

bluebarbet — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:43:17 +0000

But NFC unchecks the box "Open" since NFC access is usually a prerogative of the native wallet app of the OS, i.e. our favorite US duopoly. By contrast, any device can read or display a QR code. Hence also the success of QR payments in China, where the local app ecosystem is built more or less on top of the Android-iOS native layer.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

bluebarbet — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:38:00 +0000

It is very clear than you cannot. Yet.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

bluebarbet — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:36:16 +0000

It's a dark pattern, my bank does it too. Reminiscent of online stores that put the price-sorting option "High > Low" before "Low > High", as if literally anybody would ever want to do the former. This is a heuristic I use to judge trustworthiness. Decathlon doesn't do it.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

bluebarbet — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:26:01 +0000

The horse's mouth seems to contradict this. The subject is Wero, not Ideal.

New comment by bluebarbet in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

bluebarbet — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:22:55 +0000

This applies more to the USA than to Europe, where "credit cards" are in fact mostly debit cards (cursory research says 71% vs 26% in America), and ordinary people tend not to be up to their necks in consumer debt. Anecdotally, I've never used an actual credit card in my life.

New comment by bluebarbet in "French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time"

bluebarbet — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:02:53 +0000

These factual corrections are warranted. But IMO the accusations of dog-whistling and wrongthink are unnecessary and counterproductive. Again: I agree with you on the substance! And this probably is a climate denier. But (1) that's not very interesting in itself, and (2) by adopting an accusatory tone we're just going to push them and their sympathizers into a posture of defensiveness and victimhood which will only worsen the polarization and make the whole problem even harder to solve than it already is. IMO, on this issue it's best just to stick doggedly to factual correction and avoid the temptation to police people's inner minds.