Hacker News: bobson381

New comment by bobson381 in "Interesting Background of the Minecraft End Poem"

bobson381 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:42:54 +0000

Not certain if this has been posted here before. I found it a fascinating thing to read as context. The author also has some interesting theories about universe evolution over time.

Gift Economy Background of the Minecraft End Poem

bobson381 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:42:54 +0000

Article URL: https://theeggandtherock.com/p/i-wrote-a-story-for-a-friend

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49352399

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by bobson381 in "Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1T and 114k Lives a Year, Yale Study"

bobson381 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:16:17 +0000

it's that it's 1 Trillion less in incentivized middlemen. A la Graeber.

New comment by bobson381 in "How Gödel's Proof Works (2020)"

bobson381 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:05:44 +0000

the linking thread for all three is self-reference, either in the form of a fugue or in a painting showing its own creation. Doug is a loop guy

New comment by bobson381 in "Why Do Fewer Renters Expect to Move?"

bobson381 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:19:41 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth is why. The financial economy sits on a finite store of physical goods, and as a dissipative structure, our high-energy, high-complexity global society acts as a low-friction conduit from stored past energy to high-entropy degraded heat.

Number go up until we cannibalize the foundations.

New comment by bobson381 in "Ocean heat records broken as hottest July temperature recorded"

bobson381 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:15:03 +0000

GHG would keep leaking out of the permafrost. Warming goes up even if we stop all emissions tomorrow.

New comment by bobson381 in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

bobson381 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:29:02 +0000

okay wow. I have seen a lot of quieter bands on those, absolutely insane that they captured this. Funny blend of genre and space.

New comment by bobson381 in "Why Do Fewer Renters Expect to Move?"

bobson381 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:40:34 +0000

Right. This would make it possible and reasonable if you could find a house that is enough, such that you can live in it, expect a reasonably good experience in it for the life of your time in it, and that that mortgage payment, plus all maintenance, insurance, tax, etc. is reasonably comparable to an equivalent rental. Depending on where you are, this is not always the case. Or you need to buy a small place at current rates and prices to make it at all comparable.

You have to decide what "enough" is, and that's variable depending on your expected standard of living, etc. I am personally currently lucky enough to be in a good rental situation, which colors my view.

Having a landlord that will fix problems and eat incidental appliance/roof/major expenses is a form of insurance paid as rental.

New comment by bobson381 in "Why Do Fewer Renters Expect to Move?"

bobson381 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:37:41 +0000

Agree here. But I'm a doomer/collapsenik - so, the same future coming for "retirement" is the same future coming for "house always appreciates in value". Maybe 1990 -> 2020 was an okay 30 year period, 2026 -> 2056 sure won't be.

New comment by bobson381 in "Why Do Fewer Renters Expect to Move?"

bobson381 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:27:28 +0000

30 year mortgage is founded partly on the idea that your house will be worth more in the future when you sell it. That you can lock in a lower price now.

Number cannot always go up. We are at the top of the carbon pulse. Financialization has taken us far from the material baseline of the rock we are flying through space on. Debt will only get us so far.

For this and many other reasons, why would you believe a house "as an investment" is a reasonable thing to keep hoping for, especially 30 years from now? If you have even a reasonably stable rental, it's less risk exposure if you can save some money that isn't tied up in a down payment.

New comment by bobson381 in "Notes from a Burning Paris"

bobson381 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 18:33:29 +0000

I Eat the Stars was pretty good. Nice take on grasping the absurdity of the coming metabolic failure of the complex systems we live inside of. Everything dies, even big patterns like industrial society.

New comment by bobson381 in "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion"

bobson381 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:50:46 +0000

A guy on the sysadmin subreddit managed to 8x the global GDP https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1uz2fv2/aws_says_...

New comment by bobson381 in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

bobson381 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:15:13 +0000

Sounds good, thanks for your response. I didn't mean to denigrate your word choice at all, it's mostly that I'm hypersensitive to that kind of phrasing now because there's so much auto-written stuff on e.g. Substack, LinkedIn, etc. Sam Kriss has a nice article about it all.

New comment by bobson381 in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

bobson381 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:13:58 +0000

Language is already a lossy map, but it is not really an expression of another person's thought or mind if they translate it through an LLM. Or at least it's a much harder to decipher representation of it. Form is void, void is form, and the two are not separate.

New comment by bobson381 in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

bobson381 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:27:12 +0000

Fascinatingly, I'm now so allergic to certain LLM-phrases that I immediately noticed your use of Not X but Y in this comment. Maybe that was intentional, maybe not, but it's a funny illustration of how odd this language rabbit hole has been!

New comment by bobson381 in "The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement [pdf]"

bobson381 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:26:14 +0000

Because of access to a giant store of energy. Our advancement has also created a future need to consume more and more energy to fuel increased complexity.

New comment by bobson381 in "Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors"

bobson381 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 16:05:50 +0000

One of my favorite pieces of writing on this topic

https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everyth...

New comment by bobson381 in "Printing Gaussian Splats"

bobson381 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:12:26 +0000

if you allowed for some slippage in precision, how many images could you fit in that are recognizable from various angles, with ~acceptable~ resolution? Sounds fun.

New comment by bobson381 in "Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'"

bobson381 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:06:35 +0000

Hmm. Mainly that access to much larger quantities of energy than before in the form of oil/coal/gas enabled the creation of a much more complex system than before, with a higher metabolic need.

Ongoing servicing of that metabolic need requires continuous access to the same or greater amount of energy year after year. The world burns through its annual resource budget in July this year.

As we continue to extract more and more, the energy return on energy invested goes down, so net energy availability drops, making it harder and more expensive to continue the current basal metabolic rate, let alone fueling continuous growth. Because so much is built atop the energy mechanism, instability happens when it's threatened or changed.x

So maybe a better turn of phrase would have been that it's the first time we've harnessed so much energy at once and effectively put a lot of energy slaves to use per each person. Like starting to use fossil fuel to create fertilizer that enables more people to survive famines, you create a scenario where you need ongoing access to the same or greater amount of energy just to keep up. Not saying it was the wrong choice, just that we tend to fix issues by making more complex solutions that introduce future resource need.

New comment by bobson381 in "Reid Hoffman says SpaceX 'not an AI company', xAI 'complete train wreck'"

bobson381 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:27:30 +0000

it is the first time we have harnessed all of the energy on the planet at once to power a single interconnected advanced system across continents. Mostly I'm drawing from a thermodynamics outlook[0]. previous collapses had unused high quality energy in other areas to fall back on. I'd love to read more about the growth towards China being sustainable in that sense.

[0] https://youtu.be/5WPB2u8EzL8?si=doERoIYuYZYHLAAZ