Hacker News: bobson381

New comment by bobson381 in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

bobson381 — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 11:24:55 +0000

This is a techne/metis split. You would probably like this [0] chapter about the "rightness" struggle between engineering and service at Xerox. Some paralells to A Big Little Idea called Legibility from Ribbonfarm, too.

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

New comment by bobson381 in "Claude partial outage"

bobson381 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:07:44 +0000

How about Adam McKay, then?

New comment by bobson381 in "I'm Tired of Being on the Network"

bobson381 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:23:29 +0000

I tuned out when it switched, also. How to move on when job is in front of screen?

New comment by bobson381 in "Avoiding the babbling-idiot failure in a time-triggered communication system"

bobson381 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:29:30 +0000

Thanks for posting this. Very GEB

New comment by bobson381 in "EasyEffects can massively improve laptop speaker sound quality"

bobson381 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:29:22 +0000

If you're watching through VLC, you can set the mix to stereo in the audio settings - perhaps there's a similar setting you can find? Not sure if you've got the tv's optical going straight into an amp. Some stereo receivers also have a "night mode" that can do this, you might find an older cheaper one with pre-outs or similar.

New comment by bobson381 in "I'm becoming AI-blind"

bobson381 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:09:53 +0000

Feels like the way a video game will render the outside of a wall or solid surface, but you can run into it and warp partly through and there's nothing internal to it at all.

New comment by bobson381 in "I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers"

bobson381 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 16:10:15 +0000

To add on - complexity itself is a perceptual feature introduced by language - we treat and describe things as though they are made of an unimaginable number of tiny parts. So this also increases the fun of the wordy wine/coffee/whisky descriptions!

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.