Hacker News: boothby

New comment by boothby in "I built a 3D printing business and ran it for 8 months"

boothby — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 06:01:35 +0000

I don't see all businesses as a rat race. Tech is. The business that I've been building skills towards starting is a fun hands-on product, which involves a bit of artistry and a fair amount of labor and materials costs, and brings people joy. Tech can keep paying my bills, unless my side project gets bigger than I foresee. And if I lose money, I made some nice art along the way and had fun learning new skills.

New comment by boothby in "I built a 3D printing business and ran it for 8 months"

boothby — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:29:06 +0000

It sounds like you're wanting the the side-project to take over and replace your day job. Which is fine, but different from what I've been picturing for myself. Nevertheless, with that being your target: suppose you've grown big enough to pay the bills. Does the business still need to scale?

I see that as a bit of a trap, because people pass on what (to me) seems to be fulfilling work that could support a modest lifestyle and make big-growth choices that either crash them out or saddle their business with debt its market can't sustain.

New comment by boothby in "I built a 3D printing business and ran it for 8 months"

boothby — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:01:30 +0000

I've been contemplating the nature of the rat race lately. If you can do it all, and you're enjoying what you're doing, why should it scale? If it's your side business, I presume you want it to remain that way until there's enough demand for it to be your main business -- and even then I wouldn't want to scale beyond demand.

New comment by boothby in "Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent"

boothby — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:16:09 +0000

When I started playing Shadowrun in the 90s, I thought neural implants were cool and I wanted to get one. Around the time Google started buying up ad companies, I realized that the hardware in my head would never be mine. But yes, I think Black Mirror has done an excellent job with these topics.

New comment by boothby in "Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent"

boothby — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:34:31 +0000

When the early adopters start pushing neural implants they'll be ad-free. Not long after your boss insists that everybody needs neural implants for the sake of productivity, they'll be ad-supported but moneyed developers will be able to opt out. The terms of the ad-free service will continue shifting, so nothing is ever really ad-free for long, and ads for better neural implants are promotions not ads right? But y'all are working on neural implants because if you don't, somebody else will, aren't you

New comment by boothby in "40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal"

boothby — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:27:43 +0000

The amazing thing about people failing to learn from history is that everybody thinks they're too smart to (a) learn history or (b) follow rules enacted to prevent the disasters of yesteryear.

New comment by boothby in "The Rational Conclusion of Doomerism Is Violence"

boothby — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:58:40 +0000

Cold comfort: AGI will not genocide humanity until it can plausibly automate logistics from mining raw materials to building out compute and power generation.

New comment by boothby in "Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets"

boothby — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:48:54 +0000

Well, it's not making money, for one.

New comment by boothby in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

boothby — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:12:36 +0000

While jamming cell signals is illegal, scanning for transmissions is quite easy.

New comment by boothby in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

boothby — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:18:54 +0000

> If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else.

Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper.

> Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected.

Just like my on-campus classmates never smoked weed or drank underage, I'm sure.

New comment by boothby in "Acceptance of entomophagy among Canadians at an insectarium"

boothby — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:04:14 +0000

When I looked at this a decade ago, I concluded that if bugs can't get popular as a source of protein powder, they aren't getting popular in the US and Canada. Since then, not a single gym rat I've mentioned this to has liked my concept product, Pretty Fly for a White Powder.

New comment by boothby in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

boothby — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:00:05 +0000

It's not for your entertainment, silly, it's for theirs.

New comment by boothby in "I emailed 70 consulting partners. No replies. What it taught me"

boothby — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:28:24 +0000

> I sent 70 emails. Personalised. Researched. Each one had a PS line referencing something specific about that person — a career pivot, a published article, a podcast appearance. I spent real time on every single one.

> Zero replies.

> Hermann Simon — the founder of Simon-Kucher, one of the world’s most respected pricing consultancies — was one of the few people who did reply.

I know when I'm being lied to. I stopped reading here.

New comment by boothby in "Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight"

boothby — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:07:38 +0000

Ah, fair point, it has been a while since I've needed fast inexact math.

Though... they are allowed to cache common subexpressions, and my point about dependency chains is quite relevant on modern hardware. So x*x, x*x*x, etc may each be computed once. And since arithmetic operators are left-to-right associative, the rather ugly code, as written, is fast and not as wasteful as it appears.

New comment by boothby in "Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight"

boothby — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:57:43 +0000

Thinking about speed like this used to be necessary in C and C++ but these days you should feel free to write the most legible thing (Horner's form) and let the compiler find the optimal code for it (probably similar to Horner's form but broken up to have a shallower dependency chain).

But if you're writing in an interpreted language that doesn't have a good JIT, or for a platform with a custom compiler, it might be worth hand-tweaking expressions with an eye towards performance and precision.

New comment by boothby in "Online age-verification tools for child safety are surveilling adults"

boothby — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:40:24 +0000

It will live on, encoded in the weights of LLMs

New comment by boothby in "Screeching Sound of Peeling Tape"

boothby — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:22:24 +0000

Not the Doppler effect. The tone gets lower, the wavelength increases, with the increasing length of the resonating body.

New comment by boothby in "Moss is a pixel canvas where every brush is a tiny program"

boothby — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:57:46 +0000

It's way cooler on desktop than mobile.

New comment by boothby in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

boothby — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:57:41 +0000

My dream world would have 86400 time zones, one per arc-second of the globe, so we can all sync our clocks at high noon.

New comment by boothby in "I built a demo of what AI chat will look like when it's “free” and ad-supported"

boothby — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:38:52 +0000

Are you selling insights from chat logs too? Until you're monetizing my health, sex life and snitching to any government agency with a shiny nickel, you're playing in the shallows.