Hacker News: cal_dent

New comment by cal_dent in "Everything we like is a psyop?"

cal_dent — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 05:43:39 +0000

This is great and I wish you all the best. A byproduct of the content abundance age (because that's really what is is) is the expectation that not just growth but fast growth is everything is such a race to lower quality on the whole. It's pretty depressing but ultimately I suspect we will get sick of the lower level far quicker than we probably think.

New comment by cal_dent in "Everything we like is a psyop?"

cal_dent — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 05:38:19 +0000

Everyone needs to revisit William Gibson's the Blue Ant books. Still holds up as the best distillation of our current times culturally.

On Cameron Winter & Geese, i think he and the band are great. But I find it amusing that this weird discourse thinks this wasn't always the way the music industry works. The tools are different but its fundamentally the same playbook

New comment by cal_dent in "Picasso’s Guernica (Gigapixel)"

cal_dent — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:00:19 +0000

But it completely is different. To you point its why a 5 year old's crayon scribble is more powerful to certain people than Guernica for instance. History is littered with gazillions of scribbles, stray notes, meaningless stuff that just goes straight in the bin. AI will do that. But for something communicates the feeeell of something you need warmth and emotional relatability.

New comment by cal_dent in "Picasso’s Guernica (Gigapixel)"

cal_dent — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:54:47 +0000

Hole. In. One. I have so little fear of AI replacing true art because its fundamental purpose is to transfer emotions (and its the best way humanity's been able to do this) that can be indescribable in any other way than feelings. AI does not have that and so can never be a true substitute for it. it can be a tool to help someone convey that but it needs humans.

New comment by cal_dent in "Don't feel like exercising? Maybe it's the wrong time of day for you"

cal_dent — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:49:10 +0000

Just do it. And remember the old cycling mantra, it never gets any easier, you just get quicker/stronger

New comment by cal_dent in "OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports"

cal_dent — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 02:29:06 +0000

just maths. if they're as a capable as each other then x product cannot be worth multiples above y unless there's a clear USP. Arguably OpenAi's is brand recognition but given Antrhopic's recent growth that's less certain than a quarter ago

New comment by cal_dent in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

cal_dent — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 03:54:44 +0000

An interesting thing about one facet of how society as developed over the past decade and a half, I think, is that a byproduct of more people being conscious of the quest to monetise almost anything is that it has also raised the level of general scepticism on whether something is marketing or real. So you have increasingly more scenarios where an objectively bad thing can happen to someone but any public response is scrutinised and questioned within a hint of its life sometimes rightly sometimes not. I don’t particularly like it but that’s where we are at guess

New comment by cal_dent in "Sam Altman's Coworkers Say He Can Barely Code and Misunderstands Basic Concepts"

cal_dent — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:06:51 +0000

exactly. frankly its just a bunch of pissy holier than thou engineer thing. He seems to be pretty good at raising capital and selling dreams which his predominantly what Openai seemingly wants to be right now.

New Yorker article less so because its just a standard ceo profile piece that digs out pretty pertinent things for a ceo role

New comment by cal_dent in "AI, Unemployment and Work"

cal_dent — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:03:30 +0000

The only relevant lesson is that predictions are likely to be more wrong than right tbh

New comment by cal_dent in "AI, Unemployment and Work"

cal_dent — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:02:15 +0000

Sort of agree with this but I do find it amusing that this sort of take on it implicitly discounts that the capital still has to live with all these “useless” people on the same rock, whose numbers will grow to an unignorable amount...The idea that anything will be insulated is for the fairies and seems just as asinine to me

New comment by cal_dent in "Move Detroit"

cal_dent — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 05:29:06 +0000

Yeah that's fair point. The closest from that perspective would be the collapse of shipbuilding in places like Sunderland or Hull or maybe textile mills in burnley. But not as significant in terms of global cultural importance i guess

New comment by cal_dent in "Move Detroit"

cal_dent — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 04:03:58 +0000

The UK did do that to large swathes of Northern England. Changing times comes for everyone in the end

New comment by cal_dent in "Overcoming the friendship recession"

cal_dent — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 01:46:17 +0000

This is an interesting post (and also a very well written one!). It touches on something that does slightly irk me about the wider friendship/loneliness conversation that it feels we've been having for a decades now.

Its the "we" in "how on earth we get ourselves out of this." The bluntness of the "we" conflates it into a bigger problem than it is. If you walk past many parks & gardens across cities you'll find that same picture of families socialising in the old way without a blackout, but also people glued to their phones too.

People who are intentional of having classic socialising are still doing it, people who choose not to either through their own intention or, i suspect and hope, in a very ambient non-intentional way are the ones who may need to get out of it. Yes there are more of the latter now than before but the former groups are still a huge part of society. And if they can do it even with the same distractions and phones and access to social media etc. why can't others?

New comment by cal_dent in "Overcoming the friendship recession"

cal_dent — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 01:26:19 +0000

I agree with where you're coming from. I think its the continuing rise of individualism to a degree; sports team mentality politics/the internet/phones/social media have likely accelerated it but feels to me we'd been moving that way even prior to that. There's probably something there, too, about how more wealth gives people an out to not have to engage with broader society in a way where lower wealth or less unequal distribution of wealth doesn't.

Margaret Thatcher got quite a lot of stick for her quote about how there is no society and its just individual people that look out for themselves first and foremost before anything. But I'd say there's more truth to that than I'd want to believe. What stops that from being true to my mind is people being very intentional about creating a society by engaging with others.

I'm always interested in people's stories about adult friendships or loneliness crisis etc. and what I tend to see is that when people start being intentional about engaging, it usually ends up with them finding new friends. It's just easy to sleepwalk, with everything going on, into not engaging. Newish parents are very apt example of this

New comment by cal_dent in "AI boom risks widening wealth divide, says BlackRock's Larry Fink"

cal_dent — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 02:11:25 +0000

Until housing is solved the wealth divide will continue to grow whether ai lives up to expectations or not. Higher wealth taxing funding UBI etc. will be largely ineffective without solving housing.

All this new fangled talk about ABUNDANCE yadda yadda I find quite silly. We already live in abundance, most jobs for instance already pay very livable wages for example. It's just not livable because of mainly housing (& more broadly renting & land prices)

New comment by cal_dent in "What Young Workers Are Doing to AI-Proof Themselves"

cal_dent — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 22:56:53 +0000

My thoughts exactly. I do think people tend to frame things in a developed economies sort of way when the worst fears of ai is actually more akin to a developing/emerging economy framework. And that says when where there's lump of labour available, most aren't earning that within trades.

New comment by cal_dent in "What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves"

cal_dent — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 22:50:50 +0000

I still don't understand the logic that any job is safe from ai (if it lives up to expectations). Sure, it might not be directly impacted by ai but why is there this expectation that the excess labour from those directly impacted doesnt act to suppress the earning power of other jobs?

Especially considering that the implication is that humans just become a pair of hands with opposable thumbs?. Take the electrician in the article, sure its a skilled job but the barrier into it drops massively imo if you can just take a picture of whatever issue is at hand and ai spits out what is needed, no?

New comment by cal_dent in "AI won't fix your family drama, might help you hear what they're trying to say"

cal_dent — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 20:24:56 +0000

The last thing someone having an argument with anyone is something incredibly knowledgeable (or at least with access to knowledge) that is inclined to agree with you.

Yes, it can be good but I suspect for many people it'd more likely lead to retrenchment rather that any real progress/compromise. Might be my own cynicism I guess.

New comment by cal_dent in "Wander – A tiny, decentralised tool to explore the small web"

cal_dent — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:42:55 +0000

Cloudhiker.net has been doing this for a while too. Great to see more grassroot-ish attempt at expanding the web (or i guess more accurately returning it to its purpose)

New comment by cal_dent in "Grandparents are glued to their phones [video]"

cal_dent — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:57:15 +0000

everyone is vulnerable to it. i think the idea that certain generations are better equipped is more a by product of exposure rather than some sense of immunisation. GenX/Xennials are just more likely to have other things to do than going on social media at the same rate as other cohorts - whether its still busy working or kids or hobbies etc. Intense exposure and the reinforcement that brings is the problem. Its why the problems became even more pronounced through covid years