Hacker News: causality0

New comment by causality0 in "Microsoft Edge is about to lock out older ad blockers, just like Chrome did"

causality0 — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:26:15 +0000

Right. For example, Firefox Mobile doesn't support hitting ctrl+T to open a new tab, completely breaking flow for anyone on a tablet with a keyboard or their phone docked to a monitor.

New comment by causality0 in "Read the novels and forget everything else"

causality0 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:53:28 +0000

The AI is incorrect. Lovecraft's views largely reflected the white societal norm, particularly the "scientific racism" of time, and they softened considerably near the end of his life. His letters from the time mention that several of his earlier depictions of race were unfair. If he hadn't died so young I suspect we would have seen a very significant shift in his views.

New comment by causality0 in "Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles"

causality0 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:07:23 +0000

To flag things for removal that the powers that be, aka you, don't want on HN, as defined by the Guidelines. What I want on HN and what you want on HN aren't the same, so users like me have to go by the Guidelines on what is and isn't flaggable. For example, some types of submissions I utterly despise but don't violate the guidelines include "product launches that lie about being the first/only way to do something when this tool already exists", "obvious bullshit like a ten year old curing cancer", "this month's revolutionary new battery technology, ignore the fact it has so little real application we aren't even patenting it", and the classic "here is a five page article examining a question whose answer is not only incredibly obvious but can be answered in a single sentence".

I'd be overjoyed if you told us you wanted us to flag that stuff.

New comment by causality0 in "When is NVLink worth it?"

causality0 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:04:11 +0000

I badly miss the days when I could buy a GPU and then three years later buy the same GPU for a hundred bucks and boost my framerate by 70%.

New comment by causality0 in "Show HN: Reviving my 2001 college band with AI"

causality0 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 05:32:35 +0000

Depends on if you're willing to pay or not. You can do it alright locally with DeepFilterNet but honestly the best quality comes from Adobe Podcast's AI Enhance function.

New comment by causality0 in "Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles"

causality0 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 05:29:24 +0000

What I do know is that users should flag articles that they think don't belong on HN

If this is true then this statement should be added to the guidelines. Many a time I've seen a submission and thought "My god, this is the most moronic thing I've ever read in my life, nearly every single factual claim in this is wrong" but I don't flag it because "don't post utter drivel" is not in the guidelines.

New comment by causality0 in "Show HN: Reviving my 2001 college band with AI"

causality0 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:25:13 +0000

Have you considered processing the original recordings using AI? I've witnessed some truly amazing results. I've had twenty year old Skype call recordings sound like we were sitting in a recording studio.

New comment by causality0 in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

causality0 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:00:42 +0000

It would be decentralized if the same things were being built in different places. The way US government manufacturing is set up is more like taking all your organs out, sticking each of them in a separate room, and piping the blood back and forth. Every item has a mile-long supply chain and attacking any part of it shuts the whole thing down.

New comment by causality0 in "AI builders outnumber AI governance hires 7:1 in Europe"

causality0 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:52:18 +0000

I maintain my position that "being really, really stupid" should be added to the Guidelines for post flagging.

New comment by causality0 in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

causality0 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:46:00 +0000

Change is not going to happen until it's forced. The US military was born as a force required to rebuff existential threats. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the gravitational center of the US military has been the profit margins of defense contractors. What creates the greatest profit? Centralization. Why have a dozen logistics centers when you can have one big one? A trillion dollar fighter program more efficiently absorbs tax dollars than half a dozen specialized vehicle programs from mid-sized companies. Why get congress to pay you to make cheap drones when you can get them to pay you to build $4M Patriot missiles? The MBAs have been riding the US military into the dirt for forty years and I don't think it's going to stop any time soon.

New comment by causality0 in "The Fall and Rise of Screwworm"

causality0 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:27:10 +0000

Everything is a thing. Immune systems are, when all is said and done, physics. Simpler forms of death tend to be harder to evolve resistance against, but given enough generations it will happen. For example, microorganisms regularly evolve increasing resistance to sterilizing chemicals, such as enterococcus faecium evolving resistance to isopropanol, various species of bacillus increasing their resistance to hydrogen peroxide, pseudomonas evolving resistance to benzalkonium chloride, etc.

New comment by causality0 in "Instead of banning AI, I made a classroom contract with my students"

causality0 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:16:48 +0000

After some debate, we drew a line separating mechanical churning from actual thinking. Automating repetitive tasks or literature searches was acceptable.

Was there any possibility of this not being the case? Rules which are not enforceable do not exist. If it's any part of the process you can't check, students are going to do it in the easiest way possible.

New comment by causality0 in "We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works"

causality0 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 19:43:45 +0000

When I was young I was so naïve. The whole world seemed to be barreling straight towards the things I liked and was interested in. Every year there were more and more nerds, more people with computers, more people playing video games. It felt so much like I was the future, that in a couple of decades everyone would be chit-chatting about what was coming, buying and comparing devices, etc. I could not have conceived that people younger than me would have less computer knowledge than me. If at twenty you had told me that I would wake up one day and teenagers no longer knew what a file extension is I would've asked you who won World War 3.

New comment by causality0 in "The case for physical media ownership"

causality0 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 15:45:39 +0000

For some reason the user can't remove games from their account and it has to be done by support. A while ago they had an "anti-censorship" promotion with several games. I wanted Postal, but I didn't know I'd get all the games in the promotion added to my account at the same time, and it was like a dozen porn games I didn't want.

New comment by causality0 in "The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams"

causality0 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:12:31 +0000

Doesn't this argument equally apply to any art humans create that isn't related to their lived experiences? Melville was never a whaler. Picasso didn't witness the bombing of Guernica. Stephen Crane wasn't a veteran. Jane Austen and Emily Bronte wrote their books with no experience of a romantic relationship. Are all these works "slop"?

New comment by causality0 in "The case for physical media ownership"

causality0 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 01:24:57 +0000

Is it? A few weeks ago I had to contact support to remove some games from my account and the response time was decent.

New comment by causality0 in "The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy"

causality0 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:29 +0000

You don't necessarily have to be in favor of any measures which reduce adult privacy to be in favor of that. Logically speaking, the liability for minors accessing age-gated products and services is the person who provides those products and services to the minor. In the case of the internet, that person is the parent, not the ISP or the website. It is the parent who contracts with the provider and then forwards the product to the unauthorized user, the child. A parent who purchases, say, access to porn and then provides that access to their child is no different than a parent who buys booze and provides access to it to their child.

New comment by causality0 in "Windows 10 quietly gets one more year of support and updates"

causality0 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:47:44 +0000

If you're considering switching to Win 10 IoT you're probably not in the "people who pay for Windows" category.

New comment by causality0 in "Epidurals are a miracle technology"

causality0 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:50:06 +0000

While I have no medical opinion to back this up, I place a significant portion of blame on the mechanics of being released. I was upright in a wheelchair, then forced to stand up to get into my wife's car, then had to drive home upright, then had to stand up again to get into a wheelchair to get into my house. I believe the fact that my back was forced to take weight immediately following surgery did a lot of damage. If I could do it over again I would have insisted on remaining prone for at least the first 24 hours.

New comment by causality0 in "Epidurals are a miracle technology"

causality0 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:38:39 +0000

I have to cautiously agree with you, with the caveat that many physios don't seem to know what they're doing either and the effectiveness of therapy can differ wildly based on which therapist and what regimen they use. Speaking as someone with a herniated disc that went through a discectomy which re-herniated immediately following surgery. Frankly I've only just now started getting relief by reducing the amount of weight pushing on the disc by way of treatment with semaglutide. Could've saved myself thousands of dollars in medical costs and rehab if I'd just done this a year ago.