Hacker News: crusty

New comment by crusty in "Amazon's Zoox wins first US approval for paid robotaxis with no human controls"

crusty — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:05:12 +0000

I recently watched a snazzy labs video of him trying or Tesla's most recent full self driving and finding that it could get stuck in infinite decision loops that required the user to take control - namely circular parking lots.

I can't wait until this becomes a game for riders, requesting drop offs at locations that force these things into loops after disembarking. With no starting wheel, and at that point no driver, getting to the next pickup could take a while.

New comment by crusty in "Show HN: CheapFoodMap – A map of good meals under $10"

crusty — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:52:57 +0000

The problem isn't the word cheap, it's just that'd you've attached it to the food, and not the diner.

Food4thecheap Good food on the cheap Cheapo's meal map Bums' Guides

New comment by crusty in "Open-source 3D-printed portable MRI machine built for under $70k"

crusty — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 05:49:53 +0000

Per the write-up, that's where the AI comes in - it's got confidence for days!

Turn your low confidence into high confidence by handing off diagnostics to an AI.

"We either need to operate right now so you don't die or the AI is hallucinating again and you're actually totally fine. You're the patient though, so it's your call in the end; what do you want to do?"

New comment by crusty in "US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search"

crusty — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 05:15:26 +0000

This sends like a more-info-requiered situation. Per this article, the LEOs seemed to be fishing, so they presumably couldn't claim as a matter of fact that evidence had been destroyed. Also, claiming destruction of property seems unreasonable since the phone, the property, still exists as before. If I sell my phone, I'm going to wipe it. I think we all understand that it would be ludicrous for the buyer to claim I was destroying the phone, the property they've been sold, by doing so.

Even if the accelerated executive capture of the judiciary is largely ruled back post Trump (big IF), I fear the government will be unwilling to pay with much of the convenience of rule-by-law that it's been given a taste for.

New comment by crusty in "London Gatwick has launched a robotic airport parking service"

crusty — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:01:16 +0000

I love (/s) that there's a Cafe business that can survive on a singular customer base of people who parked their cars for a long time in one very specific parking lot.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/wL9jK7Pnsc2Ezzp4A

New comment by crusty in "London Gatwick has launched a robotic airport parking service"

crusty — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 23:48:51 +0000

It's solving the 'meatsack labor costs are really cramping my profitability' problem.

It's an inconveniently located valet service. But oh, you keep your keys. So it's really an inconvenient tow-truck valet service - or two guys with fork lifts.

New comment by crusty in "Kill The Cookie Banner"

crusty — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 23:33:17 +0000

I've wondered for a while what value is assigned if a user ignores or dismisses (when possible) a cookie banner without actively selecting accept or decline. Anyone know?

New comment by crusty in "Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV"

crusty — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:22:12 +0000

One might wonder why the Ford CEO cares about low cost foreign cars when Ford doesn't even make any. They have shifted all of their lineup except one car model to higher- margin compact SUVs, SUVs, pickups, and full size commercial vans. And that one car, the mustang, another one marketing exercise on four wheels with accompanying margin markup - not exactly a practical entry level car.

Oh, but the poors but the used cars and competition for their business will lead to greater supply of used cars, diminishing the resale value they can point to to justify purchase of their high-margin vehicles. Can't have that now.

New comment by crusty in "The Art of Money Getting"

crusty — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:41:10 +0000

What number is affiliate marketing on PT's list? Linking to Amazon rather than Project Gutenberg is the art of money getting, 2026 edition.

New comment by crusty in "Chrome removes claim of On-device Al not sending data to Google Servers"

crusty — Thu, 07 May 2026 22:09:34 +0000

Something no one else would want - a little colored dot next to HN user names keyed to their generation, so I could quickly tell why none of the commenter mentioned AOL.

New comment by crusty in "The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code"

crusty — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:22:20 +0000

I feel sad that evening I read now has to pass through my "is this LLM slop?" filter, and if it gets caught, the content loses focus and the worthless puzzle of truth takes over.

So there was this: "I run engineering teams in Ukraine. My people lived the other side of this equation. Not the factory floor. The receiving end. While Raytheon was struggling to restart production from forty-year-old blueprints, the US was shipping thousands of Stingers to Ukraine. RTX CEO Greg Hayes: ten months of war burned through thirteen years’ worth of Stinger production. I’ve seen this pattern before. It’s happening in my industry right now."

The filter flashed the warning on the telltale signs and I stopped reading. Now I've got the puzzle I don't want to do. Did someone trying to argue against "AI assisted" coding use an LLM to author that argument?

But this is HN, I can also just move on to the next story.

New comment by crusty in "EFF is leaving X"

crusty — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:28:42 +0000

This reads to me like you are putting effort into presenting your car is sick a way that satisfies your version of objectively neutral. I wonder if that is at the expense of details, because your claims provide no specifics for us to weigh independently.

As objective as you may want to sound, without any objective specific facts, all those words just boil down to "I'm a libertarian who used to support the EFF but don't like the way they're message anymore."

New comment by crusty in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

crusty — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:39:59 +0000

To each his own and all that but sitting in a hotel room hacking on a computer while on vacation (in Hawaii!) is PTSD trigger-warning territory for me.

New comment by crusty in "Vatican Rebukes Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures in Rome"

crusty — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:11:02 +0000

Someone with a primary objective of personal wealth enrichment might see him as a pathway to those riches. As he has 'grand' societal goals that require allies and terribly odious views, someone who either likes the 'smell' of them, can't 'smell' or is a master of holding his nose closed odious would see sitting through it a a small price to pay for future monetary gains.

New comment by crusty in "Jury signals tech titans on hook for social media addiction"

crusty — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 20:04:37 +0000

'Productive' here is practically bursting from all the euphemisms it's swallowed.

New comment by crusty in "Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student"

crusty — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 19:21:23 +0000

I would suggest 'more loosely coupled' perhaps, which in many cases they already are. Students may not want a surly, disinterested professor forced upon them because of a teaching requirement, but they won't want to miss out on great teachers forced to choose between teaching and researching. And as expressed by others, teaching and research reinforce each other to some degree. Teaching tests conceptual understanding and research incentivizes maintaining an understanding that tracks the knowledge limits of the field.

But this exists in many educational + research institutions already. Where it runs into problems is in resource constrained environments, where there aren't the budgets to support research-only positions that aren't 'less than' roles or the institution can't support the grant ambitions of highest 'performing' teaching researchers, stuck that they don't go to those institutions and more less research-focused (or at least smaller grant value) teachers populate those schools.

I'm trying not to make any value-judgements here, so please ignore and bias vibes that gives off.

New comment by crusty in "Lawmakers say US Military used laser to take down Border Protection drone in TX"

crusty — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:07:56 +0000

So if you're keeping score, that's one party balloon and one of their own drones. The future looks bright!

New comment by crusty in "Microsoft 365 now tracks you in real time?"

crusty — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:00:17 +0000

This was a thing. I worked in an office of 4 within a larger facility back when booting up took some time and we had staggered morning arrivals. The first arrival would power on everyone's computers so they were ready. If someone came in, they'd see a computer on without someone there. Where are they? I don't know, maybe in the bathroom, getting coffee, or running down an issue in another department.

New comment by crusty in "Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out"

crusty — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:43:06 +0000

I can't wait until this thing exposes the bad opsec, where people have these agents hooked into their other systems and someone tasks their own adversarial agent with probing the other agents for useful information or prompting them to execute internal actions. And then the whole thing melts down.

New comment by crusty in "Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out"

crusty — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:37:52 +0000

Is this the actual text from the bot? Tech-Bro-speak is a relatively recent colloquialization, and if think these agents are based on models trained on a far larger corpus of text, so why does it sound like an actual tech-bro? I wonder if this thing is trained to sound like that as a joke for the site?