Hacker News: cucumber3732842

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "Modern decor may be straining people's brains"

cucumber3732842 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 01:30:45 +0000

You see random farm houses and country estates with acres of field that get nothing but mowed they're essentially preserving resale value.

Generations ago those field would have been allowed to grow over because they could be cleared again on a whim.

These days you need six figured of engineering and permitting to clear acreage and ain't nobody gonna do that without a commercial use that can justify it.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "Modern decor may be straining people's brains"

cucumber3732842 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 01:25:30 +0000

Lawns are for where you want to put a patio but can't because some boomers 30yr ago decided that was bad and needed punitive permitting to make it not worth it.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "Construction workers, electricians, couriers: ICE disguises to detain migrants"

cucumber3732842 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 22:40:38 +0000

Gonna be hilarious when a few of these guys get shot in the back because the guy across the street thinks that some bad guys are dressed up as Dollar General municipal employees to do a home invasion. And yes I feel the same way about mundane cops pretending to be other stuff for random drug investigations or whatever.

Uniforms exist for a reason.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "Why it's so difficult to produce American-made medical gloves"

cucumber3732842 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:37:21 +0000

Or free enough. All that civil engineering, permitting, compliance checkbox BS has to be amortized over the stuff the factory makes.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)"

cucumber3732842 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:29:01 +0000

It's mind boggling that people will screech about how the professionals say zero but then turn around and act like GA is a big deal, despite the fact that the same professionals will say that unless you have occupational exposure other vectors are going to be what dominate your lead level.

And by "mind boggling" I just mean a more polite way to say "condemnation of people's logic and reasoning abilities or honesty"

Yeah, sure we should get rid of GA leaded gas and we're working on it but it's not really a front burner priority because of how little it gets into people.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)"

cucumber3732842 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:16:09 +0000

There's an equal and opposite person who'll be screeching about safety if you try and monkey with the fuel.

That's exactly why this is taking so long. There's no free lunch.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall"

cucumber3732842 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 12:48:47 +0000

Probably because the people working on them get job offers that come with clauses about not working on this stuff publicly.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall"

cucumber3732842 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 12:41:40 +0000

Remember how for years starting in the late teens and fizzling out over covid university paper after university paper about "this is so cool look how we can see through walls by essentially using 5g and wifi as ambient light" and they steadily marched up the chain from simple room layouts to furniture layouts, occupant detection, occupant movement and then started being dressed up with the usual dogwhistle language about "emergency services" that people who are building tech to help infantry/police entry teams use to make it seem more noble and then after that it all just kinda stopped being publicized with any sort of regularity?

I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I'd say all the people working on that shit got hired.

Sorry not sorry for the run on sentence.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

cucumber3732842 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 12:11:46 +0000

The spear analogy dates at least as far back as 1940. Heavy mechanized units as the tip and then reinforcing units behind them, further units to secure flanks, logistics flow. From the metal differences across the head of a spear (something that people who have a passing familiarity of artillery or naval gunnery will be able to relate to) the finish of the handle to keep the wood in good shape the analogies basically write themselves. The dick jokes are an obvious follow on.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI"

cucumber3732842 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:35:21 +0000

>How do they bypass the AI safety measures?

Tell it you're in Africa.

Not joking.

I do this all the time to bypass whiny Reddit "you need a license" and "that's unsafe" type pushback when I just want to know what's less worse.

Like just yesterday I was trying to plan out a YF-whatever to R134a conversion and used that trick. Worked great.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

cucumber3732842 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:50:54 +0000

The US healthcare industry is ~10% of the workforce. More if you include people affected by the supply distortions thereof (all those techbros working for agentic penis pump startups).

The fact that that pie is not sliced evenly does not change the fact that is an integer multiple larger than it ought to be.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

cucumber3732842 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 10:52:09 +0000

>But no one wants to fix it. US doctors are overpaid. US nurses are over paid. Dug companies. Admin. Lawyers. Everyone who makes the system work, and everyone who makes the system a mess are paid a fortune for it.

17% of GDP is healthcare. So between 1:10 and 2:10 people in this country are making more than they otherwise would (note I did not say wealthier) because the system is screwed up and hoovers up more of everyone else's wealth than it ought to.

Slavery was 12% and (while obviously geographic concentration of industry plays a lot into it) it took a war for them to take a haircut.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "GLM 5.2 is nearly as accurate as a human book keeper"

cucumber3732842 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 20:26:21 +0000

The tax code is so complex that business taxes are already nondeterministic.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

cucumber3732842 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:07:51 +0000

The military is still fairly results focused compared to the political class so that at least sort of pushes back on the most flagrant careerism.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

cucumber3732842 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:06:12 +0000

Tooth to tail is crappy PC/corporate-approved rename. The concept used to have a bunch of arrow and spear related names and a bunch of informal phallic counterparts all of which are better suited to the fundamental workflow of mechanized offensive operations.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "Deadly bacteria found in city's wastewater system tied to Meta data center"

cucumber3732842 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:47:10 +0000

This. Somebody's non-potable water truck was particularly nasty that day, they flushed the pipes with it, sent the flush water down the sewer and eventually the sewer people noticed some odd bacteria.

Since a cooling system is supposed to start off pretty darn clean and has a pretty clean construction process this is ironically exactly the kind of water you'd want to just run off but can't because the law.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "EU now one step away from reviving private message scanning rules"

cucumber3732842 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 10:19:06 +0000

>Aren’t stupidity, shortsightedness, and corruption universal human “values”, well-spread all across the political spectrum?

We ostracize and marginalize people for doing all sorts of bad shit that is endemic to humanity because minimizing and eliminating those people's ability to affect society improves society.

The fact that people feel entitled to peddle flimsy "for the children" justifications for obvious enabling of authoritarian government (or any other social ill) is the problem. Those people should be as well received as someone who says we need to re-subjugate blacks because 13/50 or whatever. Nobody makes the excuse "cut them some slack tribalism/racism is a universal human value"

If we treated peddlers of the former the way we treat the latter we'd have a lot less of this problem.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "EU now one step away from reviving private message scanning rules"

cucumber3732842 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 10:09:36 +0000

>Kind of surprised they don't just pitch it as a way to root out Russian propaganda and right-wing extremism. Public opinion would shift overnight. They'd practically demand it!

Because the masses are already pretty damn sick of exactly the demographics and groups that that marketing would garner support from.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "FAANG Simulator"

cucumber3732842 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:37:32 +0000

Not if you're selling your house in "muh good school district" to the next sucker and retiring to Idaho.

New comment by cucumber3732842 in "FAANG Simulator"

cucumber3732842 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:33:51 +0000

Laid off at 49 as a L8 Principal with 402% freedom bux in the bank at $9.8m net worth and $0.9M/yr with nothing but grinding and touching grass.

Sounds about right for someone who was born in the late 70s and got in in the 90s.