Hacker News: darthoctopus

New comment by darthoctopus in "Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches"

darthoctopus — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:41:46 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone

New comment by darthoctopus in "Microsoft admits Windows 11's dedicated Copilot key breaks certain workflows"

darthoctopus — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:35:43 +0000

Can we finally stop having business people forcing product decisions on us? Microsoft's recent history suggests not… and I fear the facade of empowerment by LLM will only make things worse in the near future.

New comment by darthoctopus in "We Are (Still) Living in the Long Boring"

darthoctopus — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 01:06:16 +0000

> You have not heard any of the many, many excitable AI maximalists in the media address this reality, the bits vs atoms barrier, because they have no response that can preserve their intense attachment to the idea that the world is about to change forever. So they resolutely ignore this basic reality: most of the world is not computers. Most of your life is dependent on technologies other than computers. Inconveniently, we also have few arenas of human endeavor that are seeing rapid development other than in computing.

I suspect stark wisdom of this nature will, unfortunately, not find HN to be fertile ground. At the same time, I am glad these other arenas, few though they be, still exist.

New comment by darthoctopus in "If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos"

darthoctopus — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:57:56 +0000

subtlety is dead on the internet of the lowest common denominator, and that enabled by AI assistance is very low indeed

New comment by darthoctopus in "Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website"

darthoctopus — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:00:38 +0000

wanting to be good at something is not exactly the same as being interested in getting good at something, which carries the additional, nuanced, connotation of investment (or willingness to invest) towards this goal.

e.g. many people want to live an active healthy lifestyle, but fewer are actually interested in doing so.

New comment by darthoctopus in "Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website"

darthoctopus — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 11:02:47 +0000

> don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so

In most circles, that is "not that interested in getting good at it".

New comment by darthoctopus in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

darthoctopus — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 05:53:36 +0000

> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

I can no longer use GNOME on X11, and the decision to remove support was a deliberate one. Users are definitely being forced.

New comment by darthoctopus in "Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage"

darthoctopus — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:35:19 +0000

> Why is that not going to happen next time?

Because this shortage isn't natural, it's the result of OpenAI flexing monopsony power to deprive everyone else for its strategic gain. Unlike an organic shortage, there is no compelling reason for otherwise excess capacity to be built, since this artificial shortage can end as arbitrarily as it started.

New comment by darthoctopus in "Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage"

darthoctopus — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:30:23 +0000

Lest we forget, this memory shortage was deliberately engineered [1]. Thanks, OpenAI.

[1]: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

New comment by darthoctopus in "Georgian wine culture dates back, uninterrupted, approximately 8k years"

darthoctopus — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:11:42 +0000

what _is_ that reason, out of curiosity?

New comment by darthoctopus in "Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app"

darthoctopus — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 12:03:15 +0000

I think you may have fundamentally misunderstood what a technocracy is: it has nothing to do with tech companies whatsoever. From literally the article that you have linked:

> The technocracy movement proposed replacing partisan politicians and business people with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy.

New comment by darthoctopus in "Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups"

darthoctopus — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:29:15 +0000

I would absolutely love for this proposed blocker to happen, but I have zero faith in it actually happening given the user-centred nature of this feature and the user-hostile origin of Mozilla's funding situation…

New comment by darthoctopus in "Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal"

darthoctopus — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:56:46 +0000

every one of these things that make the deal "good" for OpenAI is a direct result of negative externalities for everyone else: competitors, consumers, and people who wouldn't care otherwise.

New comment by darthoctopus in "The fall of Labubus and the mush of modern internet trends"

darthoctopus — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 08:31:32 +0000

Indeed, I find it very hard to take the article seriously given that every one of the notionally decentralised trends it's described has propagated on a very small handful of highly centralised platforms. For that matter, it's very difficult for me to imagine how these trends might have spread in the first place without access to large-audience virality directed by algorithmic recommendations precisely enabled by such severe centralisation.

New comment by darthoctopus in "Replacement.ai"

darthoctopus — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 14:33:06 +0000

that is the point of Luddism! the original Luddite movement was not ipso facto opposed to progress, but rather to the societal harm caused by society-scale economic obsolescence. the entire history of technology is also powerful business interests smearing this movement as being intrinsically anti-progress, rather than directly addressing these concerns…

New comment by darthoctopus in "In Praise of Idleness (1932)"

darthoctopus — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 07:08:08 +0000

> Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. These are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might, therefore, be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.

Ahhh, how times have changed indeed!

New comment by darthoctopus in "We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that"

darthoctopus — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 18:28:03 +0000

perhaps read the actual first paragraph of the article? the whole point of it is that, whether we call it that or not, our privately run reputation scores (including but not limited to credit scores) functionally are social credit scores --- except we've been boiled frogs, and should take some time for self-reflection before engaging in knee-jerk reactions to China's other failings (which I'm not denying btw) whenever social credit is brought up.

New comment by darthoctopus in "We already live in social credit, we just don't call it that"

darthoctopus — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 18:04:35 +0000

Did you even read the article? Here is the situation in China:

> Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.

Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.

New comment by darthoctopus in "Apple announces American Manufacturing Program"

darthoctopus — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 06:54:02 +0000

that is the point --- precisely because the usual mechanisms of enforcement do not apply, there will be no accountability for Apple.

New comment by darthoctopus in "Show HN: Mathpad – Physical keypad for typing math symbols"

darthoctopus — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 20:00:48 +0000

As an intermediate alternative between a hardware keyboard and a graphical symbol picker, I use an .XCompose file with contents that look like this:

    # GREEK
          : "Α"   U0391    # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA
          : "α"   U03B1    # GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA
          : "Β"   U0392    # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER BETA
          : "β"   U03B2    # GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA
          : "Δ"   U0394    # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA
          : "δ"   U03B4    # GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA
          : "Ε"   U0395    # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON
          : "ε"   U03B5    # GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON

    ...

    # Math Symbols
          : "∈"   U2208 # IN
          : "∀"   U2200 # FOR ALL
          : "∃"   U2203 # THERE EXISTS
           : "∧"   U2227 # AND
          : "∨"   U2228 # OR
        : "⟨" U27E8     # MATHEMATICAL LEFT ANGLE BRACKET
      : "⟩" U27E9   # MATHEMATICAL RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET
          : "∂" U8706 # DEL
          : "∇" U8711 # NABLA

I've used this for perhaps the last 10 years now and I don't think I could go back to working on a machine without configurable compose key functionality at this point.