Hacker News: darthoctopus

New comment by darthoctopus in "Qwen3.8 27B"

darthoctopus — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:23:14 +0000

this page gives a 404

New comment by darthoctopus in "Twenty Years of Pandoc"

darthoctopus — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:03:57 +0000

Yes, in my field (astronomy), Overleaf is also ubiquitous, especially for observational papers with long author lists. However, by the same token, this means that most of my collaborators are distant ones, and from experience many are happy (and occasionally prefer) to conduct business by way of emailed PDFs. My close collaborators have been happy to co-edit a Markdown file by way of GitHub pull requests or directly committing to a shared repository.

I have, for a while, been toying with the idea of maintaining a fork of (or plugin for?) Overleaf CE that runs pandoc-powered build scripts instead of using latexmk directly. Perhaps this might be something vibe-codeable.

New comment by darthoctopus in "Twenty Years of Pandoc"

darthoctopus — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 20:19:31 +0000

Thank you for pandoc. I made the (at the time perhaps not transparently wise) choice to go all in on it when I started my PhD, and that decision has paid nothing but dividends since. I owe my career as a scientist to it.

New comment by darthoctopus in "Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism"

darthoctopus — Sun, 31 May 2026 03:23:49 +0000

What is definitely being argued unironically is "it doesn't matter that humans are sentient", and I would still consider that misanthropy

New comment by darthoctopus in "The C++ Standard Library Has Been Walking Itself Back for Fifteen Years"

darthoctopus — Sun, 24 May 2026 08:02:59 +0000

this kind of overt inevitabilism is complicity in the death of good writing.

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…