Hacker News: elektronika

New comment by elektronika in "Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software"

elektronika — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:42:50 +0000

> Every game engine has a sort of "grain" to it where it tends to produce games with a certain look and feel

There's a degree of toupee fallacy to this. It's hard to tell what engine something is on just from gameplay if the team invested in custom rendering and gamefeel.

New comment by elektronika in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

elektronika — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 05:58:35 +0000

Do you really think we'll have optimization in an era of metrics encouraging developers to approach shipping a million lines of code a month?

New comment by elektronika in "Countries are competing to see which can carry out mass surveillance the best"

elektronika — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:36:01 +0000

Right, it's dystopian if they do it, but utopian if we do. If anything I'd trust Chinese surveillance more. It's accountable to the government not the whims of profit motive and private individuals.

New comment by elektronika in "The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs"

elektronika — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 20:48:04 +0000

We all know how much local PDs like collecting traffic fines, but I wish they would enforce the laws around yielding to pedestrians with the same enthusiasm as speed limits. I walk a lot and pretty much every day someone blows by in front of me while I'm in the crosswalk or takes a right on red into me because they're not looking. It'd be trivial to set up a sting for this sort of driving, just have one plain clothes officer cross back and forth with another cop parked on a side street ready to flash their lights.

New comment by elektronika in "A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown"

elektronika — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:33:52 +0000

> The level of international coordination with vaccine rollouts and agreements between countries was way more than I had initially expected

Did we forget the DoD running anti-vax propaganda campaigns because the USA's vaccines weren't ready as quickly as Sinovac's: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...

New comment by elektronika in "Where is the AI jobs crisis?"

elektronika — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:50:09 +0000

CPI functions to obscure disproportionate price increases in essentials by lumping them in with cheapening commodities (e.g. electronics) that have a high demand elasticity. It's as much a choice to to use CPI to come to the conclusion things are fine, as it would be picking "arbitrary items" such as the essentials: food, shelter, medical care, and transportation that would paint a picture distinctly less fine.

New comment by elektronika in "Hallucinate – Massively Multiplayer Online Rave"

elektronika — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:26:43 +0000

I hear this all the time as a rationalization for why people don't go out anymore, but I don't buy it. You're afraid people on the internet might see you having fun? I've had people shove a phone in my face and take video while I was out dancing. It's rude, but it's not a big deal. The reason people don't go out is because Live Nation/Ticketmaster made live music outrageously expensive and strangled small venues.

New comment by elektronika in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

elektronika — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:14:18 +0000

It's very blatant and below that range. They got many orders for the exact same model that's around $50k.

New comment by elektronika in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

elektronika — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:31:59 +0000

Watches are the commodity of choice for corruption in some circles. I know people in jewelry and a significant portion of their transactions are watches to Chinese businessmen, formerly through Hong Kong, now through Singapore. They're high value items with razor thin margins.

New comment by elektronika in "Childhood Computing"

elektronika — Sun, 24 May 2026 23:14:29 +0000

Americans like to downplay the impact of the situation of their birth in their successes and others' failures.

New comment by elektronika in "The sigmoids won't save you"

elektronika — Sun, 17 May 2026 00:42:23 +0000

> AI and automation makes things so cheap that today's underclass lives better than kings ever did

I suggest you go share this opinion with the people living on the street because they can't afford housing.

New comment by elektronika in "Let's Buy Spirit Air"

elektronika — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:51:09 +0000

> The question is whether we feel air travel is as essential to everyday life as busses and trains are.

Anywhere I can get to by train in the USA I can go faster and cheaper by plane. By bus I can go "cheaper" if I ignore the value of my time and the people offering me meth at the bus-stop.

New comment by elektronika in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

elektronika — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:20:00 +0000

> Specifically, for the least happy group, happiness rises with income until $100,000, then shows no further increase as income grows. For those in the middle range of emotional well-being, happiness increases linearly with income, and for the happiest group the association actually accelerates above $100,000.

Exactly. There are other things you can do to be happy and some personalities are simply miserable, but there's nobody who's better off with less money. I'd be curious to see if this holds in societies with better social safety nets for whom money isn't as directly tied to survival or options in how to live.

New comment by elektronika in "Why I Write (1946)"

elektronika — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:29:49 +0000

The state of the UK suggests to me that Orwell's writing was as much an expression of British post-colonial anxieties as it was an indictment of the USSR. His books are no doubt pushed in US education system for their nonpartisan anti-communism.

1984 was surprisingly prescient about automatically generated propaganda. The slop deluge we're going through certainly echoes the "Novel-Writing Machines".

New comment by elektronika in "Police used AI facial recognition to wrongly arrest TN woman for crimes in ND"

elektronika — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 01:04:19 +0000

Under qualified immunity cops are all but completely immune to being sued.

New comment by elektronika in "U.S. Global War on Terror Has Taken Nearly 1M Lives (2021)"

elektronika — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:18:46 +0000

More accurate to call it the War for Terror at this point.

New comment by elektronika in ""Just a little detail that wouldn't sell anything""

elektronika — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:24:40 +0000

Sadly, or not, they still sell the best laptops.

New comment by elektronika in "Can you reverse engineer our neural network?"

elektronika — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:55:24 +0000

A market economy is just as good if not better at denying "the agency to live their lives as they choose". Do you think the bum on the street or the poor family working paycheck to paycheck have more agency than someone with a decent job at a state owned enterprise and a social safety net? It's absurd.

New comment by elektronika in "Americans are destroying Flock surveillance cameras"

elektronika — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:24:18 +0000

They will fall in line as property crime increases.

New comment by elektronika in "The only moat left is money?"

elektronika — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:35:00 +0000

Is it any surprise when wealth inequality has been increasing in the USA for the past 50 years? Globally the picture is even more bleak.