Hacker News: fifticon

New comment by fifticon in "Stop Ruining It"

fifticon — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 14:11:09 +0000

This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\...", while the rest of the row is EMPTY SPACE (which I, admittedly can still use to drag the window around; thank you for that, but it will probably be filled with ADS come next month.)

"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"

NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too.. It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...] Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ... Is it because we are out of space? I don't know, every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ] (because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.) Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by a spyglass. So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for. Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need, apart from maybe the single spyglass icon? Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have, has been chopped up to unrecognisability.

It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".

New comment by fifticon in "Debunking the CIA's “magic” heartbeat sensor [video]"

fifticon — Mon, 04 May 2026 10:08:21 +0000

or bombings

New comment by fifticon in "I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it"

fifticon — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:24:18 +0000

hmm, I have no iphone.

New comment by fifticon in "US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid"

fifticon — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:52:27 +0000

Apparently he did not belong to the social class who are allowed to do this.

New comment by fifticon in "How to be anti-social – a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences"

fifticon — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:48:32 +0000

I don't really think you like it, but maybe you will like this.

New comment by fifticon in "How to be anti-social – a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences"

fifticon — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 13:46:34 +0000

May the bridges I burn light the hills I die on.

New comment by fifticon in "Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland"

fifticon — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:09:51 +0000

They will not go back to anything resembling the old normal :-/. Trump & his cronies have obliterated the Overton Window so hard you cannot even tell which side of the house the window used to be in. The successors for Trump will be worse, because they will not be senile old men who sabotage themselves, and the checks-and-balances against this millenia-old crap have now been pretty well dismantled :-/. We are entering an age where US will behave like a weird sort of Russia#2, run by oligarchs. In a way it was of course always run (or influenced) by oligarchs, but nothing like the scale we are going to see from now on. But.. look at the history of US, the last hundred or so years, and how they behaved south of Mexico (I am not particularly calling out US here, of course Europe has also been bad).

New comment by fifticon in "What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable"

fifticon — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 18:19:46 +0000

the comment section for this post is a shit show, most of the main comments have been downvoted to gray-land.

New comment by fifticon in "Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)"

fifticon — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:11:00 +0000

did they mention that you can cheat this when e.g. singing, by changing pitch dynamically to fit the chords you are working with? In theory, a synthesizer or sound card could do the same. Of course, this could have other undesirable side effects.

Maybe this was implied by the "just tuning"?

New comment by fifticon in "My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs"

fifticon — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 08:39:29 +0000

I am glad this essay was on the right side of the fence, otherwise I would have written it myself in response.. Our company is currently one of countless, where we just had a "get with the program" meeting with our PMs, where they showcased stuff they had added to our enterprise system in hours and days, and told us that they expected us to start delivering with the same tools techniques and speed.. Meanwhile, my team had spent that same working day before that meeting, trying to figure out why our production databases were suddenly getting hammered; it turned out some system was suddenly calling an expensive query endpoint 10k (10.000) times each hour, during business hours. Guess 3 times whose vibe-coding adventures were responsible for those 10k calls :-/.

Other than that, I noticed during the meeting, that their vibe-coded demo added module to our enterprise system only dealt with happy-path of the data updates, but would leave debris in our database for all the edge cases. Happy times. But heck yeah, let's just ram it straight into production. I wonder who will take care of adding support/clean up for the edge cases.

New comment by fifticon in "The beauty and terror of modding Windows"

fifticon — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 12:11:40 +0000

file sizes in explorer is my pet peeve, it should be a builtin. When I am coding and making small projects, I want to see the bytes. I hate that everything is shown as "1 or 2 k". and it is a hazzle to get access to and install of the mods that show bytes column. It should just be an extra column available by default 'Byte Size'.

New comment by fifticon in "FreeCAD"

fifticon — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 07:51:43 +0000

fusion 360 is exactly "free" for that reason, to make people reason like you do. They do not want a blender moment.

New comment by fifticon in "Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout"

fifticon — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 08:28:28 +0000

Usually, I can easily tell bad AI slop, because it is just that - sloppy - the bullet points, the 'delving' and all that. But how can you tell this article was also AI-tainted? On a second skim, I can sort of sense some of it - the bulletpoint-enthusiasm, the idiosyncratic segues (?) that link sections/paragraphs of the text. But it didn't trigger for me immediately, or cause me concern..?

I'm worrying that soon, I will have to hunt for non-AI essays by them just being worse written/more 'crude' and not as eloquently written as an AI would do :-/ Basically, seeking out "authentic human slop".

New comment by fifticon in "Arm wants a bigger slice of the chip business"

fifticon — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 10:43:04 +0000

traditionally, the chip goes on the shoulder, not the arm.

New comment by fifticon in "Text classification with Python 3.14's ZSTD module"

fifticon — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:43:24 +0000

It really should have been called Pi-thon, though.

New comment by fifticon in "Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)"

fifticon — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:41:08 +0000

Though I did not follow the idea of chunkier fruit in those travel milkshakes, isn't that what clogs the straw, which is not ideal for a 1-hand treat.

New comment by fifticon in "Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)"

fifticon — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 09:40:15 +0000

It is a bit sad that people have to be taught this; I am presuming the product people are a kind of humans too. But when I see their outputs, maybe this Christensen guy is right.

I tried to adjust the background image on microsoft Teams video calls this morning; the UI I had to use or rather figure out, to achieve that, was a major depression. (1) the settings menus in teams are well hidden, for reasons unclear to me(). (2) but the _actual_ settings you need are hidden unless you START a meeting call. (3) but, the _actual_ settings are a long chain of ".. but are you sure you REALLY want to see the ACTUAL settings?", where you must continue to click 'more settings', 'advanced settings', 'full actual settings' (I am paraphrasing.)

() I suspect what they are though.. Something about dumbing the UI down to the level where the people in charge of teams can understand them, plus some kind of fear of UI designs where any given screen or view contains more than 1 or 2 elements (the second element being "show further settings").

We are dumbing down UI to the level of people with no hands, no eyes, no brains, which I presume is the target audience. I must have mah minimalism.

New comment by fifticon in "Porsche sold more electrified cars in Europe in 2025 than pure gas-powered cars"

fifticon — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:03:30 +0000

Well, currently US _are_ ICE enthusiasts, lamentable as that may be.

New comment by fifticon in "Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?"

fifticon — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:40:28 +0000

currently learning 3d "solid" design with blender for 3dprinter. I am aware blender is not the fit a cad app would be (), but it 'works' if you are careful what you do (I am not). This morning I had to clean the poor 3dprinter of a spaghetti-gone-wrong accident, because my hubris-3d-design submitted last night was not as clever as I naively thought. () the advantage of using blender is that, as a byproduct I will eventually have learned blender..

New comment by fifticon in "Why have death rates from accidental falls tripled?"

fifticon — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 14:04:47 +0000

It is weird that the graphed increase grows steadily at presumably the same rate - there is no spike or bump or curve. I wonder if that indicates anything. Disregarding the shape of the graph, I would have guessed at a change in reporting instead. The steadily rising curve almost looks like something being gradually employed. At some point, the curve ought to change direction, if not before, then after the last person has fallen over.