Hacker News: floren

New comment by floren in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

floren — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:19:23 +0000

I was struck by something similar when I visited the county fair in rural Grant County, Washington in 2023. We were walking around, checking out the 4-H/FFA barns and the exhibit halls, and there were teenagers everywhere, and almost none of them had their phones out. They were in little groups, talking and seeing the sights. Nobody was, I dunno, harassing goats for TikTok videos. Even the kids on "barn duty" (maintaining a presence in the barn with your animals in case somebody has questions or there's a problem) were reading books and playing cards, not scrolling.

I don't know if it was the local culture (I grew up around there, I don't think there's anything so special about the local culture) or just that the kids aren't as fucked up as we think, but it was nice!

New comment by floren in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

floren — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:13:25 +0000

Are we talking about 8 year olds, or 15 year olds?

I think it's fine to give your 8th grader a flip phone. A third grader isn't "grabbing dinner after band practice".

For sports practice, I'd just take the sports bus home; the 30-60 minutes between the end of practice and the time the bus left was perfect for a little quiet reading or homework.

For band practice, I'd call my parents from the office phone, or plan to get a ride home from an older student who lived nearby, or just accept that I might miss out on something when mom picked me up at 6:30 and that's ok.

New comment by floren in "Retro-Tech Parenting"

floren — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:20:06 +0000

"I'll be done with marching band practice at 6:30"

"Ok, I'll come get you then"

New comment by floren in "Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min"

floren — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:28:29 +0000

There's something you'll start to notice in Stephenson's books, where a passage will be almost entirely standalone and you think, he wrote this some other time and just barely massaged it to fit into this text. See also "Part 3" of *Fall; or, Dodge in Hell* which is pretty much entirely disconnected from the rest of the story but god damn it Trump just got elected (for the first time) and I've gotta write this.

New comment by floren in "Someone used my open source project to phish people"

floren — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:06:28 +0000

That was the sentence that made me close the tab.

New comment by floren in "I am retiring from tech to live offline"

floren — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:10:55 +0000

Yes, that's a concern for me too, I'd like to retire early but healthcare has me wondering about getting a job as a teacher or something just to make sure I can afford it if I get cancer at 55.

New comment by floren in "I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline"

floren — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:17:34 +0000

I'm trying to figure out where the best place to do this sort of thing is, looking a few years ahead. Currently feels like the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York hits a good combination of available farmland, affordable prices, acceptable weather (I went to school near there), and so on. I love the West Coast but it's all too damn expensive.

New comment by floren in "Various LLM Smells"

floren — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:21:15 +0000

"Better and faster than ESR" is not a particularly high bar to clear.

New comment by floren in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

floren — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:12:45 +0000

I don't see that much advantage in pushing them out of the crab bucket and into the rat race. As a smart kid in a small rural high school, I had so much free time to read and pursue my other interests, because school wasn't demanding.

New comment by floren in "Trump Mobile exposed customers' personal data"

floren — Fri, 22 May 2026 20:20:25 +0000

Wow, what's it like being the president's grandkid?

New comment by floren in "Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI"

floren — Thu, 21 May 2026 06:18:54 +0000

It's great but they don't handle AMT so I had to use TurboTax this year.

New comment by floren in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

floren — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:09:25 +0000

> My mother has started watching 100% AI generated stories on YouTube.

God, I'm sorry

New comment by floren in "Accelerando (2005)"

floren — Sat, 16 May 2026 18:14:56 +0000

What makes them "modern"?

New comment by floren in "MIT: 20% drop in incoming graduate students"

floren — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:00:47 +0000

Agreed, it's my 2026 book of the year despite being written in the 30s

New comment by floren in "Residents furious as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan"

floren — Thu, 14 May 2026 03:09:20 +0000

> Certainly the current population level isn't needed to support the current number of billionaires. Isn't there about 1000 right now? I probably eat more than 2 or 3 of them.

That's a good attitude, if we all set out to eat more than 2 or 3 billionaires they'll be in our stomachs and out of our hair before you know it!

Brilliant Labs brooks no dissent as the Halo SNAFU continues

floren — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:07:30 +0000

Article URL: https://jfloren.net/b/2026/5/12/0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111105

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by floren in "Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes"

floren — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:40:53 +0000

There is the very similar Ultrix version:

http://www.typewritten.org/Media/Images/decwindows-ultrix4.5...

New comment by floren in "Holding Community Space"

floren — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:57:39 +0000

> No one should be able to use a hot glue gun or X-Acto in your facility without first paying you and consistently physically showing up to hear you tell them how, when, why, and for how long they're allowed to use it.

This is why I end up just buying my own tools. By the time I factor in a couple months of membership just so I can get trained up to use the machines, plus the gas & time sinks of driving to the place, I've blown the time and the money to get my own gear instead. A 3d printer, a variable power supply, a soldering iron, and all the X-Acto blades I can break cost me less than 4 months at Hacker Dojo, and they're here in my garage, and if they get ruined and set me back on my project it's my own fault.

New comment by floren in "[dead]"

floren — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:01:12 +0000

The article stank of slop from the first paragraph. You are not distributing high-quality information here.

New comment by floren in "Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months"

floren — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:29:09 +0000

Still waiting for the output of that agent