Hacker News: fnordsensei

New comment by fnordsensei in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

fnordsensei — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:29:47 +0000

To be fair, this seems consistent with what they normally do, and arguably consistent with what their voters want.

New comment by fnordsensei in "I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore"

fnordsensei — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:36:08 +0000

It's cultural.

I've read that German society, for example, is largely based on contracts between the family unit and the state. Sweden, as a contrast, is largely based on contracts between individuals and the state.

As an example, Germany treats a married couple as a fiscal unit, Sweden abolished joint taxation in the 70s. Swedish parental leave is allocated per individual, and is mostly non-transferable.

In a lot of ways, individualism is produced by state contract in Sweden.

New comment by fnordsensei in "Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers"

fnordsensei — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:42:49 +0000

They could build them somewhere where people don't care. But you can't co-opt 70 years of public infrastructure investments out in the middle of nowhere.

New comment by fnordsensei in "Why is it so hard for the U.S. to win wars?"

fnordsensei — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:12:54 +0000

And didn’t Genghis Khan more or less go to war with most of the known (and some of the unknown) world and for all intents and purposes win?

New comment by fnordsensei in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

fnordsensei — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:42:47 +0000

You'd probably want to be more precise regarding "important for what" as well. And the philosophical angle: if the person hadn't existed, would someone else have slotted in to take their place? Is the impact measured in years/decades, because the overall historical forces were heading in a direction anyway?

Is it like trying to say "the most important bacterium in a petri dish"?

Without diminishing the impact that Musk has had, I'm fairly certain that Musk isn't the answer. And either way, the intent of saying that Musk is the most important person in history I'm fairly certain wasn't a very grounded decision. I'm sure it was more an expression of reverence and fealty.

New comment by fnordsensei in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

fnordsensei — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:36:44 +0000

Whoever came up with the wheel, maybe? Perhaps someone carrying the original homo sapiens mutations?

New comment by fnordsensei in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

fnordsensei — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:31:00 +0000

I have a friend who unironically said "Elon Musk is the most important human who has ever lived"

New comment by fnordsensei in "Sam Neill has died"

fnordsensei — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:18:11 +0000

Same here. The miniseries itself has its quirks and oddities, but I find it charming. Particularly his role as Merlin.

New comment by fnordsensei in "Clojure 1.13 adds support for checked keys"

fnordsensei — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 16:25:58 +0000

Well, kind of. This is the kind of problem that you might throw schemas (eg. Malli) at pre 1.13.

It’ll be nice to have it at hand in the base language though.

New comment by fnordsensei in "The hacker sent by Anthropic to calm the government's nerves about AI safety"

fnordsensei — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:58:30 +0000

Yes, why not resolve it the same way all the others have done?

Say that Trump has weird elbows or something, Trump sues for defamation, they settle, bribe completed.

New comment by fnordsensei in "Britain’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi"

fnordsensei — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:43:23 +0000

The people we should be genuinely scared of today are the ones that are looking at Britain's past and are thinking to themselves that colonization sure looks like a good idea that will work super well in modern times. Which not many actual Brits think.

New comment by fnordsensei in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

fnordsensei — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:03:49 +0000

Didn’t write “money”, wrote “resources”, but sure.

Yes, there’s a risk to releasing a product whenever you can be held accountable for that product. I understand that Apple seeks to be as unaccountable as possible.

So we ultimately agree with one another: Apple can do it, but doesn’t want to, for various reasons.

New comment by fnordsensei in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

fnordsensei — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:51:24 +0000

The point isn’t that it’s easy or straightforward to do. The point is that one of the world’s wealthiest companies can spare the resources needed to comply with the regulations of one of the world’s largest markets.

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

fnordsensei — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:29:37 +0000

Right.

Meta’s biggest culture problem is definitely “not enough masculine energy”.

New comment by fnordsensei in "Gemini 3.5 Flash"

fnordsensei — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:09:59 +0000

3.5 flash is listed as stable rather than preview, or am I misreading?

https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/models/gemini-3.5-flas...

New comment by fnordsensei in "US businesses and consumers pay 90% of tariff costs, New York Fed says"

fnordsensei — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:44:10 +0000

Step 1: put tariffs on coffee and bananas. Step 2: pump out CO2 until climate is appropriate for growing coffee and bananas. … Step n: Load profits onto your scavenged freight boat and try to find Dryland.

New comment by fnordsensei in "De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)"

fnordsensei — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 17:53:55 +0000

Is it more efficient though? It just looks like burning long term prospects for short term ones. Which is on brand with the current regime to be fair.

New comment by fnordsensei in "The US polluters that are rewriting the EU's human rights and climate law"

fnordsensei — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 11:12:47 +0000

Planned economies don’t work great beyond small scopes.

The market does work, but it’s a giant paper clip AI and needs regulation in order to not turn everything into paper clips.

New comment by fnordsensei in "A Fast 64-Bit Date Algorithm (30–40% faster by counting dates backwards)"

fnordsensei — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 18:40:17 +0000

Wouldn’t it be accurate for that as well? Unless we change to base 10 time units or something. Then we all have a lot of work to do.

But if it’s just about starting over from 0 being the AI apocalypse or something, I’m sure it’ll be more manageable, and the fix could hopefully be done on a cave wall using a flint spear tip.

New comment by fnordsensei in "Measuring political bias in Claude"

fnordsensei — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 08:12:42 +0000

It’s a canned tuning mechanism to force the model to change track and align with the user.

It’s not so much a message to you as a message to the model from itself.