Hacker News: foobar_______

New comment by foobar_______ in "Show HN: I built a social media management tool in 3 weeks with Claude and Codex"

foobar_______ — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:47:23 +0000

Same. I was hoping for this. As much as social media frustrates me, the content can be great at times. I want an aggregation tool where I have strict control on the output. Give me the content minus the addictive never ending scroll with inflammatory posts. Basically, I want a benevolent curation of media on my terms.

New comment by foobar_______ in "The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'"

foobar_______ — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:21:09 +0000

why don't they have donate pages or venmo QR codes at the concert? I am serious. I don't want more stuff. I don't need tshirts. I don't need trinkets. I legitimately love music and want to support, but it is so difficult. Best I can find is digital sales of an album that doesn't cost them any manufacturing/shipping costs.

New comment by foobar_______ in "Where things stand with the Department of War"

foobar_______ — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 13:41:13 +0000

Agreed. You can quit. That is always an option. "Gotta pay the bills" is definitely valid for some small subset of the us population but that certainly doesn't apply to software engineers in a hub like the bay or seattle. These people delude themselves into thinking they "must" have their ridiculous Meta pay to pay for their $2.5M house and their current lifestyle. Golden handcuffs and turn the blind eye to what they are doing.

New comment by foobar_______ in "Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance"

foobar_______ — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:44:02 +0000

I like your take. I see this same thing playing out across many parts of the world.

Dont hate the player hate the game

It is about incentives and rules of the "game" that drive things. Sure, there are a few evil people but the vast majority of it is normal people responding to broken rules/incentives. Probably you and I both fall in this category :)

New comment by foobar_______ in "Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial"

foobar_______ — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:53:26 +0000

Fatten up that wallet with 500K a year and tech stock RSUs and people pretty quickly forget about their morals. Seriously, they tell themselves the same story: "ah this is just temporary. I can make big money for a couple years then get out." But 2 years turns to 5, then they buy a house in the Bay area and now they're stuck. Same thing for Seattle.

New comment by foobar_______ in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

foobar_______ — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:47:02 +0000

I dream of the day when people wake up to see TikTok and Instagram are as bad or worse than smoking.

New comment by foobar_______ in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

foobar_______ — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:42:49 +0000

Agreed. Great summary. Postmodernism and everyone tearing down all systems to their roots is fun... until you have no structure left.

New comment by foobar_______ in "TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe"

foobar_______ — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:46:14 +0000

Maybe? I really don't know. I don't want to believe it but the data and just looking around in public and seeing the scroll addition seems to indicate otherwise?

New comment by foobar_______ in "The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat"

foobar_______ — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:12:05 +0000

How did you get into this? How would you recommend transitioning from FTE to this life?

New comment by foobar_______ in "Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say"

foobar_______ — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:03:37 +0000

I don't know how everyone doesn't see this. I pray. I hope. One day people look at you in complete repulsion and dumbfounded that we gave anyone, let kids unfettered access to social media. Absurdity.

New comment by foobar_______ in "Guess I'm a rationalist now"

foobar_______ — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:03:47 +0000

I really appreciate this comment. Now in my 30s, I was not even aware of EA or Rationalist groups in my 20s but your description of a person high on the smell of their own farts and putting logic as king was me. The world is so chaotic that it felt good and right that I could lean on something "true" like logic. It took me to the "correct" answers according to logic but very misguided answers as I see them now. Humans are driven by emotions and the world is probabilistic so relying so heavily on logic just seems so misguided now that I'm older.

New comment by foobar_______ in "Meta AI: "The Future of AI Is Open Source and Decentralized""

foobar_______ — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 19:16:31 +0000

It has been clear from the beginning that Meta's supposed desire for an open source AI, is just a coping mechanism for the fact that got beat out of the gate. This is an attempt to commoditize AI and reduce OpenAI/Google/Whoever's advantage. It is effective, not doubt, but all this wankery about how noble they are for creating an open-source AI future is just bullshit.

New comment by foobar_______ in "OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show"

foobar_______ — Thu, 23 May 2024 12:15:02 +0000

Exactly. I barely know who this actress is. To me, it sounds like the tens of thousands of other white american voices. How is the remotely too similar?

New comment by foobar_______ in "GPT-4o"

foobar_______ — Mon, 13 May 2024 20:25:42 +0000

So much negativity. Is it perfect? No. Is there room for improvement? Definitely. I don't know how you can get so fucking jaded that a demo like this doesn't at least make you a little bit excited or happy or feel awestruck at what humans have been able to accomplish?

New comment by foobar_______ in "Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'"

foobar_______ — Fri, 10 May 2024 11:42:22 +0000

You help me feel sane. People, it is a commercial. Nothing more. Don't get your panties in a bundle. If you don't like it, change the channel, don't buy their product, go outside on a hike. The things people get upset about today is fascinating. GO OUTSIDE

New comment by foobar_______ in "Meta does everything OpenAI should be"

foobar_______ — Wed, 24 Apr 2024 13:13:25 +0000

This is clear as day. If they got an early lead to the LLM/AI space like OpenAI did with ChatGPT, then things would be very different. Attributing the open source to "good will" and Meta being righteous seems like some mis-founded 16 year old's overly simplistic ideal of the world. Meta is a business. Period.

New comment by foobar_______ in "Claude 3 beats GPT-4 on Aider's code editing benchmark"

foobar_______ — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 13:50:59 +0000

I agree with your analogy. Also, there is a quite a bit of "standing on the shoulders of giants" kind of thing going on. Every company's latest release will/should be a bit better than the models released before it. AI enthusiasts are getting a bit annoying - "we got a new leader boys!!!!*!" for each new model released.

New comment by foobar_______ in "The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I"

foobar_______ — Sat, 09 Mar 2024 15:35:12 +0000

Yeah if I had to stack rank 'obscene' energy consumption technologies, Bitcoin would be number 1 and AI would be pretty low on the list.

New comment by foobar_______ in "Sora: Creating video from text"

foobar_______ — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 22:16:49 +0000

Feels like another pivotal moment in AI. Feel like I’m watching history live. I think I need to go lay down.

New comment by foobar_______ in "Gemini AI"

foobar_______ — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 18:21:41 +0000

Agreed. The whole things reeks of being desperate. Half the video is jerking themselves off that they've done AI longer than anyone and they "release" (not actually available in most countries) a model that is only marginally better than the current GPT4 in cherry-picked metrics after nearly a year of lead-time?!?!

That's your response? Ouch.