Hacker News: foobiekr

New comment by foobiekr in "It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs"

foobiekr — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:43:16 +0000

They are very closely related and share a number of fungal pathogens. In addition as grown they are almost a small set of monocultures.

New comment by foobiekr in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

foobiekr — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:24:24 +0000

People are not growing their own anything at all scale necessary to be responsible for the decline.

New comment by foobiekr in "1 in 8 cancer cases worldwide are caused by infections, study finds"

foobiekr — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:08:17 +0000

About ten years ago I was at a party and an Australian coworker and I were talking. I casually mentioned the HPV vaccine since his daughter was entering her teens. He declared, “I’m not going to turn my daughter into a whore.”

You may be right that the demographics are shifting but not necessarily in a good way.

New comment by foobiekr in "It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs"

foobiekr — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 05:51:47 +0000

You don’t need to attack humans directly. Simply making and distributing a virus or fungus that successfully damages the grasses that we use for the bulk of our calories would do the job.

New comment by foobiekr in "How much oil-market buffer is left?"

foobiekr — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:55:27 +0000

PHEV are more convenient and generally better. A Toyota Rav4 PHEV, Prius or may others, are shockingly fuel efficient relagtive to older car stock. I had not replaced a car for 16 years and found getting actual 52-54mpg out of a much larger and heavier vehicle genuinely shocking.

Most people have a relatively short commute where the modest range of PHEV still allows them to mostly be on electric.

New comment by foobiekr in "How much oil-market buffer is left?"

foobiekr — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:52:33 +0000

It will take _many_ years for alternatives to come online in the US and most other places. So much of the west is unable to execute on any kind of large project. In addition, in the US, the current administration has an irrational opposition to the main cost-effective alternatives.

New comment by foobiekr in "Jabber/XMPP: How Do We Gain Traction?"

foobiekr — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 16:07:31 +0000

There is literally nothing about enterprise inspecting proxies that requires the client operate without default and always on crypto. That makes no sense at all.

The way businesses handle this is by installing a certificate they manage and deploy to their proxies.

New comment by foobiekr in "Jabber/XMPP: How Do We Gain Traction?"

foobiekr — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:59:07 +0000

Most of the critique in the post is about the low quality of Signal's app, which has zero to do with the protocol. And frankly almost every XMPP client was vastly worse in quality terms than Signal is and OTR regularly just produced garbage. It had a chance. Signal is not widespread because the only reason to use it is high privacy consciousness or being in the government and wanting secure chat with automatic deletion for conversations you're not supposed to be having.

It's a little like asking "Carburetors: How do we gain traction?"

XMPP is not a well designed protocol in many ways. There's no particular reason for anyone to care.

New comment by foobiekr in "Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)"

foobiekr — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:57:04 +0000

Blind culture is really just asian cultural values in aggregate form.

New comment by foobiekr in "Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions"

foobiekr — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:35:13 +0000

Why? There's no benefit to the first person view part of it at all.

New comment by foobiekr in "Two German airport workers die of malaria after 'mosquito arrives on plane'"

foobiekr — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:43:10 +0000

Malarone gave me insane almost-kindof-sortof waking dreams of concerning character. I have never had anything like that before or since.

New comment by foobiekr in "Andreessen Horowitz is investing billions into a bleak future"

foobiekr — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:46:11 +0000

In universe the society of earth and the federation only happened because there was a devestating global thermonuclear war that left the survivors being highly selected for collectivist impulses and then on top of that the eugenics wars where there was another filter (even the common people).

New comment by foobiekr in "Andreessen Horowitz is investing billions into a bleak future"

foobiekr — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:40:24 +0000

You’re thinking the servants exist primarily to execute tasks. Servants exist primarily to abuse.

New comment by foobiekr in "Andreessen Horowitz is investing billions into a bleak future"

foobiekr — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:37:42 +0000

For this system. Their fantasy is effectively automated luxury palaces and the poor exist primarily for exploitation (mostly sexual and gladiatorial).

New comment by foobiekr in "Fable and the end of the free lunch"

foobiekr — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:43:36 +0000

It’s because they are training them as much for engagement as actual problem solving at this point.

New comment by foobiekr in "The Ploopy A+ Trackball Is Here"

foobiekr — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:39:33 +0000

These have been made on and off since 1995 at the latest. They never work out even though you'd think they'd be super popular for 3d modelers at least. I first encountered one for SGI workstations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceOrb_360 as one example.

New comment by foobiekr in "The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert"

foobiekr — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:52:39 +0000

I wish this was true in the Bay Area. 5-MeO-DMT does not seem to be available and it’s supposedly a unique experience.

New comment by foobiekr in "Designing an Ethernet Switch ASIC"

foobiekr — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:58:48 +0000

ECC is _not_ too expensive to use in hardware data paths. The existence proof of this is almost every medium to high end NPU has end to end ECC.

New comment by foobiekr in "I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy"

foobiekr — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:57:46 +0000

I think you've not experienced one of the real downturns. There isn't always a golden parachute for most of the people involved.

New comment by foobiekr in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

foobiekr — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 07:06:52 +0000

Othr than bubble $, not really. The true "golden time" was the 1980s. Creation of Cisco, Sun and SGI, and so many other things (like the personal computer), all new, incredible energy, mostly positive.