Hacker News: foxglacier

New comment by foxglacier in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

foxglacier — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:52:38 +0000

I thought not needing words was because people often watch them on their phone in public without sound. Who are these people that can't enjoy listening to spoken words because of illiteracy or ignorance?

New comment by foxglacier in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

foxglacier — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:42:21 +0000

It sounds like you're an AI-happy employer though. What if their truthful answer was that they never tried to use LLMs and refuse to because they waste water or because of an overconfident view of their own skills, or they don't want to help a clanker steal their job? These are all popular beliefs that can easily come from following the right crowd rather than forming their own opinion. In fact, from what I usually hear of people's opinions, they almost never come up with them themselves, you can practically predict people's opinions on some topics just from what they look like (what social group they belong to) or what other unrelated opinions they've already told you.

New comment by foxglacier in "Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive"

foxglacier — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:42:01 +0000

Uses change and laws need to keep up. Lobby or not, jaywalking is a reasonable thing to be illegal because when cars became common enough, walkers in their way caused an overall loss for everyone. People also used to be allowed to walk on the train tracks freely when trains were slower and more obvious - did the train lobby invent the word "foamer"? Should we make rail corridors train-free? Computer hacking became illegal during my lifetime to shift liability for faulty software and incompetence from the operators to the users. Before that, it didn't really matter because nobody was using the internet for anything important. Friends used to hack each other for fun. Bitcoin used to be a wild west where people would openly steal from or fool each other for sport - I don't think people really saw it as money or property when you could just generate it with your computer.

New comment by foxglacier in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

foxglacier — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:41:00 +0000

I think he means the submit button is disabled because some field failed validation. It might have turned red or have a message appeared next to it - and it might be scrolled off the screen so you have no idea. Or just the common "I have read and agree to ..." checkbox you didn't tick. Possibly because you didn't read the T&C or because it won't let you tick it until you click the link to the T&C. Nobody else read them either but they've learned through trial and error that when the checkbox doesn't work, you have to click the link to fool the computer into thinking you read it.

New comment by foxglacier in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

foxglacier — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:07:12 +0000

Try another branch. I had that exact problem and just shopped around. I think some staff err on the side of caution when they don't know what to do.

New comment by foxglacier in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

foxglacier — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:05:46 +0000

Tech people forget how the real world has solved these problems long ago. I got access to my bank account in another country by writing them a letter on paper and having it signed by a policeman in my country then sending it in the mail. A pain and expensive but if it's important, you do it. All these old fashioned techniques are backed by the criminal justice system which can actually work when the fraudsters have to go to the police station to commit their crime.

New comment by foxglacier in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

foxglacier — Sat, 30 May 2026 05:40:44 +0000

Yea that sounds like different people. Even news sites can have contradictory opinions and narratives - they should otherwise they're just biased. But it doesn't make it the same people.

New comment by foxglacier in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

foxglacier — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:57:45 +0000

Yep but most news readers are innumerate and scientifically illiterate so they just get swept up by the narrative.

New comment by foxglacier in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

foxglacier — Thu, 28 May 2026 08:54:40 +0000

Looks like you're making the common mistake of counting all people you disagree with as the same person. In this case they're clearly different - AI proponents and AI skeptics respectively.

But your 2nd paragraph is spot on.

New comment by foxglacier in "Mocked by a scandal sheet, Kierkegaard endured months of personal attacks"

foxglacier — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:46:50 +0000

I fully agree about provocative content. Well except that some people enjoy feeling angry by believing something that isn't true. That's a kind of pleasure that's worth something, but it seems emotionally harmful in the long run. God in these olden-days moral judgements usually means emotional health of the individual or vaguely defined long-term success of their society.

My point is that it's not AI-vs-human that matters. AI makes provocative content easier to write but it also makes helpful technical documentation easier to write.

New comment by foxglacier in "Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back"

foxglacier — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:33:37 +0000

The general public are only able and willing to use the internet because of the capitalism! When it was an academic thing, most people didn't care at all, and even if they did, they'd have to have social connections to gain access. Even when consumer ISPs were widespread, internet use was still much smaller than today because it wasn't as engaging without capitalism's social media.

New comment by foxglacier in "News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism"

foxglacier — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:27:04 +0000

2. is literally you making money off someone else. That someone else might not also be making money off your work - you might be selling services to an individual for their personal consumption, or more commonly, you might be doing that through an intermediary (employer) that connects consumers with producers and launders the guilt of demanding more money.

1. Do farmers count as greedily making money off you for trying to get the highest prices for their produce from distributers and retailers who are trying to compete for customers with low prices? Yes but that's good! Every player in that supply chain is optimizing for themselves and it ends up working pretty well for everyone. Maybe you think farmers are too rich and should not demand so much money for their produce because greed is bad?

New comment by foxglacier in "Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar"

foxglacier — Mon, 25 May 2026 23:55:18 +0000

Not generally, no. Workers usually do have choice - they can work in a less desirable job, just as consumers can buy a less desirable product. At the extremes, both are serious - workers without income can starve and consumers for whom food is too expensive can starve.

New comment by foxglacier in "Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar"

foxglacier — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:24:04 +0000

So basically most older professionals, and today's young professionals will step into their shoes as they grow their wealth over time too. Which means probably far more than 10% of the population will at some point in their life belong to that group which owns 90% of the means of production.

New comment by foxglacier in "Samsung chip workers will get an average $340k bonus as AI profits soar"

foxglacier — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:15:52 +0000

I think you mean who will protect the interests of the consumer? That's ultimately who loses to unions. There's no direct ethical value in protecting businesses or their owners but workers and consumers include pretty much all humans and their interests are in tension with each other.

New comment by foxglacier in "Tristan Davey's Punch Card Archive"

foxglacier — Fri, 22 May 2026 03:53:22 +0000

Those edge-notched cards for mechanically searching are amazing! I guess you could enter a binary number with several needles to instantly pick out a single card from a deck of thousands.

I have a child's puzzle game that works the same way. You poke a pin through a hole in the deck holder to choose your answer, then try to pull the card out. It won't come out unless you poked the correct hole.

By the way, punched cards live on in virtual form as text file formats used by engineers everywhere for popular products like Abaqus and Nastran. There are actual engineers today operating software by typing text into fields lined up by the column number of the card in a similar way to how they would have punched the cards in the old days but usually with some automatic card generating pre-processor to help with the tedious parts. They even use the jargon of cards and decks when they're actually lines and files today.

New comment by foxglacier in "Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart"

foxglacier — Fri, 22 May 2026 02:09:06 +0000

It can't do that if it's not to scale! And who knows where the errors are? Neptune's orbit is way too big compared to Alpha Centauri. Are other stars also way too close compared to that? I can't stand these intentionally misleading education images of stuff. You have to work at undoing the artistic license of the author before it's useful.

New comment by foxglacier in "News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism"

foxglacier — Fri, 22 May 2026 01:30:22 +0000

You people need to stop saying this. You're being greedy when you buy groceries from a cheaper supermarket. You're being greedy when you negotiate your salary or choose a job based on pay, or anything where you're trying to get more stuff for yourself. Those things are all perfectly good behaviors, they make the world more productive, so everyone wins overall. Greed isn't a problem.

Spite? No evidence of that. They probably just don't want to lose the money from paying customers and ads. You're just making up fantasy. Perhaps projecting your own spite.

New comment by foxglacier in "Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back"

foxglacier — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:31:18 +0000

They did look petty and intolerant. The explosion of popularity of the internet in the late 1990's was done by capitalism. Only a few privileged people had access to the pre-capitalism academic internet. Additional capitalism also made it interesting to the little people so that it's the hugely popular thing it is today.

New comment by foxglacier in "Mocked by a scandal sheet, Kierkegaard endured months of personal attacks"

foxglacier — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:18:23 +0000

Thanks for clarifying. I think we just differ on what we value. I don't mind communicating with someone even when there's no hope of them gaining any understanding from our interaction. I'm happy to read a technical manual that may have been written by 100's of different individuals of many decades, many of whom aren't even alive anymore. That's the same one-way communication I get from a blog or news article. Who or what the author is is irrelevant to me.

Do you mean you'd rather read the prompt than the output? That's tantalizing but it's only possible because they used AI. I think regular journalists and bloggers effectively have a secret prompt in their head and generate an article to respond to it. Don't you feel the same way about that? It's not AI vs human, but seeing behind the scenes vs seeing the product of the work. Also, you probably don't want to see how the sausage is made. It might look like "here's a bunch of dense technical PDFs about resource use permits and lab reports. Write an article that makes Tesla look like they did something wrong". That might be the exact same secret prompt a human journalist uses, so why do you value the human's output more than the AI's? The human certainly isn't trying to gain any understanding - they're trying to rile up their readers.