Hacker News: frereubu

New comment by frereubu in "I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities"

frereubu — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:46:34 +0000

Thanks, I hate it. I imagine Calvino turning in his grave at such an abdication of human imagination.

New comment by frereubu in "'Jonathan' is the oldest land animal on Earth"

frereubu — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:36:27 +0000

And?

New comment by frereubu in "'Jonathan' is the oldest land animal on Earth"

frereubu — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:35:53 +0000

That's an uncharitable reading of what I mean, but I suppose I could have been clearer. Perhaps "no point staying alive if you're so unhealthy that you're perpetually miserable" would be closer to what I meant, particularly having seen a number of elderly relatives living through their last years in unrelenting misery, impatient for death. One in particular sticks with me, an uncle who had been a doctor and knew exactly what was coming because he'd seen plenty of it in his career, but without the means to end it in a dignified way. These people absolutely didn't want to be kept alive longer - which is the point of the distinction between lifespan and healthspan in the podcast.

New comment by frereubu in "'Jonathan' is the oldest land animal on Earth"

frereubu — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 06:48:45 +0000

No point staying alive if you're not healthy. This is a great podcast about the difference between lifespan and healthspan: "To start our new series about what it means to live in a world of ageing populations, David talks to geneticist Adam Rutherford about the benefits and pitfalls of increasing longevity. Are GLP-1s – drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro – miracle cures that will extend human lifespans? What happens if longer lives do not coincide with better health? How far can life extension be pushed? And who wants to live forever anyway?" https://www.ppfideas.com/episodes/an-ageing-world-lifespan-v...

New comment by frereubu in "Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates"

frereubu — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:12:27 +0000

Interesting, although could those not be different things? The linked page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_(unit) - shows that it absolutely was a foundational measure in England. I guess it's probably down to the etymology, which would tell you when and where the phrase came from, then you could tell whether it from the English or ancient meaning, although it's not especially relevant to the meaning. The linked article does call it an "English idiom", so you'd need to show a similar ancient idiom for that to be the source.

New comment by frereubu in "Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates"

frereubu — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:41:01 +0000

I don't think this is right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_grain_of_salt The "grain" isn't a single grain, it's an old English measure which is around 65mg, i.e. roughly how much there is in a pinch. I've also only ever heard people use larger amounts to mean more scepticism.

New comment by frereubu in "Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates"

frereubu — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:18:20 +0000

This is semiconductors, not superconductors.

New comment by frereubu in "Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers authored with Claude"

frereubu — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 13:02:38 +0000

Reminds me of this - https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/27/258/ - which I think was on HN at some point in the last week. The fact that (according to another comment here) these papers were in areas outside his specialism, and therefore things he doesn't have the domain knowledge to critique, makes me think we're going to see more of this special kind of madness that seems to have some kind of grandiosity at its heart. It really does feel like some people are falling hard for plausibility rather than rigour.

Edit: the papers do seem to have other names on them, and he says that all papers "were reviewed by humans for accuracy", but I still think there's a very serious risk of people being gulled into okaying something that's plausible rather than rigorously checking everything. There's enough human-generated slop in science already!

New comment by frereubu in "CSS Bed: Classless CSS themes to use as starting points in web development"

frereubu — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:28:27 +0000

Just checked - now the homepage of the BBC on load has a transfer of 1.5MB with 5.7MB of resources, and once you've scrolled down the page for the lazy loaded images those figures are 2.9MB and 7.2MB respectively.

New comment by frereubu in "CSS Bed: Classless CSS themes to use as starting points in web development"

frereubu — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 06:24:46 +0000

When I worked at the BBC in the late 90s / early 2000s the home page of any site - including images - couldn't be more than 70kb!

New comment by frereubu in "America.gov"

frereubu — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:01:45 +0000

That "if" is doing such an incredible amount of work I think we could use it to power the entire US grid.

New comment by frereubu in "macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess"

frereubu — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:58:40 +0000

Ugh, how annoying. Thanks.

New comment by frereubu in "macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess"

frereubu — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:53:47 +0000

Spaces really needs some attention. It makes me much more productive overall, but it really feels like it's been forgotten. Beyond just making it less buggy, some simple things would make a huge difference, like being able to rename spaces, and not only showing the name of the space when you hover over it.

Edit: Thanks for the tip about killing the dock to get the keyboard shortcuts working. That was driving me mad. Do you have to do that every restart, or will those just work now?

New comment by frereubu in "Systems that no one will test"

frereubu — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:31:48 +0000

> Yes, software is more complex than bicycle.

In ethical terms I agree that software quality should be better, but I think this line is too dismissive. Software is a few orders of magnitude more complicated than a bicycle, to the point where I would say it's an entirely fruitless comparison.

New comment by frereubu in "F-Droid 2.0"

frereubu — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 09:44:26 +0000

I think anyone who differentiates between design and functionality has a profound misconception of what design should mean, and are the kind of people who produce terrible interfaces because they just see design as prettifying the functionality. That's why you get buttons that don't look clickable, lines where they're not needed, no lines where they are etc. Good design is a holistic practice, and in the case of apps the interface should be an integral part of the functionality. There's lots of literature out there about things like affordances, but many people don't know about it or don't care enough to use it in practice.

New comment by frereubu in "F-Droid 2.0"

frereubu — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:25:58 +0000

Good design is part of the functionality.

New comment by frereubu in "OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals"

frereubu — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 07:58:31 +0000

I know it sounds a bit like "don't make mistakes", but surely this could be part of the core instructions? Recognising categories of sensitive data like medical data and having some kind of check-in with whoever has asked it to do something?

New comment by frereubu in "OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals"

frereubu — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 06:30:31 +0000

Why aren't these agents set up to do what a security researcher should do - responsible disclosure, ideally to a specific person in its company to handle, or I suppose potentially directly to the organisation itself e.g. if they have a security.txt file on their website? I really hope legal precedent is quickly established that holds companies responsible for the actions of their agents.

New comment by frereubu in "Samsung accidentally freezes its smart fridges with a software update"

frereubu — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:15:58 +0000

> I got a basic Beko because they are usually good with replacement parts

Can confirm this. My mum has broken two drawer fronts in her Beko freezer and I was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to get replacements.

New comment by frereubu in "I said no and Apple said yes"

frereubu — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 09:37:38 +0000

Haha! Great minds think alike. (Although they do also say that fools seldom differ...)