Hacker News: funnybeam

New comment by funnybeam in "US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report"

funnybeam — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 07:13:55 +0000

Hallucinations are not errors, they are the intended output.

LLMs do not hallucinate sometimes, everything they produce is an hallucination, that’s how they work and what makes them useful

New comment by funnybeam in "How the Chorleywood Bread Process transformed British bread"

funnybeam — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:58:24 +0000

Probably not in your bath, but in houses with water tanks at least one of the cold taps will be fed directly from the mains supply. If you are drinking it then you want it straight from the mains rather than from the tank in your loft that’s been sat there for a while and had all sorts of things falling into it

New comment by funnybeam in "Apple is no longer thinking different"

funnybeam — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:12:57 +0000

Microsoft did an Android Duo that was basically two phones hinged together, like this but with two separate screens. Didn’t last long…

Quite an odd name choice by Apple

New comment by funnybeam in "The pencil case model of creativity"

funnybeam — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 06:36:34 +0000

How much time do the majority of people spend scrolling on their phones?

I tend to think that i don’t have time to do the things i want to do outside of work, but on the rare occasions when i managed to put my phone aside for a couple of weeks I find I have more time than i know what to do with.

Everyone’s situation is different obviously, but personally “I don’t have time” is completely untrue

New comment by funnybeam in "Online ad giant Adform was hacked, proving once again why ad blockers are needed"

funnybeam — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:55:42 +0000

And vice versa

New comment by funnybeam in "Bonnie Tyler has died"

funnybeam — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:44:21 +0000

I like to pretend that was filmed in the Hogwarts sixth form commmon room in the eighties

New comment by funnybeam in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

funnybeam — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:10:10 +0000

They don’t express gender, they signify adjective and noun. No genders in Esperanto

New comment by funnybeam in "The Miller Principle (2007)"

funnybeam — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:10:28 +0000

I used to refer to the helpdesk as the reading desk - “Hello, you’re through to the IT Helpdesk, what can i read for you today?”

New comment by funnybeam in "Do your own writing"

funnybeam — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:21:23 +0000

In this scenario the ai _writer _ is redundant.

You might as well publish the prompt you were going to give to the writer and have the ai reader consume that directly.

Assuming you think any of this is a good idea of course. Personally I wouldn’t trust ai to interpret release notes for anything that i cared about

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying

funnybeam — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:03:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47527415

Points: 20

# Comments: 2

New comment by funnybeam in "Deep Blue"

funnybeam — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 12:54:43 +0000

The longbow didn’t require “minimal training”, it took years of regular practice and physical conditioning.

Weekly longbow practice was even a legal requirement for most English men to ensure there were enough skilled archers.

The crossbow was the weapon that allowed an untrained peasant to kill an armoured knight and was widely illegal for that reason

New comment by funnybeam in "Windows Notepad App Remote Code Execution Vulnerability"

funnybeam — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:32:05 +0000

Except it keeps reverting to the new notepad every few days….

I’ve been fighting this for the last couple of weeks but it just doesn’t stick

New comment by funnybeam in "Government drops plans for mandatory digital ID to work in UK"

funnybeam — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:50:06 +0000

According to Wikipedia she was born in Britain and a British citizen, but i am not aware of all the ins and outs of her case

New comment by funnybeam in "Government drops plans for mandatory digital ID to work in UK"

funnybeam — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:44:48 +0000

Not heard of Shamima Begum?

British born, stripped of citizenship

I’m not commenting on the rightness or not of her case, just pointing out that being born British is not necessarily the guarantee you are describing

New comment by funnybeam in "Worst of breed software"

funnybeam — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 11:59:55 +0000

As an IT security loser it’s not your software I’m worried about, it’s your OpSec. I’ve seen enough innocuous software being owned and being used to deploy malware that it takes a lot of due diligence to trust providers of random binaries

New comment by funnybeam in "Ask HN: What would you do if you didn't work in tech?"

funnybeam — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 08:32:48 +0000

Don’t let the bastards win. Keep your principles

New comment by funnybeam in "Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri"

funnybeam — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 07:24:43 +0000

We have a process at work where clients export information from their database as a pdf which they email to us so that we can ocr it and insert into our database.

No one else seems to think this is bat shit insane

New comment by funnybeam in "Space: 1999 – Special Effects Techniques"

funnybeam — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 15:11:51 +0000

The Omega Factor is another good one you’d like judging by the rest of your list.

Was terrified by the theme music as a child and never allowed to watch it. Managed to find it a little while ago and loved it. Only one season unfortunately.

New comment by funnybeam in "Space: 1999 – Special Effects Techniques"

funnybeam — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 07:30:02 +0000

I’ve been rewatching it recently and thought the first season was awful. The plots specifically, the aesthetics and theme music are awesome and worth watching for that alone. Haven’t gotten to the second season yet but was really hoping it improved…

Biggest disappointment was reading up on it and finding that the Anderson’s had originally intended to do a second season of UFO then changed it up to make Space 1999 instead.

UFO was amazingly good

New comment by funnybeam in "Windows GUI – Good, Bad and Pretty Ugly (2023)"

funnybeam — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 21:42:49 +0000

From memory I believe it was windows 7 that broke the taskbar - before that you could put it on any side of the screen and also embed folders on it.

I used to have it on the left side of the screen with my actual documents folder (not “My Documents” which even then was full of other crap) embedded in it. Kind of like vertical tabs in the browser, but better

I was really annoyed when they took that functionality away for no apparent reason. Win 7 was the start of the slide for me, windows steadily got worse with them removing more and more functionality. Was it seven that removed all the customisation you used to be able to do as well and replaced it with much more limited themes?