Hacker News: galangalalgol

New comment by galangalalgol in "Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI"

galangalalgol — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:25:48 +0000

The farther from average height you are the worse it is. If you are from some part of the world where the average height distribution is near the point BMI based itself you will perceive it to be so much better.

I am only 6' and only an intermediate lifter. I'm overweight, but BMI makes me look obese. It really only takes a normal person a year or so to get to three plates on squat with no supplements other than chicken broccoli and rice if they don't skip workouts. Assuming no injuries. That level of strength easily distorts bmi wildly if you are even a little taller than average.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Why Wall Street Is Ignoring Big Tech's Debt"

galangalalgol — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:17:12 +0000

How sure are we that isn't the case here?

New comment by galangalalgol in "Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?"

galangalalgol — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 23:46:17 +0000

I have aeen usb-c bent but I have never seen 3.5 break in decades of use. Walkmans then discmans falling. Shooting back out of my chair and snagging it such that the whole tower spins unplugging ps/2 mouse. But the headphones are fine. What do you do to those poor things? The only time I have seen one fail it was on a custom pcb and the solder joint broke. A couple minutes with an iron and it was back.

New comment by galangalalgol in "No one can afford to make Myst games anymore"

galangalalgol — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:10:12 +0000

If the difference between me getting to enjoy some solo developer's vision or not is whether they use the ai, I'll ignore it. Not everyone who can create a great gameplay experience can code, draw, or create music, and the margins can preclude having three different people. The problem you are pointing out is that ai is allowing a repetition of "Engels' pause" where capital accrues all the benefits of automation. Back then the unrest was resolved with workhouses and shipping people to Australia. Also shooting them in the streets. It is hard to predict how that will end up this time.

New comment by galangalalgol in "No one can afford to make Myst games anymore"

galangalalgol — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:26:15 +0000

Why is using it for code more acceptable than for art? I can't imagine we aren't already seeing tons of both in indie games. Maybe aaa too? Is there any ramification for leaving off the disclosure, or adding one? Personally if the gameplay is good I kind of don't care if it used lots of ai.

New comment by galangalalgol in "This Mine Predicts Major Wars. It's Opening Again"

galangalalgol — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:26:08 +0000

"αὐτὸς γὰρ ἐφέλκεται ἄνδρα σίδηρος." And the movie having just come out.

New comment by galangalalgol in "The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate"

galangalalgol — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:33:03 +0000

Some reports indicate it is already to late for emission reduction, or even elimination, to halt the feedback effects that continue the trend. But it won't be too late for active climate engineering until the effects of the climate change prevent our ability to do that engineering.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

galangalalgol — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:26:05 +0000

Is Gemini really that bad? I mean, I would always prefer anthropic for agentic coding, and apparently openai has the math thing cornered, but if I'm using ai like a search engine gemini does that just fine. That may be all they were actually aiming for whatever else they say.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

galangalalgol — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:20:45 +0000

I would not have chosen the word governing for that sentence but I'm not sure what fits best. Plundering, pillaging, gutting, ransacking, Rick rolling, despoilng, or perhaps molesting.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Waymo in Dallas"

galangalalgol — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:57:26 +0000

I know this isn't /. but a car analogy seems appropriate here. A city is like a modern cramped engine bay vs an old one where you can sit next to the motor to work on it. Anything you try to fix or upgrade in a dense city causes large problems.

Also, governance isn't like manufacturing, it doesn't get easier at scale, it gets so much harder.

Living in a perfectly planned super dense urban utopia where I can quickly walk wherever I want is extremely appealing to me. I would also like living in the wilds where once a week I drive to the general store and back as the full day's task. Suburban living is my least desired outcome. But everywhere there is room for it, it happens, even without a city to latch onto. There are good reasons for that.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Waymo in Dallas"

galangalalgol — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:22:38 +0000

The climate part is certainly an issue for dfw, but the superiority of dense urban areas from a financial or ecological standpoint isn't backed by data. Buses were better for fuel efficiency, but now the bus and robotaxi are both ev, the robotaxi has a smaller impact ecologically due to microplastics scaling with axle weight ^4 and financially because road wear scales with axle weight ^3. If buses and trash trucks didn't drive on streets they would last virtually forever the way they are built now. While the glorious excesses of the last 75yrs are definitely going away, the suburbs may very well not. Urban cores might instead rot in infrastructure until only the highways between them with low density adjacent settlements remain.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Waymo in Dallas"

galangalalgol — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:43:15 +0000

Lots of single user "busses" cause dramatically lower road wear and microplastics than a many user bus. Those scale with axle weight to the third and fourth powers respectively.

New comment by galangalalgol in "F*: A general-purpose proof-oriented programming language"

galangalalgol — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 02:35:45 +0000

How does this relate to the topic? I'm willing to assume it does, I just don't get it. I'm probably overreacting because when Scott was writing this, tens of thousands of Scots living in poverty were being evicted via arson from their land and country. Saying they were dead in spirit is very elitist as he sat in comfort.

New comment by galangalalgol in "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"

galangalalgol — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 18:04:17 +0000

A good example is go. On linux you can use a from scratch image fairly easily because it only uses syscalls. But for windows or mac the moving target wasn't maintainable so they link against shared objects. Linus enforcing the don't break userspace rule is what made that possible. That definitely has tradeoffs. At some point relibc or something similar will allow the same (stably) for rust. But using posix as that compatibility boundary gets you a much larger set of OS and only occasionally has a performance penalty. Often, a posix api tuned to the kernel is more performant. Musl is an exception precisely because it makes an openbsd-esque trade of performance for simple small attack surface.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals"

galangalalgol — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:54:26 +0000

Even if you don't think about memory management, and do the naive thing in rust or rc in some other systems language, gc only comes out ahead in that many tiny objects case. Which is very domain specific. I don't ever run into that situation, or if I do, they are homogeneous in type so I handle them in bulk, not individually.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

galangalalgol — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:38:18 +0000

Yeah, but its always a trade right? Heroin would kill me too fast for the upside. The trade on alcohol wasn't what I thought it was. I think there are better options. Says I as I lift a cider.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

galangalalgol — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:53:27 +0000

Have the recent studies indicating just how dangerous alcohol consumption is made any impact. Losing a few neurons was one thing but some of the studies don't put it as much less dangerous than tobacco. New guidance in the US is there is no safe quantity and no one should have more than one serving a day. I know a lot of younger sw devs in the US that simply do not drink ever. I once would have said that was a little unusual, but now it is the norm. I suspect it will be stigmatized akin to smoking not that far into the future.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Glue bonds to nonstick surfaces and wipes clean with ethanol"

galangalalgol — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:23:01 +0000

We got one of the greenpans for eggs after the last ptfe one chipped. It is ceramic glass coating of some sort. About halfway between ptfe and mirror stainless for sticking. Better than that if you keep the temp low. Kinda pricey though.

New comment by galangalalgol in "Glue bonds to nonstick surfaces and wipes clean with ethanol"

galangalalgol — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:59:34 +0000

Why is scratched a problem? They use the same stuff in medical implants. It is chemically inert if you don't overheat it right?

New comment by galangalalgol in "How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?"

galangalalgol — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:10:07 +0000

A selective menory dump that when deserialized can ignore fields not present its version, but yeah.