Hacker News: gilrain

New comment by gilrain in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

gilrain — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:25:35 +0000

As someone who’s compared spreadsheet feature sets, though: it’s also very much the feature set.

New comment by gilrain in "One of the largest salt mines in the world exists under Lake Erie"

gilrain — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:02:43 +0000

> connect various dots without going all dry

As long as you keep in mind that what you come away with are shallow, incomplete views of nuanced topics.

Unfortunately, many come away from these popular summaries believing 101-level knowledge makes them subject experts.

New comment by gilrain in "Apple Just Lost Me"

gilrain — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:46:18 +0000

> threw their hard-won reputational gains off a cliff for _nothing_

I imagine some executive’s ego was spared by not telling them their idea was bad. Priceless.

New comment by gilrain in "A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)"

gilrain — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:03:10 +0000

Zocchi retired, but his company charmingly continues.

https://www.gamescience.com/about-1

(Note: the sprue left by his sharp-edged process has since been proven to result in more bias than the tumbling undergone by the round-edged process.)

New comment by gilrain in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

gilrain — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:02:36 +0000

The cooperation of allies is more powerful than all of that, and the US is woodchipping their allies as fast as possible. Their power will disappear astonishingly quickly.

New comment by gilrain in "Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland"

gilrain — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:30:27 +0000

There’s just absolutely no comparison between one senile president who maintained our democracy and another senile president who loudly, proudly, and rapidly destroyed it.

No comparison, folks. What can you do?

New comment by gilrain in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

gilrain — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 14:22:58 +0000

It was bought by Microsoft and declined, yes.

New comment by gilrain in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

gilrain — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 14:13:38 +0000

“I would argue that…” is a weaker statement, because it ends with an implied “…but since I don’t care that much, I’m not ‘seriously’ arguing that.” It’s not at all equivalent to the strong statement “I argue that…”, which has no such qualifier.

Why cure yourself of useful conversational nuance?

New comment by gilrain in "GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics"

gilrain — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:25:39 +0000

In my view, another example would be Gautama Buddha, with Dependent Origination. It’s basically a super early realisation of Process Philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da https://iep.utm.edu/processp/

Edit: but even it likely relied on his prior experience with nondualistic Hinduisms, of course.

New comment by gilrain in "Gemini 3 Deep Think"

gilrain — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:19:41 +0000

If it tried to play Balatro using knowledge of, e.g., poker, it would lose badly rather than win. Have you played?

New comment by gilrain in "Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs"

gilrain — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:19:40 +0000

> Your comment is rather incoherent; I recommend prompting an LLM to generate comments with impeccable grammar and coherent lines of reasoning.

It seems your reading comprehension has fallen below average. I recommend challenging your skills regularly by reading from a greater variety of sources. If you only eat junk food, even nutritious meals begin to taste bad, hm?

You’re welcome for the unsolicited advice! :)

New comment by gilrain in "Zulip.com Values"

gilrain — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:07:18 +0000

It’s a lot easier to keep your values when you aren’t literally waiting for and counting on the billion dollar check, though.

New comment by gilrain in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

gilrain — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:41:46 +0000

And who gets to decide the membership of those groups? You?

New comment by gilrain in "Discord Alternatives, Ranked"

gilrain — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:37:26 +0000

Isn’t Telegram at least plausibly a tool of Russian surveillance? My understanding was that its attempts to distance itself from the regime were laughable and only made the relationship more obvious.

I think that’s why it’s rarely mentioned.

New comment by gilrain in "Tea Chemistry (1997)"

gilrain — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:26:50 +0000

To be fair, the British invented and innovated that style of tea. You should only look east if you’re interested in the many other styles.

New comment by gilrain in "Tea Chemistry (1997)"

gilrain — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:25:53 +0000

This is like claiming everyone is making coffee wrong and then describing how to make a cappucino with city roast Nigerian dry-process beans.

Yep, cool. That’s a recipe. For one type of preparation. With one type of bean. And one style of roast.

The ignorance of global tea culture in the west, including Britain, is very cringe.

New comment by gilrain in "Tea Chemistry (1997)"

gilrain — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 13:21:16 +0000

It depends on the tea you’re brewing, what you want to make with it, and your personal taste. How could there possibly be an objective answer?

New comment by gilrain in "We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports"

gilrain — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:26:13 +0000

Brahmin. Brahman both is you and reports to you, as it were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman

New comment by gilrain in "Why I left iNaturalist"

gilrain — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 13:47:57 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by gilrain in "Why I left iNaturalist"

gilrain — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 13:43:38 +0000

> I've always fed our observations from Seek into iNaturalist since I though it was the "right" thing to do. Now I'm questioning it.

Why? The author explicitly encourages people to keep using and contributing to iNaturalist, both data and donations. What did you read that made you disagree with them?