Hacker News: goobatrooba

New comment by goobatrooba in "Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time"

goobatrooba — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 19:23:05 +0000

Markets are now committed than a single pipeline. Germany was importing most gas through other channels - pipelines through Eastern and Southern Europe and shipping - as well as of course plenty of oil. While the NortStream cut had a significant short term impact it took much more effort to wean the country off all the other routes.

New comment by goobatrooba in "Unraveling the mysteries of habit formation"

goobatrooba — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 10:48:57 +0000

Indeed, and time also gives plausible deniability.. reacting live means the behaviour is present, evident. Three hours later it is easy to deflect reality and claim it was a misperception.

New comment by goobatrooba in "Cookware Got Worse on Purpose: Who Owns Pyrex and All-Clad Now"

goobatrooba — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:09:24 +0000

Maybe unit is an Atlantic divide issue, but I don't know many people that put pots and pots in the dishwasher. Putting fatty pans in there is sure to ruin not just your pipes but also the internal machinery of the dishwasher, notably if it's a water saving one

New comment by goobatrooba in "Qwen-Image-3.0: Rich Content, Authentic Details, Deep Knowledge"

goobatrooba — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:29:47 +0000

Wow, crazy things - "shemale porn", "spider fucks venom", and various porn URLs like tushy.com. What the hell did they do to their AI? Is that the training corpus or intended use case?

New comment by goobatrooba in "Jelly UI: Soft-body physics for native HTML form controls"

goobatrooba — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 23:46:29 +0000

> Yes my car is running all night while it stands in front of my house, but it's not really a waste of resources or a nuisance because generators do the same thing.

New comment by goobatrooba in "AliExpress hit with record $629M fine for counterfeit and illegal goods"

goobatrooba — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:36:41 +0000

Generally, testing, certificates, and legal culpability if something goes wrong. But if you buy a fake there is no one you can sue.

New comment by goobatrooba in "British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply"

goobatrooba — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:29:18 +0000

I had not realised UK still had mining for iron ore, but it seems it's even a net exporter [1]. In that case it really makes sense to keep such a strategic industry alive as both the up- and downstream companies would suffer if it's shut down.

[1] https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/iron-ore/repo...

New comment by goobatrooba in "British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply"

goobatrooba — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:26:06 +0000

Well since Mondelez night Caburies, Milka, and other major brands across Europe it has slowly been downgrading their quality. So unfortunately not a purely British problem and even more unfortunately an intentional business strategy by a Swiss conglomerate.

Kind of the best European chocolate option, if you want to avoid the Swiss and don't want to buy the premium for pralines is the JD Gross company which is mainly delivering to Lidl.

New comment by goobatrooba in "British Steel taken into public ownership to protect 'vital' UK supply"

goobatrooba — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:23:47 +0000

That seems more a feelings than fact based view. The Norwegian referendum had many reasons, but as for Brexit they were not necessarily based on rational analysis. Norway is nominally independent but in every economic sector, including farming, pretty much integrated with the EU countries.

New comment by goobatrooba in "Pebble Mega Update – July 2026"

goobatrooba — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:02:32 +0000

From the website it seems the ring is $75. So definitely cheaper

New comment by goobatrooba in "EU officials peeved after Anthropic sends junior staffer to testify about safety"

goobatrooba — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:39:49 +0000

Very bad headline and politico knows better, so very disappointing. An official is a public servant, so it sounds like a technical meeting. Here anthropic sent a low level employee that is with the company for two months to testify to the European Parliament, the elected representatives of 440 million people. It's like the U.S. house and a deep insult to not even bother with anyone who has actual insights on decision making.

Shame on Anthropic.

New comment by goobatrooba in "OpenAI loses trademark dispute at EU court"

goobatrooba — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:59:23 +0000

Good. The trademark would ultimately allow them to sue any company for claiming it provides "open AI". So only right choice to reject it.

New comment by goobatrooba in "The Second Life of Sanskrit"

goobatrooba — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:17:20 +0000

Not sure why you are speculating or what your background would be to do so, when the info is easy to find. Yes it was a link language given its prominence, but also

> Sanskrit was a spoken language in the educated and the elite classes, but it was also a language that must have been understood in a wider circle of society because the widely popular folk epics and stories such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Bhagavata Purana, the Panchatantra and many other texts are all in the Sanskrit language, while many Sanskrit dramas indicate that the language coexisted with the vernacular Prakrits.[115] Thus, Classical Sanskrit with its exacting grammar was the language of the Indian scholars and the educated classes, while others communicated with approximate or ungrammatical variants along with other natural Indian languages,[114] with the cities of Varanasi, Paithan, Pune and Kanchipuram being centres of Sanskrit learning and debate until the arrival of the colonial era

(Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit )

New comment by goobatrooba in "LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire"

goobatrooba — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:16:41 +0000

Cameras don't prevent crime, they just increase the cost of doing so (or the cost of preparing for it).

Most crime is spontaneous. Plenty of examples from across the world that installing cameras or other checks at best shifts crime to other areas.

New comment by goobatrooba in "The console wars have been lost"

goobatrooba — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:45:11 +0000

I guess they were hoping to sell additional controllers..

New comment by goobatrooba in "EU will seek to limit children's access to social media"

goobatrooba — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:34:59 +0000

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand it clearly is necessary - we expect parents to do this but most are obviously failing (and I say this being a parent myself). Look what any 13 year old is doing on their phone or what disgusting horrors they encounter on the abyss of tiktok or Roblox.

On the other hand the means available to block access are too crude and seem to impinge on everyone's privacy. A shopkeeper checking the age to sell alcohol can look at your face, but an app cannot - so the solutions all seem to resort to quite invasive age checks.

I saw this related EU initiative a few weeks ago (also on HN) which seems to try to find a middle ground where you have to authorise ones and then can simply prove you are 18 without revealing any private info, but I do wonder how this holds up in practice - will the most-in-need-of-protection kids not simply get an adult to do a one-off signup for them?

https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/04/30/what-to-know-about-...

New comment by goobatrooba in "AI developers are buying up old books in Germany in large numbers"

goobatrooba — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 18:43:04 +0000

I am both a fan of books and AI. A clear win would be if the digitised copies would be made available by the AI companies for the long term, but unfortunately I doubt that will be the case (and probably they also wouldn't care enough compared to e.g. a project Gutenberg approach). Buying up books to digest them and throw their remnants in the trash feels like a destruction of culture - even if no one else has read these copies in years, their existence is still a record that may be useful in the long term.

So a challenge to the AI companies - go on, but please share the results with preservation societies like Gutenberg. And please be thorough enough in digitising to keep these copies useful.

New comment by goobatrooba in "What Does a 13-Year-Old See on Snapchat in a Normal Week?"

goobatrooba — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:02:33 +0000

I'm not sure it's that straightforward. What the article shows is that even a legal, commercial, and publicly known platform serves this content. What it doesn't show is all the other contexts kids may encounter it.

New comment by goobatrooba in "EU's five regulations that will change how we live, drive, and use the internet"

goobatrooba — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:17:56 +0000

Obviously a five line summary loses a lot of nuance. E.g. these legislative files are at very different stages of discussion , some not even proposed formally and others close to completion. It reminds me a bit of the famous UK tabloid headlines that the EU would prohibit hairdressers from wearing jewellery (which was a position paper by a small hairdresser union, never an EU legislative idea).

Let's see when these things are actually proposed and can be analysed. E.g. I do t see a problem with an automatic speed limit - anyone using electric cars will already do this anyway. E.g. driving in the Netherlands or Belgium (everyone is at 100-125kmh) is a lot more comfortable and safe than in Germany (where a motorway speed can vary from 100 to 190 or sometimes much beyond). If you want to feel speed go to dedicated racetracks and don't threaten my kids lives.

New comment by goobatrooba in "Grok 4.5"

goobatrooba — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 07:44:03 +0000

Funnily, as a European all the models appear extremely right wing. The political spectrum is shifted far more right in the US than in Europe, so what is left there is still at least conservative here.

I ask my AI to give me citations science and pro/con arguments when discusssing anything that could be shaped by cultural biases.