Hacker News: goobatrooba

New comment by goobatrooba in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

goobatrooba — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:04:17 +0000

An interesting question to him and management might be what his own role is now and whether he's still needed. If he's not doing any reviews then you could yourself directly prompt the code and review.

New comment by goobatrooba in "The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy"

goobatrooba — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:39:17 +0000

Sorry I don't know your use case, but wonder - looking at the Op post don't you feel like you are supporting a rather malicious company preying on tech illiterate users? I can understand the desire for a VPN that gives residential identities but plainly this is against the will or interests of the "provider".

New comment by goobatrooba in "The Smart TV in Your LivingRoom Is a Node in the AIScraping Economy"

goobatrooba — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:35:33 +0000

I get this policy in theory but don't see how it works in practice in a modern life where you want some device that runs Netflix, YouTube, of similar to show on your TV. It can be the TV or an android box - but somewhere you end up trusting a third party and a software that may end up running other this party apps. The alternative is a local jellyfin server but that means you very likely have to break some laws to put content that the family wants to see on it.

Personally I'd just not want any TV in my house, but convincing the family of that is not easy ;-)

New comment by goobatrooba in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

goobatrooba — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:33:19 +0000

But these can't be the same model - the model is far too demanding to be part of regular chrome for most people.

New comment by goobatrooba in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

goobatrooba — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:32:17 +0000

Either Google changed the text or you editorialised it a tiny bit - just for all others that got excited, they mean 16GB VRAM. So a premium graphics card requiring a >2500€ device is the minimum to run this.

Still progress, but not quite democratic yet.

Weird though that Google might be cannibalising it's own AI subscription service?

New comment by goobatrooba in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

goobatrooba — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 06:10:02 +0000

I've moved to Migadu a few years ago for more or less the same reason, but pre AI - Google's unrequested filtering and sorting made things actively worse on my daily chaos. Moreover the eternal threat of Google cutting the cord for any non-defined infraction and locking you out of your own life is crazy. I still use drive and other Google features, but my email is just an account login and nothing more.

Migadu has been a breeze, very sane and transparent payment model, human support, infinite domains and accounts (!). What I really miss are calendar features which are just underdeveloped, but it seems mostly the Microsoft and Google have ruined that area by doing whatever they want.

I like the instructions Migadu gave for copying your emails over - just open thunderbird and copy or move everything from one account. I put everything in an Archive folder so can find it if ever needed. Just insanely pragmatic and it worked.

New comment by goobatrooba in "Let's talk about EU Sovereignty (2025)"

goobatrooba — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:09:21 +0000

That's a rather odd point. One country has left the EU due to a very narrow 'exit' vote, so it's not anyone's prison. Across surveys the EU enjoys broad support, often even more so than the national government.

Clearly not everyone loves the EU but the majorities are very much in favour (and certainly this is the case among the people who actually understand politics, economics, etc.).

New comment by goobatrooba in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

goobatrooba — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:59:37 +0000

While not wrong, your perspective is very simplistic. A company gains massively from strong stock performance - they can issue more shares to raise capital, give handouts, take loans at better rate, pursue M&A with stock payment, ... So anyone who buys stock they ethically disagree with is certainly supporting that company - and inversely not using those funds to the advantage of other companies that they find morally more appealing.

New comment by goobatrooba in "Danish Pension Blacklists SpaceX over 'Catastrophic Governance'"

goobatrooba — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:54:22 +0000

Well this used to be the rule until it was changed just a few months ago on anticipation of this very SpaceX IPO.

New comment by goobatrooba in "High Density Living, 2000 Years Ago: Inside the Roman Apartment Building"

goobatrooba — Sat, 30 May 2026 06:40:46 +0000

Just to stress that the world is larger than the US. Zoning exists pretty much everywhere and the reasons for its introduction were diverse and mostly about quality yof life, citizen health, or city esthetics (keeping polluting businesses out).I have no view on whether what you're saying is true for the US, it is however definitely false for most other places.

New comment by goobatrooba in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

goobatrooba — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:01:51 +0000

Maybe that too is a native question, but there's a large scale between single user and 6000 tweets per second - most of our apps will never reach anything approaching even one save a second. So where to draw the line? I do far have gone the sqlite route for my hobby apps as it's so easy to handle and doesn't require setting up two docker containers for a single app. Am I drawing myself in a corner in case my apps ever do become relevant?

New comment by goobatrooba in "All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes"

goobatrooba — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:41:59 +0000

Nice ideas, it just misses amounts. And of course there may be nuances of technique missing, e.g. low or high heat. So it might work best as a recap and starting point "how to vary m favourite recipe".

New comment by goobatrooba in "How do you build a semiconductor company on something that's free?"

goobatrooba — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:52:32 +0000

Pharma companies developing new molecules spend millions to patent all chemicals close to their target chemical, to avoid that a competitor might be able to jump in with a similar product. This is before they even know whether it works. If variation is cheap why not run directly 5-50 versions of the chip and see which works best?

New comment by goobatrooba in "I love my Bluetooth keyboard"

goobatrooba — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:52:32 +0000

I have an ergo for two years, used eight hours most days, and apart from the space bar the keys still look good. Do you by chance have quite sweaty/greasy fingers or eat while typing? I can't see any other reason why the keys would wear that quickly.

New comment by goobatrooba in "I love my Bluetooth keyboard"

goobatrooba — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:44:34 +0000

Bol, coolblue, Amazon.Com.be or .nl all deliver to Germany. Actually I often do Amazon arbitrage, same coffee machine fun the same warehouse may be 200€ cheaper on Amazon.fr than in any German shop including amazon.de. and the Belgian store has less choice but often better prices. Makes no sense but true.

New comment by goobatrooba in "Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks"

goobatrooba — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:21:27 +0000

I think s/he meant that if you earn 30k it's easy to be tempted by crime because the numbers are big. What night not tempt a Google engineer might tempt a telecoms infrastructure key from Anytinytown, Moldova/Romania/...

That said I don't think there are many good software engineers that earn less than that in Western Europe. Net maybe, but certainly not gross, and if it's net that covers anything from pension security to healthcare, meaning you can live a decent life in most places.

New comment by goobatrooba in "DeepSeek reasonix, DeepSeek native coding agent with high caching and low cost"

goobatrooba — Sun, 24 May 2026 18:42:56 +0000

As a European I have to admit I am these days more worried about the US than China. See yesterday's article about the US government forcing Microsoft to give them lists of Dutch government officials. Utter madness. At least the Chinese mainly care about the money and power levers, the US about strange worlds of revenge and manipulation, trying to change or influence your government. E.g. which of the two countries has put crippling personal sanctions on staff of the international criminal court?

Honestly I'd love to love the US again, but basically after Obama things have just gone down and down and no soul will trust the US again in the next generation or two.

New comment by goobatrooba in "Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda"

goobatrooba — Sat, 23 May 2026 06:33:31 +0000

"much" is an unqualified and unjustified word here. It definitely happens but this would at most affect a tiny fraction of donor money.

Many of the NGOs have strict no-bribery policies, else they would not receive support from bodies like the EU (which is the biggest humanitarian donor on the planet).

In some cases the choice may be between "letting people starve" and "feeding people but the local warlord extracts some benefits" but these are rare and only the worst crisis contexts (think South Sudan, DRC).

New comment by goobatrooba in "DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent"

goobatrooba — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:31:14 +0000

But do these prices apply if you use a third party go-between? I would expect they then charge their own prices?

New comment by goobatrooba in "Google's Antigravity bait and switch"

goobatrooba — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:44:26 +0000

Oh it's about the IDE. I thought it's about this email I got just today, a bare week after subscribing:

> We wanted to let you know about changes to the usage limits included with your Google AI Pro subscription.

> What's changing starting today, 2 0 M a y 2 0 2 6 :

> Usage limits in the Gemini app: For the Gemini app, we’re introducing compute-based usage limits that factor in the complexity of your prompt, the features that you use and the length of your chat. Your limit will refresh every five hours until you reach your weekly limit. As an AI Pro subscriber, you’ll enjoy a usage limit four times higher than non-subscribers.

> AI credits: The product-based usage limit model is also rolling out to other products, starting with Flow and Antigravity. You can extend your limits by purchasing AI credits. While 1,000 AI credits will no longer be included as a benefit in your base plan each month, the new usage limit model that we are introducing should allow you to maintain the same experience as you are used to. To learn more about how to use AI credits, please visit our Help Centre.

So the app is more restricted, the "free" (actually paid) monthly credits are gone, and somehow this will "maintain the same experience as you are used to". All while releasing ever more token costly models that barely move the needle on qualify.