Hacker News: idle_zealot

New comment by idle_zealot in "Why are we even doing all this?"

idle_zealot — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:14:33 +0000

I'm all for advancing human understanding, even if it might lag behind machine understanding, but there is a way to have machines prove they understand something we don't: ask them to build something functional that we can't. If your hypothetical future comes to pass, and we ask the machine to build a cancer-curing healing ray, and it works, I'd say that's its own win. Then we can spend however long it takes trying to understand how it works. It's depressing and disempowering in a way, but I think overall I'd be happy with that future.

New comment by idle_zealot in "Blood cells from 80-year-old donor become stem cells with molecular age under 20"

idle_zealot — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:22:14 +0000

Curing aging doesn't stop death entirely. There's still the attrition of living in the physical world. Some portion of the population will trip and break their necks every year.

New comment by idle_zealot in "Noto means "no tofu": fixing dotted circles in Myanmar text"

idle_zealot — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 21:24:10 +0000

Japanese katakana

#include using namespace std;

There are some mistakes though, like using ウ instead of ク in インウルード

New comment by idle_zealot in "We are going to kill "unalive""

idle_zealot — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:05:13 +0000

Which word from this wave won't be unalive in 50 years?

New comment by idle_zealot in "We are going to kill "unalive""

idle_zealot — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 08:07:39 +0000

You're right that it's in-group signaling, but that's actually why it's going to basically disappear within a few years. This sort of youth slang rotates out regularly.

New comment by idle_zealot in "Zig v0.17.0"

idle_zealot — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:18:02 +0000

> Someone in the thread below says their bug was closed because of mentioning that they use AI to confirm the bug they had encountered

I don't know about this particular case, but if I saw someone report a bug and as evidence claim they had X Y and Z LLMs verify it I would be pretty upset. If you're going to use an LLM to make a replication, just do that and give me the replication, don't point to your notoriously error-prone tools as though they lend your report credence.

It's in a similar vein to people who reply to questions with "well Claude says: "

New comment by idle_zealot in "Apple's smart home camera reportedly won't record video"

idle_zealot — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 01:06:24 +0000

It is reproducible. It has to be for their feature to work. They're trying to find some way to communicate to people that the recording is to a ring buffer, and isn't durably saving everything it hears indefinitely. It's an unenviable position to have to find a way to sell your engineering that enables a fairly privacy-preserving implementation of a feature that intuitively feels like it depends on surveillance to a mass audience. Made especially difficult by the environment where most products really are surveilling you even when they don't need to.

Of course, Apple still collects more data than it needs to and abuses users in other ways, so I don't really feel bad for them.

New comment by idle_zealot in "Cities Are Forced to Funnel License Plate Data to a Federal Surveillance Program"

idle_zealot — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 03:37:22 +0000

Most people who claim to be against big government are really just opposed to the idea of the government restricting them, personally. If it's their friends wielding government to hunt and punish the right people then they're in support. You could see this well before the current turn, recall the overlap between small government support and pro-police, pro-military, pro-death penalty, pro-stop and frisk "law and order" types.

New comment by idle_zealot in "PS5 Relapse Exploit"

idle_zealot — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:25:43 +0000

Apple tried this, I forgot which year, there was a push to make the Apple TV a console. Arcade support, controller compatibility, it all shipped. You can plug in an Apple TV and pair an Xbox controller right now and play a surprisingly large number of AAA and indie games, from Resident Evil VIII to Slay the Spire. It was too little too late, though. Most games are played on phones, and the console market is falling apart. Microsoft seems to be pulling out, Sony is basically shipping locked-down gaming PCs with a couple of exclusive games. Nintendo is holding course more or less, but their main value propositions are simplicity and first-party exclusivity, and phones already ate the first half of that.

New comment by idle_zealot in "What would a serious AI product look like?"

idle_zealot — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:59:46 +0000

What you're identifying is a more fundamental bifurcation in why people are interested in AI. Some people have intent, a vision, something they know is possible but lack the technical skills or time to bring into reality. Others want the computer to handle the intent, the technical aspects, the decision-making, the whole process, but be able to go back and specify changes reactively when they don't like something about the result. It seems the latter cohort is much larger.

New comment by idle_zealot in "F-Droid 2.0"

idle_zealot — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:16:34 +0000

In the case of the featured sections in the first screenshot, there should at minimum be a visual well indicating the horizontally scrollable strips. Invisible scroll panes are insane.

New comment by idle_zealot in "F-Droid 2.0"

idle_zealot — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:37:26 +0000

It's sad to see F-Droid using the now-standard design convention of categorically refusing to draw lines between things. No visual differentiation between sections of the UI, no clear indication of what's tappable and what will happen on a tap, no indication of scrollable areas beyond content being cut off. I'm willing to chalk some bad text alignment or uneven padding up to amateur designers working for free, but the design ethos on display, the thoughtless trend-chasing, is depressing to see.

New comment by idle_zealot in "Grammarly will send unhinged messages to all your users if you try to cancel"

idle_zealot — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 07:49:27 +0000

They are an AI business, just a more focused one. The creepy information gathering, the way it blandifies output and encourages reliance over building communication and language skills, it's all the same problems frontier companies have writ small. Their lunch is being eaten by bigger fish and they're shamelessly trying to remain relevant. This will not result in any less spying or bad behavior.

New comment by idle_zealot in "Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude"

idle_zealot — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:41:44 +0000

Defaults matter a lot. Before you had to intentionally be lazy to put together garbage and call it a day. Now your boss is telling you to use AI to "speed up." The tool you're pointed to presents like it can make the slide for you and claims to do so. Every signal is screaming that you're supposed to be a lazy fraud, and people will, on average, take the path of least resistance.

New comment by idle_zealot in "Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude"

idle_zealot — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:20:02 +0000

This is a nightmare scenario to me.

"Claude, prepare me a presentation on XYZ."

I get to work, go straight to the meeting room, and pull up what it made to present.

It's barely coherent nonsense. Lots of irrelevant details, buzz words, wrong charts or confusing phrasing. Obviously LLM output.

I read it out.

When I'm done, I get a question about one of Claude's incorrectly inferred details.

The shame instantly kills me.

This is a scenario I've seen play out with coworkers. Except that last part, instead of dying or owning up to the mistake of trusting LLM output they waffle. Their shame circuit is broken.

New comment by idle_zealot in "Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit"

idle_zealot — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 03:49:30 +0000

> If I'm busy, I can hire a person to go stand in line and buy the device (me asking Comet to shop on my behalf)

I feel like this is already ceding too much ground. A better analogy is "can I hire someone to read this product catalog I got in the mail for me." My browser isn't Amazon's store, it's a device for reading catalogs they send me.

New comment by idle_zealot in "Steam Frame starts at $1059"

idle_zealot — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 18:43:25 +0000

> For sure not couple of hours in 1 go

Worry not! That's how long the battery lasts!

New comment by idle_zealot in "Adversarial Fashion Makes a Statement on AI Panopticon"

idle_zealot — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 16:58:44 +0000

I would expect it to be covered under any existing laws about circumventing security systems or impeding law enforcement. A more specific law would probably pass in this environment though.

New comment by idle_zealot in "AirPods 5"

idle_zealot — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:52:41 +0000

Another year of disappointment for me. Airpods gen 1 and 2 were the only buds I could find that fit in my funky ears perfectly. The new shapes just fall right out unless I'm constantly adjusting them. Apple may have found a more universal fit, but I'm not part of their universe.

New comment by idle_zealot in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

idle_zealot — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:04:02 +0000

It's not a "personal annoyance" that twelve people control half of the wealth in the world. Our current society did a better job concentrating power than any previous one, and concentrated power is extremely dangerous.