Hacker News: idreyn

New comment by idreyn in "New iPad mini"

idreyn — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:07:34 +0000

Still waiting for a 13 Mini refresh :(

New comment by idreyn in "Transit rewards"

idreyn — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:07:39 +0000

I am not sure which rail right-of-ways in the Bay Area could plausibly be justified for AV lane deconversion. Maybe the ailing VTA light rail?

But an "AV lane" will very quickly converge on the traffic characteristics of a regular road.

New comment by idreyn in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

idreyn — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 23:10:05 +0000

Here are the two I was thinking of:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767937

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784816

New comment by idreyn in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

idreyn — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 23:00:15 +0000

These last few days, there has been a small stream of blogposts on HN expressing similar things, and I have enjoyed them all.

My question recently has been how to broach this subject with colleagues who really enjoy producing prose with AI. There is not yet a better cultural shorthand for this sort of thing than "slop" which is a harsh-sounding word and itself sort of a thought-terminating cliché. "I don't want to read what you didn't write" is maybe closer — but it needs a pithier and somewhat more encouraging encapsulation, like "I want to hear it from you".

Has anyone had good experiences setting up professional boundaries or team norms around AI-written docs?

New comment by idreyn in "Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too"

idreyn — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:30:16 +0000

I'm rooting for this general class of technology as a platform for sensory augmentation for the blind. I don't know exactly what sonic encoding of spatial information is exactly ideal — I suspect it's something echo-like, only slowed-down — but it's going to be a hell of a lot easier to develop it and support it on commodity hardware. Please no Meta login, though.

New comment by idreyn in "Show HN: A free ESG stock screener that publishes its losses and methodology"

idreyn — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 14:34:02 +0000

Grok is that you?

New comment by idreyn in "Just 'English with Hanzi'"

idreyn — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:47:59 +0000

> He argued that Modern Chinese has become “lazy” by forgetting how to use its own verbs. instead of “researching” (研究, yanjiu), speakers “conduct research” (进行研究, jinxing yanjiu)

I can't help but think of this classic essay about Java OOP: https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...

New comment by idreyn in "Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back"

idreyn — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:13:10 +0000

I think the more mainstream understanding of transhumanism is closer to "post-genics" than eugenics.

New comment by idreyn in "Building a new Flash"

idreyn — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 03:16:26 +0000

Flash created a medium. The particular genius of the authoring tool gave rise to a whole style of animation and game and thing-in-between that only existed in its time and could have only been created with the tool at hand. Software should aspire to this.

New comment by idreyn in "Do Metaprojects"

idreyn — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 21:04:40 +0000

did we read the same post? none of what was mentioned was even in the realm of entrepreneurship or anything ethically hairy.

New comment by idreyn in "Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well"

idreyn — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 16:59:10 +0000

My word count has hovered around 100k for most of my three years of writing and revising. This does sometimes run up against limits on Claude (or recently, with Opus 4.5, compaction) but in the past the whole thing has fit just fine as a plain text file.

New comment by idreyn in "Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well"

idreyn — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 23:45:56 +0000

Yes. I am a novelist and I noticed a step change in what was possible here around Claude Sonnet 3.7 in terms of being able to analyze my own unpublished work for theme, implicit motivations, subtext, etc -- without having any pre-digested analysis of the work in its training data.

New comment by idreyn in "Caltrain shows why every region should be moving toward regional rail"

idreyn — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 01:35:55 +0000

NYC here, our three disconnected commuter rail systems would all like a word :)

New comment by idreyn in "California invests in battery energy storage, leaving rolling blackouts behind"

idreyn — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 01:26:13 +0000

These maps are such a cool resource, thanks for sharing!

"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson

New comment by idreyn in "Element: setHTML() method"

idreyn — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 12:57:18 +0000

It is to render untrusted (user-generated) HTML without letting them slip in markup like script tags that could harm other users.

New comment by idreyn in "Replacement.ai"

idreyn — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 20:33:27 +0000

Yes, it is. And yes, except that it wasn't. A SWF is about building common wealth inside the systems that finance capital built (in the same way that the 401k replaced the pension) rather than turning back the clock on them. How you acquire those assets can vary wildly:

- Maybe you just decide to invest some public money

- Maybe you have some natural resources that are collective-by-default (minerals wealth on public land)

- Maybe there's a bailout of an industry that is financially broken but has become too big to fail cough and the government presses its leverage

- Maybe a president just wakes up and decides that he wants the government to own 10% of Intel, and makes that deal happen on favorable terms.

New comment by idreyn in "Replacement.ai"

idreyn — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 18:41:33 +0000

This sounds a lot like a sovereign wealth fund. The government obtains fractional ownership over large enterprises (this can happen through market mechanisms or populist strongarming — choose your own adventure) and pours the profits on these investments into the social safety net or even citizens' dividends.

For this to work at scale domestically, the fund would need to be a double-digit percentage of the market cap of the entire US economy. It would be a pretty drastic departure from the way we do things now. There would be downsides: market distortions and fraud and capital flight.

But in my mind it would be a solution to the problem of wealth pooling up in the AI economy, and probably also a balm for the "pyramid scheme" aspect of Social Security which captures economic growth through payroll taxes (more people making more money, year on year) in a century where we expect the national population to peak and decline.

Pick your poison, I guess, but I want to see more discussion of this idea in the Overton window.

New comment by idreyn in "American Prairie unlocks another 70k acres in Montana"

idreyn — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:16:53 +0000

I would like a non-native speaker to weigh in, but I gloss it as "there are ONLY a few and this is ONE OF them" and have never found that confusing or contradictory.

New comment by idreyn in "Escaping the Internet"

idreyn — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 19:20:25 +0000

It's a stereotype of his political opponents as adrift in selfishness, hedonism, and "gender stuff".

When you find your thought patterns flowing through tropes this way it is a good sign to consider logging off for a long while, as the author is doing. I wish him peace and perspective.

New comment by idreyn in "Open office is giving you secondhand ADHD"

idreyn — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 12:43:27 +0000

This is clearly done by AI and I am disinclined to draw any conclusions from the anecdotes or data here because it all feels "synthesized".