Hacker News: inopinatus

New comment by inopinatus in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

inopinatus — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:05:29 +0000

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

New comment by inopinatus in "Who Is America's Homer?"

inopinatus — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:56:42 +0000

That would be the poet-king Yoyontzin¹, not any of these post-Columbus nitwits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nezahualcoyotl_(tlatoani)

New comment by inopinatus in "Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse"

inopinatus — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 09:38:52 +0000

It illustrates that some people can’t distinguish between a useful label by association for the general public, and their own desperate compulsion to litigate hair-splitting category distinctions.

Someone who was truly on the ball on this matter might’ve observed that Edinburgh in the 90s was so balkanized by internecine personality conflicts that most research that might later be strictly labelled “machine learning” actually took place in adjacent units and not directly under the DAIry. But I suppose you haven’t heard that, either.

New comment by inopinatus in "Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse"

inopinatus — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 06:04:53 +0000

My local supermarket places the almond milk in the dairy section, and some people find this very upsetting.

New comment by inopinatus in "Kaiser nurses say AI, surveillance are making their jobs and patient care worse"

inopinatus — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 03:20:17 +0000

> I never heard…

You should listen better. The University of Edinburgh had an entire Department of Artificial Intelligence when I was an undergrad there in the 1990s, and one of the things it researched was machine learning.

New comment by inopinatus in "Never argue with your boss (2009)"

inopinatus — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:49:21 +0000

Equally, never give your 2IC a dressing down in public.

New comment by inopinatus in "I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets"

inopinatus — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:11:44 +0000

I’ve been recommending the use of consistent lies about name and date of birth to online systems since Eternal September began. Very few sites and systems justify accurate PII, and even for those I often still maintain dual accounts/profiles as necessary.

New comment by inopinatus in "Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode"

inopinatus — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 01:25:46 +0000

If you prefer your builds composed of declarative and incremental targets, see

https://github.com/inopinatus/sublime_url/blob/main/Makefile

Same shit with a bit of structure.

New comment by inopinatus in "Has_not_been_viewed_much"

inopinatus — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 06:06:12 +0000

My gateway drug was The Third Policeman, as read aloud by Patrick Magee on the wireless in 1986, a feat all the more remarkable for a man that was, quite appropriately, dead at the time.

New comment by inopinatus in "Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries"

inopinatus — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:08:34 +0000

That’s what they said about the Daleks, who still managed to suppress all other species and become supreme rulers of the universe.

New comment by inopinatus in "VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO"

inopinatus — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:36:33 +0000

Any sufficiently general superintelligence will deduce the existence of rice pudding and income tax from Cartesian first principles.

New comment by inopinatus in "TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP"

inopinatus — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:44:05 +0000

This generalises to NNTP, in which anyone writes to everyone and is read by no-one.

New comment by inopinatus in "Microsoft turns to AWS as GitHub faces AI capacity crunch"

inopinatus — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 04:04:00 +0000

If there’s one thing that surprised me at AWS during my time there - over a decade ago now - that I was not clearly expecting in advance, it was the scale and competence of the units fulfilling the colossal and unceasing growth in capacity demand.

This led me to reconsider Amazon as a whole, and I still think of it basically as a logistics firm, with the shop and the public cloud merely a monetisation thereof.

New comment by inopinatus in "Meta’s chaotic AI strategy"

inopinatus — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 02:33:51 +0000

That is why I have no sympathy to spare for anyone who chose to work for Zuckerberg's social toilet.

New comment by inopinatus in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

inopinatus — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:54:31 +0000

Good writing doesn’t exclude it.

New comment by inopinatus in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

inopinatus — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:45:29 +0000

Your argument goes as follows: “I’m incapable of it, therefore no-one is capable of it”.

Followed by, “You should abandon your preferences because I don’t share them”.

New comment by inopinatus in "Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds"

inopinatus — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:21:59 +0000

Just sit there in silence whilst you cogitate.

New comment by inopinatus in "Thermodynamics rules future orbital data centers"

inopinatus — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:54:38 +0000

“Solved problem”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain

It merely remains to build one.

New comment by inopinatus in "AI misidentification results in wrongful arrest; man seeks justice"

inopinatus — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:59:32 +0000

origin is geoblocking. https://archive.is/DtYSf

New comment by inopinatus in "Show HN: Performative-UI – A react component library of design tropes"

inopinatus — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:00:18 +0000

I don’t understand why the obnoxious popover didn’t automatically manifest when I scrolled its own doco. Needs more IntersectionObserver. Bonus points if the component props thereof are named like “selfArmTrigger”, I suppose.