Hacker News: isk517

New comment by isk517 in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

isk517 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:58:53 +0000

I've let tech pass me by many times, then the tech that passed me which I was never in a position to use got replaced by the next big tech innovation. I've found that you can climb aboard the train at anytime since everything new is a lot easier to get started on than learning C and having to manually allocate memory.

New comment by isk517 in "Oregon school cell phone ban: 'Engaged students, joyful teachers'"

isk517 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:47:17 +0000

Back in the day the feature I liked most about my TI-82 was the amount of information that could fit on the display, the formatting options available, the ease of entering and editing what you entered, and the amount of past entered formulas that would be saved and how easy they were to retrieve. It made doing large blocks of basic BEDMAS math very quick and less suspectable to errors caused by accidentally hitting the wrong key entering in large formulas, and very easy to go back and find out where I messed up and quickly retabulate everything.

All of that mostly comes up in physics and chemistry were its about knowing what long formulas you need to plug the numbers you have available to you to find out what you need to know. Oddly enough their seems to be very little benefit to using a graphing calculator in a actual math class.

New comment by isk517 in "Mark Zuckerberg Lied to Congress. We Can't Trust His Testimony"

isk517 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:52:02 +0000

If there was any increase of reported incidents of ED over the 30 years I would hazard to guess that it would have to do with the fact that various medications have been released over the last 30 years to address it. Fewer people will report an embarrassing issue when there is a narrow chance it can even be fixed.

New comment by isk517 in "Most people are individually optimistic, but think the world is falling apart"

isk517 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:53:24 +0000

A person is also more in control of what's going on around them personally, the larger that scope increases the less any normal individual has any effect. The ant can be optimistic about it's chances of surviving the winter while still pessimistic about what the fate of all of the grasshoppers.

New comment by isk517 in "AI is killing B2B SaaS"

isk517 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:34:32 +0000

There was no chance that everyone would be running their own email server, but if it wasn't for the lack of IPv6 adaptation a plug and go home email server solution would probably see a decent amount of use. I'd bet we'd already be seeing it as a feature in most mid-ranged home routers by now.

New comment by isk517 in "France dumps Zoom and Teams as Europe seeks digital autonomy from the US"

isk517 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 21:51:35 +0000

Another one for the pile. You can choose to open office documents in Teams directly, the browser, or in the native desktop app, but you can only set it to open by default in either Teams or browser. Why?

New comment by isk517 in "The $100B megadeal between OpenAI and Nvidia is on ice"

isk517 — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:41:46 +0000

Usually when I hear about people using ChatGPT they are usually just using it as a search engine that delivers summarized results. The average person wouldn't use email if they had to pay for it, good luck making money off of all of those visitors without just becoming another ad tech company competing with the other ad tech companies.

New comment by isk517 in "Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media"

isk517 — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:13:33 +0000

Also manages to sustain itself on it's own weird brand of whales, a handful of disgruntled users with enough money to just keep buying accounts using random characters as a username just to get immediately banned after their first post. Some taking a dump in the middle of your living room isn't so bad if they are paying your rent and you can just kick them back out.

New comment by isk517 in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

isk517 — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:05:16 +0000

Even without national protectionism we are still experiencing isolationism, expect instead of it being done by nations in the interest of their citizens it is being done by corporations in the interest of their shareholders and it's leading to a dangerous amount of centralization as well.

Compatibility protocols are probably the best answer, allow individual countries to develop software they trust to interact with internationally accepted protocols and formats. As you said, good luck getting anyone to agree to anything. If email didn't already exist I don't think it would even be possible to implement today.

New comment by isk517 in "Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft"

isk517 — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 20:42:26 +0000

>>Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information. It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.

Everyone I know who use AI day-to-day is just using Copilot to mostly do things like add a transition animation to a Powerpoint slide or format a word document to look nice. The only problem these LLM products seem to solve is giving normal people a easy way to interact with terrible software processes and GUIs. And better solution to that problem would be for developers to actually observe how the average use interacts with both a computer and their program in particular.

New comment by isk517 in "Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app"

isk517 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:57:12 +0000

It isn't 'You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain', it's 'You either die a hero or live long enough for people to realize you are a villain'. While it's ultimately meaningless to speculate on what the dead would do if they were living, Steve Jobs in life did have plenty of belief and made plenty of decisions that are perfectly inline with what we are seeing in 2026 and there is no particular reason to believe he would not just be up there with the worst of them.

New comment by isk517 in "Windows 11's Patch Tuesday nightmare gets worse"

isk517 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 18:30:13 +0000

People are pointing their fingers at QA, and while that is a big part of it I think the bigger issue is, like you said, them not really caring about some of their core products. Windows 11 seems to exist purely so that they can earn passive ad revenue while vacuuming up user data, Office 365 is now just a pile of mature applications that are slowly getting worse and new applications that are too unfinished to be actively useful.

New comment by isk517 in "The age of Pump and Dump software"

isk517 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 17:28:57 +0000

Rapid prototyping has always seem to me as the most viable use for generative AI, especially in software. Being able to quickly produce something that is just functional enough to determine if its feasible or if it would properly meet the customers needs before then taking the time to build it correctly would resulted in a lot of saved time and money.

New comment by isk517 in "Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales"

isk517 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 23:25:08 +0000

Trucks being dick compensators is also based on their association with the work they do. Easier to pretend to be a salt of the earth tough guy when you both drive the same truck but with a different trim package.

New comment by isk517 in "1000 Blank White Cards"

isk517 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:57:48 +0000

Basically, the true victory condition is to create a win condition that impresses the other player

New comment by isk517 in "Government drops plans for mandatory digital ID to work in UK"

isk517 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:41:02 +0000

Arguably it's purpose is to define where government responsibility ends and tyranny begins. Very useful if the population it applies to cares about it being violated

New comment by isk517 in "Microsoft May Have Created the Slowest Windows in 25 Years with Windows 11"

isk517 — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 17:59:22 +0000

The most common issue anyone around were I work has when their computer is running slow is available memory. Windows 10 -> 11 has seen 16GB go from more than enough for anything other than power user tasks to barely enough to use the full array of standard office software, all with no actual improvement or meaningful change to the standard user experience. Going from 7 -> 10 at least made it so that you did not need to download your entire OneDrive and attached SharePoint libraries.

New comment by isk517 in "Exercise can be nearly as effective as therapy for depression"

isk517 — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:22:11 +0000

Exercise is great, just make sure to take sometime to evaluate where you are at mentally. I was running about 40 miles and doing 5 hours of lifting per week to try and stay a head of my depression, and when I finally burnt out everything came crashing down all at once.

New comment by isk517 in "SendGrid isn’t emailing about ICE or BLM – it’s a phishing attack"

isk517 — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:06:32 +0000

Also they are using variants of the same scam to target a variety of groups

New comment by isk517 in "Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage"

isk517 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:18:09 +0000

I'm pretty sure GPUs have their own RAM installed that is usually higher spec than the motherboard RAM.