Hacker News: izzydata

New comment by izzydata in "Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'"

izzydata — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:01:23 +0000

My impression of companies pushing AI so heavily is that they are basically being forced to do it by it merely existing. Imagine if AI really is as powerful as it is suggested to be and you didn't jump on the bandwagon. Then you would be behind. So by it existing and other companies using it, you have to as well because even if it turns out to be a failure at least everyone else will have failed too and you are on an even playing field.

New comment by izzydata in "Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence"

izzydata — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:54:06 +0000

Can you further explain the semantics you are talking about here? Are people not trying to predict things? Thus it being a market for people making predictions?

New comment by izzydata in "Phantasy Star IV – 1993 Developer Interviews"

izzydata — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:24:44 +0000

I like Phantasy Star IV, but my main love of the franchise is still Phantasy Star Online 1. From my understand during the planning phase of PSO it hadn't been decided to be a Phantasy Star game. It wasn't until later that they decided to skin the game to Phantasy Star. Funny how you can be well into development on the fundamentals of a game and not know what it will be called or exactly what it will look like.

New comment by izzydata in "The fun has been optimized out of the Internet"

izzydata — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:05:58 +0000

Things being too easy takes the joy away from the process. All you are left with is the result and not the journey.

New comment by izzydata in "Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold"

izzydata — Tue, 05 May 2026 14:05:51 +0000

How much extra does it cost to show an extra movie that nobody shows up to? It seems like the majority of the cost is rent of the building and salary. If employees are already working to operate the few movies that are expected to have people and the building is already being paid for then they may as well use up all their theaters just in case since the extra cost would be low.

New comment by izzydata in "GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay"

izzydata — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:54:19 +0000

Perhaps that is part of the scam here. Meme stock buyers will think this means something and will spend more on worthless shares so that ebay executives can sell.

New comment by izzydata in "U.S. companies back Sam Altman's World ID even as much of the world pushes back"

izzydata — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:01:16 +0000

Perhaps it is time to return to meatspace for verifiably real interactions.

New comment by izzydata in "GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing"

izzydata — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:59:49 +0000

It may already be cheaper if you calculate the hidden cost accumulated by LLM generated tech debt. At least some of it could be avoided by manually doing it better to begin with.

New comment by izzydata in "Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal"

izzydata — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:25:04 +0000

If we take that statement as fact then I don't believe we are even close to an LLM being sufficiently complex enough.

However, I don't think it is even true. LLMs may not even be on the right track to achieving AGI and without starting from scratch down an alternate path it may never happen.

LLMs to me seem like a complicated database lookup. Storage and retrieval of information is just a single piece of intelligence. There must be more to intelligence than a statistical model of the probable next piece of data. Where is the self learning without intervention by a human. Where is the output that wasn't asked for?

At any rate. No amount of hype is going to get me to believe AGI is going to happen soon. I'll believe it when I see it.

New comment by izzydata in "Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated"

izzydata — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:56:27 +0000

I am hopeful that in the near future once AI has saturated as much of everything that it can that it will actually become even more worth it to do things. At least for me the only reason to experience art in any form is that there was human intent behind it. Thus making human generated content more valuable compared to the flood of empty AI content.

New comment by izzydata in "Turtle WoW classic server announces shutdown after Blizzard wins injunction"

izzydata — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:20:00 +0000

I was extremely skeptical that Blizzard would bother with something like Classic Vanilla+ where they add additional content to Vanilla Azeroth, but now it seems like a real possibility.

New comment by izzydata in "Every GPU That Mattered"

izzydata — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:18:21 +0000

What are they advertising? Nvidia graphics cards?

New comment by izzydata in "Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]"

izzydata — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:09:08 +0000

It is a fine time to be going to the moon, but we could be doing multiple productive things at the same time. It just doesn't surprise me that there are so many people that are not caring so much about this.

New comment by izzydata in "Artemis II crew see first glimpse of far side of Moon [video]"

izzydata — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:34:52 +0000

People are struggling to afford every day life and we are surrounding by crazy things every day like cellphones talking to satellites in space. On any objective measure it is definitely amazing to send humans to the moon, but there are more pressing issues for most people right now.

If we as a species had more of our ducks in a row we may be able to better celebrate this as the achievement for humankind that it is.

New comment by izzydata in "Tell HN: Chrome says "suspicious download" when trying to download yt-dlp"

izzydata — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:53:01 +0000

The amounts of times someone invented something that was important to them and then never make any money from it only for some other entity to make tons of money from it is way too high.

New comment by izzydata in "My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary"

izzydata — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:11:39 +0000

They have different writing styles generally, but it is still pointless to call Star Trek a fantasy for the same reason why you wouldn't call Lord of the Rings a science fiction. If you have a spectrum from fantasy to science fiction with 5 being the middle then maybe Star Trek would be a 6 and Star Wars being more of a 5.

Personally I'd classify Dune to be more of a fantasy than Star Trek just because of the style it is written in being very mystical and prophetic.

New comment by izzydata in "My Astrophotography in the Movie Project Hail Mary"

izzydata — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:53:33 +0000

Star Trek is true scifi? I always considered it to be soft scifi due to it being more about social issues in space rather than the more hard scifi about the fictional science. At least the book of Project Hail Mary is closer to hard scifi than Star Trek as they spend a lot of time describing the science. The movie rightfully skips most of this tedium in favor of a beautiful spectacle.

This is the first time I've heard of the idea of "true" scifi though.

New comment by izzydata in "Passengers who refuse to use headphones can now be kicked off United flights"

izzydata — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 18:16:33 +0000

I was recently in Hawaii in the middle of the forest and this group nearby on the trail were blasting music from a bluetooth speaker. Whether it is compelte lack of self awareness or utter disregard for other people it is just disturbing behavior.

New comment by izzydata in "Oil and gas prices jump after Iran and Israel attack gasfields"

izzydata — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:52:50 +0000

It seems highly unlikely that the US will magically have trains and more walk-able living because gas is unaffordable. Especially if it was a drastic and sudden shock of supply. Myself as much as anyone is not in favor of the reliance the US has on cars and non-renewable energy, but causing chaos is not the way to do it.

New comment by izzydata in "Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn"

izzydata — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:50:19 +0000

This is obviously not a reversible trend. People having close proximity to one another, creating economies of scale where everyone does what they are best at instead of everyone doing everything for themselves is what allows big cities to be possible.

I'm sure all of this was inevitable as there likely hasn't ever been a time where humans were not getting together to form communities when it was beneficial to do so.