Hacker News: jackvalentine

New comment by jackvalentine in "The Australian government has announced gambling advertising reforms"

jackvalentine — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 05:31:08 +0000

Weak reforms, I'm disappointed and will write to my MP to express that sentiment.

Frankly all advertising for gambling on TV, radio, social media, bus stops - everywhere - should be banned the same as we did for cigarette ads in the 90s.

It basically killed a bunch of racing teams that I was a fan of but it needed to be done.

New comment by jackvalentine in "BYD is seeing a flood of new EV buyers"

jackvalentine — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:24:30 +0000

Those factories won’t be run by Chinese automakers they’ll be shut down with the corresponding loss of jobs and secondary industries.

Gotta say I was annoyed at the time but deprecating the Australian car manufacturers last decade means we have no scruples about allowing cheap as chips Chinese EVs through the door and I’m loving it.

New comment by jackvalentine in "macOS 26 breaks custom DNS settings including .internal"

jackvalentine — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:30:09 +0000

A month ago my debian 13 laptop out of the complete blue decided it wanted zero DNS. Might have been an update that did it I am not sure.

I was unable to resolve it and ended up reinstalling.

New comment by jackvalentine in "Marc Andreessen is a philosophical zombie"

jackvalentine — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:45:08 +0000

Interesting thing to tell people - this means any change of heart or apology from Marc should be viewed purely through a cold realist self interest lens and not be afforded any of the trappings of humanity.

Don’t anthropomorphise the lawnmower indeed.

New comment by jackvalentine in "Asian governments roll out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel crisis caused by war"

jackvalentine — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:22:01 +0000

> Sounds like whoever is scheduling meetings need to adapt to a new asynchronous environment whereas many meetings isn't necessary.

I agree, and a lot of my 'participation' in these meetings these days is read the papers, write my opinion, attach it to the documents and tell people I'm not attending.

That said we're 5 years in to this thing and people haven't adapted.

New comment by jackvalentine in "Mac Studio 512GB RAM Option Disappears Amid Global DRAM Shortage"

jackvalentine — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 02:38:02 +0000

Maybe they don’t have any further production of the 512GB M3 Ultra SKU planned and sometime in the next few months we’ll see an M4/M5 Ultra.

New comment by jackvalentine in "How to talk to anyone and why you should"

jackvalentine — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:40:00 +0000

You should really read the article rather than judging it based on the title. The author establishes several reasons you might want to speak to others and highlights cultural phenomena where people seem to be yearning for more connection with strangers.

If after reading it you decide it’s not for you then that’s fine, it is as they say bean soup.

New comment by jackvalentine in "Drivers reeling after passengers caught out by AI-powered safety cameras"

jackvalentine — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 04:32:58 +0000

The people fined for doing the wrong thing are an absolute minority of voters and the majority supports this kind of thing.

New comment by jackvalentine in "Drivers reeling after passengers caught out by AI-powered safety cameras"

jackvalentine — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 02:54:28 +0000

> If the majority of your citizens are breaking a law, then your citizenship clearly thinks the law is unnecessary.

Which law do you think the majority of the citizenship here is breaking?

New comment by jackvalentine in "Larry Page has moved to Florida"

jackvalentine — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:17:15 +0000

Oh no?

New comment by jackvalentine in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

jackvalentine — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:27:12 +0000

Young kids carrying whisky on the school grounds isn’t really a threat where I live.

But to answer your question directly - kids having whisky and I can go after whoever sold/provided it to them using existing legal means if I think it serious enough.

New comment by jackvalentine in "Cardiorespiratory fitness is associated with lower anger and anxiety"

jackvalentine — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 23:26:08 +0000

What you've just said is a common refrain, if you haven't already seen it please take a look at these two videos that attempt to address part of what you're saying. I found them very interesting when I came across them years ago and it changed my view of what's possible or even good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSGx3HSjKDo "Who else benefits from the Dutch cycling infrastructure" (old people, disabled people)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU "Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (but Finnish people can)" (frozen Finnish winters)

New comment by jackvalentine in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

jackvalentine — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:32:20 +0000

What is your proposed recourse for me as a parent if your kid shows my kid gore videos?

New comment by jackvalentine in "Tesla Sales Down 55% UK, 58% Spain, 59% Germany, 81% Netherlands, 93% Norway"

jackvalentine — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 01:09:44 +0000

I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me.

New comment by jackvalentine in "Tesla Sales Down 55% UK, 58% Spain, 59% Germany, 81% Netherlands, 93% Norway"

jackvalentine — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:13:33 +0000

I just ordered a 37,000AUD BYD, the "$25k (USD) car" that Elon used to promise was coming.

Seems like I'm not the only one with 2779 BYD EVs sold in the country in January compared to just 501 Teslas.[1]

[1] https://business.carsales.com.au/news-room/news/vfacts-janua...

New comment by jackvalentine in "Court orders Acer and Asus to stop selling PCs in Germany over H.265 patents"

jackvalentine — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 11:15:10 +0000

Thanks!

New comment by jackvalentine in "Court orders Acer and Asus to stop selling PCs in Germany over H.265 patents"

jackvalentine — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:59:53 +0000

Assuming you’re using FFMPEG?

Do you have a good guide for balancing quality and size? I’ve searched but never found something that really nails it for me. I have until now just been keeping everything as it streamed off the dvd or bluray in mpeg4 or h264 in an mkv and yeah, time to re-encode in to something more reasonably sized.

New comment by jackvalentine in "You can't trust the internet anymore"

jackvalentine — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 21:35:05 +0000

You’re going to end up running down the same merry path that DRM companies do - and you can’t patch the wetware layer. Inevitably thousands of ‘human tokens’ will end up in the hands of actual humans working in call centres with 300 phones in front of them.

https://www.scmp.com/news/people-culture/trending-china/arti...

New comment by jackvalentine in "Valve's Steam Machine has been delayed, and the RAM crisis will impact pricing"

jackvalentine — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:49:55 +0000

I think you’re reading my post wrong. I’m not stating it’s impossible.

New comment by jackvalentine in "Valve's Steam Machine has been delayed, and the RAM crisis will impact pricing"

jackvalentine — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 10:49:19 +0000

Good example. I’d want to look at the first-mover(ish) advantage Valve had and other differences in product timing/delivery before I concluded it was impossible to found a company like Valve in the EU.