Hacker News: jawilson2

New comment by jawilson2 in "I sold all my SP500 yesterday morning"

jawilson2 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:19:59 +0000

If I am reading a blog post written by an MD about medical advice or whatever, then their next post is extolling the virtues of alchemy, it IS going to make me question everything else they have said, regardless of their professional credentials. Like, maybe you are able to encapsulate and separate the real from the pseudo-science, but it at least welcomes closer scrutiny.

New comment by jawilson2 in "Geoffrey Hinton: 'We're creating alien beings. I'm willing to choose humans'"

jawilson2 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:25:41 +0000

> Scientists have been saying global warming would have destroyed humans by the early 2000s

yeah, I'm going to need a citation for this

New comment by jawilson2 in "Apple Keynote now showing ads in its UI"

jawilson2 — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 18:32:27 +0000

Yes it is.

New comment by jawilson2 in "Creating a Garmin "MCP""

jawilson2 — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:34:10 +0000

If you do local sync, can you work with the files directly? I.e. if I don't want to upload to garmin connect, can I just tell Claude to use an API or reverse engineer the files? I've had a venu 4 for a few months, and finished my connect+ trial, and want to setup my own analytics.

New comment by jawilson2 in "So, you’d like to sell your print issues of The Onion?"

jawilson2 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:19:32 +0000

I did a college visit there in 1998, and finding the Onion on campus was a deciding factor in realizing I could live there for 4+ years.

New comment by jawilson2 in "Apple HomeView"

jawilson2 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:11:27 +0000

Interesting, the calendar2 has a header that says "Designed to Delight", and the new apple page says "Delight Up the House". That CAN'T be a coincidence...

New comment by jawilson2 in "Learning Jazz Pianist Style with Cross-Attention Conditioning"

jawilson2 — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 03:16:59 +0000

"One X, Twelve Y"

If you don't care enough to write it, I don't care enough to read it. Will be checking out the Hyman book though.

New comment by jawilson2 in ""I'm Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry""

jawilson2 — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:34:59 +0000

> quit tech and live in the woods

I'm so curious about this; it is nearly universal that software engineers threaten this. I constantly tell my colleagues that I am quitting to start woodworking in a cabin in British Columbia.

My theory is that we are comprised of people who love building and making things, yet at the end of the day we don't have anything tangible to show. Like, my parents (nearing 80 years old) barely understand what I do or how software engineering works, though they are computer-literate. Going back 2 generations and it is incomprehensible magic. But, if I built a cabin or a cabinet or a wooden spoon, I could have a meaningful conversation about it with someone from the last Ice Age (language barriers aside). Maybe it is just staring at a screen 8 hours+ per day leaves the ancient part of the brain wanting.

New comment by jawilson2 in "The last time my family was replaced by technology"

jawilson2 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 20:01:54 +0000

I would agree with you, if we taxed the ever-living fuck out of AI companies to enable UBI, so that the people replaced with robots did not end up homeless.

New comment by jawilson2 in "McDonald's push to have AI price your Big Mac"

jawilson2 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:35:55 +0000

That would be an upgrade

New comment by jawilson2 in "The Beatles have permeated research papers across academic disciplines"

jawilson2 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:39:26 +0000

I am the walrus?

New comment by jawilson2 in "Joseph Szabo’s pictures of American adolescents"

jawilson2 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:31:41 +0000

I'm the opposite. I LOVED high school, and miss those friends dearly. I'm 45, and it has been difficult to find people that I gel with the same way, aside from my wife (who I started dating in high school). I miss being on the basketball team and marching band. I miss many of the teachers. I miss the 90s and no cell phones, and trolling AOL message boards. I miss being able to exist without the fear of having your life recorded, either by phones or government mass surveillance. I miss when it was accepted that Nazis were the bad guys, and Canada wasn't on fire and making the air quality in Chicago horrific every summer.

College was a great experience too, and I made some great friends, but I really focused on graduating in engineering so I slowly became the party-pooper, and in grad school my wife and I moved in together, got married, so it was a completely different life experience. Now my focus is on work and getting my 3 kids into good colleges.

I sometimes dream about being in high school again, or taking my kids back with me to see what life was like pre-cell phones. I wouldn't say that high school was the best part of my life, but it is a chapter I reminisce about and wish I could revisit occasionally.

"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anybody?" - Stephen King, Stand By Me

New comment by jawilson2 in "Toyota is taking the Corolla electric"

jawilson2 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:29:32 +0000

I rented an EV (Ioniq) 2 years ago, to drive from Chicago to Detroit, and my experience was abysmal. I had to setup 3 different charging accounts on my phone, each with a min deposit of like $20 that I cannot get back. I got routed to empty truck stops where there was nowhere to eat within several miles, and it had charged 5% after 30 minutes, so we got back in the car and drove 20 minutes to find another charger. I spent so much of the trip with anxiety about where we would find a charger, if I would have cell coverage to download yet another shitty app, why the AC was turning off when I dropped below 10% battery, etc. Until I can roll up and swipe a credit card (or tap my phone) without ridiculous proprietary bs, EVs are a no-go. This is equivalent to Chrysler having Chrysler gas stations with Chrysler-only pumps that you must use the Chrysler app to fill up, and you can only buy gas in $100 increments.

New comment by jawilson2 in "An SR-71 Blackbird Has Vanished (Updated)"

jawilson2 — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:43:51 +0000

At this point, this copy pasta is so well known you pretty much don't have to attribute it. 98% of HN readers saw "SR-71" and immediately quoted half of this text.

New comment by jawilson2 in "Side-stepping the Secretary Problem, unwittingly"

jawilson2 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 21:03:45 +0000

What are SLA and ATS?

New comment by jawilson2 in "macOS 27: Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage"

jawilson2 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:57:13 +0000

Is there a version of this that uses more than 10% of my horizontal screen space? I have a 40in monitor, I don't need the website compressed to the aspect ratio of a phone.

New comment by jawilson2 in "Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions"

jawilson2 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:56:26 +0000

Same with sunglasses, and glasses in general. One company owns everything.

New comment by jawilson2 in "ZuckOff is a free app that sees Meta glasses before they see you"

jawilson2 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:54:13 +0000

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

-Thomas Jefferson

I personally think the tree of liberty is probably getting pretty thirsty.

New comment by jawilson2 in "AI safety is mostly a sex cult"

jawilson2 — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 15:28:56 +0000

Here, I was going to say it's actually unhealthy to shower twice a month. This is some super-power nose blindness.

New comment by jawilson2 in "Senior Engineers Are the Next DRAM Shortage"

jawilson2 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 21:18:39 +0000

What about that comment sounds AI generated?