Hacker News: jihadjihad

New comment by jihadjihad in "Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines"

jihadjihad — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 13:43:29 +0000

> I genuinely think this mix of children's communication and humor is a clever way to make these big stories more approachable.

Agreed. I recall seeing similar things around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, to make the concepts around mortgage-backed securities and financial derivatives etc. digestible and clear.

Come to think of it, listening to Frog and Toad discuss subprime lending and credit default swaps would be an entertaining follow-up to TFA.

New comment by jihadjihad in "56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience"

jihadjihad — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 13:10:05 +0000

Start > Run... > command.com

Launches a command prompt, just like I hoped it would. Nice.

New comment by jihadjihad in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

jihadjihad — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:30:25 +0000

And don't peel your kiwi, either.

New comment by jihadjihad in "500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive"

jihadjihad — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 16:53:30 +0000

Username checks out?

New comment by jihadjihad in "Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?"

jihadjihad — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:38:19 +0000

The entire site is suspect, IMO. Pangram says that the entirety of TFA save the paragraph beginning "The American Psychological Association" is AI-generated.

Another tell is that I have yet to find a single "article" on this site with inline links that go anywhere other than the site the articles are on.

New comment by jihadjihad in "When did Google get so weird?"

jihadjihad — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 11:02:02 +0000

It’s insane, and there was even a helpful graph of word usage over time. “define ” is still baked into my brain, too, after so many years of use.

Like others have said, Wiktionary is a great resource, and is usually more authoritative. Many times the Google result would say “origin unknown” after listing the route a word in English took through Latin from Greek, while Wiktionary would settle on some PIE construct with links to cognates, etc.

I’ve even replaced the default English dictionary on my Kobo with one derived from Wiktionary, major win.

New comment by jihadjihad in "SNL Weekend Update: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on A.I.'S Threat to Humanity [video]"

jihadjihad — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 19:20:03 +0000

I know it’s a little OT, but I keep seeing the same misquotation all over the place. Right at the beginning Michael Che refers to the claim that “there’s a 10% chance that AI could wipe out humanity within 10 years.”

But that isn’t what the often-misquoted current and former Anthropic employees said. They said it was a 10% chance of it happening by the end of the current decade [0], i.e. by 2030, not 2036.

0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/09/anthropic...

New comment by jihadjihad in "A Model for Winning Survivor"

jihadjihad — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:01:31 +0000

> Why would you put money into something knowing that there are people who already have the absolute answer?

https://youtu.be/Hm3mDatFpNE?is=vKkBJs6XsypuD833

New comment by jihadjihad in "A Model for Winning Survivor"

jihadjihad — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:47:15 +0000

> I loved using it while watching Season 50, and it identified several interesting threads early on.

The ideas in TFA are interesting, but it’s important to keep in mind that when we watch Survivor, we’re not watching something that happened in real time and then was simply compiled together. Survivor is edited after the fact, once the winners and all the arcs of contestants are known.

And don’t get me wrong! I love watching the show even knowing that in my mind. But a model built on the edited material is necessarily biased due to the format of the show itself.

New comment by jihadjihad in "Prisma's pgbouncer=true on Supabase made every query 4 round-trips (postmortem)"

jihadjihad — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 18:02:21 +0000

> Who found it

> I didn't. I gave Claude Code the guest's screenshot and asked whether the problem was ours or his phone's. It answered that in twenty minutes and, while verifying the deploy, noticed the ten-second floor and kept pulling: the logs by hour, the 47 ms TCP measurement, the pg_stat_statements query, the arithmetic.

If your brain, dear reader, is aneurysm-proof, by all means go ahead and read TFA.

You won't learn much, though, but then again neither did its author.

New comment by jihadjihad in "The Tudor Kings"

jihadjihad — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:04:57 +0000

Timely for me since I’m in the middle of Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel [0], and there’s a lot of backstory and historical context that I never learned in school. Certainly a fascinating time to read and learn about.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Hall

New comment by jihadjihad in "Eating Fruit Skins"

jihadjihad — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 19:40:49 +0000

My condolences to your tooth enamel.

New comment by jihadjihad in "Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route"

jihadjihad — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:00:18 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standard...

New comment by jihadjihad in "AirPods 5"

jihadjihad — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:12:10 +0000

We've been over this for a couple decades now. The average consumer simply cannot tell the difference between lossless and compressed codecs. Even back 20-25 years ago when people carried around CD players, vanishingly few people batted an eye when those went the way of the dodo and devices started getting loaded up with shitty 128 kbps MP3s. The difference in quality mattered far less than the convenience.

There are many, many people who are even technically minded who would be surprised that their expensive AirPods Max cannot reproduce lossless audio from Apple Music when used wirelessly.

New comment by jihadjihad in "Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time"

jihadjihad — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:43:31 +0000

This is a hard truth many wish to deny. An article published every month decrying the poor habits or lack of good habits of children, with a not-so-subtle implication that it is the fault of the children themselves.

It is 100% true that "you have to model the behavior of X" to your kids, otherwise all bets are off and headlines like this should not be surprising in the least.

New comment by jihadjihad in "[dead]"

jihadjihad — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:08:18 +0000

This appears to be the relevant blog post by DHH, from last month: https://world.hey.com/dhh/wolves-sheep-and-gypsies-ba44af6a

New comment by jihadjihad in "American Airlines mechanic Azriel “Al” Blackman has died"

jihadjihad — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:33:25 +0000

OT, but Azriel/Azrael translates to the Grim Reaper/Angel of Death [0].

0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Azrael

New comment by jihadjihad in "Calibrate Before You Accelerate: Bias Toward Action in a New Role"

jihadjihad — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:15:36 +0000

The images are awesome, in an “I cannot believe someone would upload this to their site” kind of way.

The blueprint with the “LOAD-BEARING WALL!!!” includes nonsensical labels like “Dining Broom” and “Witchen”, and I am supremely disappointed that there isn’t a bubbling cauldron or pointed hat to be found.

New comment by jihadjihad in "ALMA Reveals Long-Lived Hotspots on Betelgeuse's Bubbling Surface"

jihadjihad — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:00:59 +0000

> A remarkably detailed image

I know it's 600 ly away but my eyes kept waiting for the images to crisp up anyways, spoiled as they are.

New comment by jihadjihad in "507 Mechanical Movements"

jihadjihad — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:30:41 +0000

It makes me want to find a way to boot up The Incredible Machine [0], so many hours spent on TIM and TIM2 back in the day.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incredible_Machine