Hacker News: jl6

New comment by jl6 in "Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions"

jl6 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:34:51 +0000

Kinda, but the back catalog has never been bigger or more valuable. There is good stuff from every era, and it only accumulates. What happens when the viewing mix is 10% new stuff, 90% classics?

New comment by jl6 in "Teen Social Media Bans Miss the Point"

jl6 — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:14:07 +0000

Maybe it’s because tech people are prone to binary thinking, but there seems to be the idea that if you can’t prevent a bad thing entirely, then you shouldn’t try to prevent it at all. Or maybe the other way around: if you can’t achieve a good thing completely, then why even bother trying?

New comment by jl6 in "If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious"

jl6 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:38:12 +0000

> We call the iPhone a phone, but is it? I can call people from my laptop, my tablet, etc. I can watch videos and play music and write notes on my phone. Everything is everything, and nothing is what it is.

Fuzzy edges don't render the centers un-useful. Philosophical debates about the edges consume all the oxygen, but regardless of whether you think an iPhone is a phone or a computer or a television, it is definitely not a cricket bat. An inability to draw a sharp boundary doesn't mean classification has broken down, and it's nihilistic to conclude that real, meaningful distinctions cannot be drawn.

New comment by jl6 in "WangNet – 1.8 MB, zero-dependency Numberwang adjudication in 11 languages"

jl6 — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:24:22 +0000

Amazing, I passed by Mornington Crescent only yesterday!

New comment by jl6 in "The case against JPEG XL"

jl6 — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 08:08:45 +0000

The chart showing jxl-rs taking 1209ms to decode a 5456x3632 image in a single thread is a little damning, but is there an equivalent benchmark showing multithreaded decode performance? Clients tend to have an abundance of threads these days.

New comment by jl6 in "Show HN: Bodily Oddities"

jl6 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 14:31:47 +0000

I used to feel mildly synaesthetic about day colours.

Saturday red, Sunday blue, Monday orange, Tuesday purple, Wednesday green, Thursday pink, Friday cyan.

Then I realised that was just the colour scheme used by the Radio Times.

New comment by jl6 in "Mind-altering drugs played key role in rise of Andean civilization"

jl6 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 14:05:54 +0000

Context does matter though? There are plenty of substances which are legal for certified professionals to use in controlled settings that would be illegal for untrained amateurs to use for recreational purposes. Plutonium, for example.

New comment by jl6 in "Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants"

jl6 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 06:26:19 +0000

Guess it’s a good time to be in the power plant business.

New comment by jl6 in "On Really Trying (2009)"

jl6 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 09:12:27 +0000

So where did it all go wrong, to end up with you posting comments like this?

New comment by jl6 in "My Feed, My Way"

jl6 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:45:56 +0000

I don't think it's at all obvious that a regulation-based approach could produce better outcomes than a prohibition-based approach. No doubt prohibition causes much violence and misery, but prohibition was a response to other great harms, most famously the condition of opium addicts.

Rather than rehash the arguments for and against, I would ask a meta-question: if the matter really were so clear, then why, over the last ~200 years, did every country introduce a prohibition-based stance, and why has no country switched to tax-and-regulate?

New comment by jl6 in "My Feed, My Way"

jl6 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:57:41 +0000

"tax and regulate" isn't immune from second-order effects either. Set the tax high enough and you'll get smuggling gangs with all the same tendencies.

New comment by jl6 in "No constitutional right to clean water, federal court finds"

jl6 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 19:03:05 +0000

At the risk of an analogy, this is like finding that the Linux kernel provides no guarantee that a process won’t contain buffer overflow vulnerabilities. While buffer overflows are bad, and it would be a good idea to try to prevent them, enforcing against them at the kernel level would be a far-reaching prospect with many consequences, intended and unintended.

The judge is opining that other layers of protection are available.

New comment by jl6 in "The many mysteries and lessons of the Bayeux tapestry"

jl6 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:31:09 +0000

Low stakes conspiracy: the high-security operation to move the tapestry to London was actually cover for the simultaneous movement of gold from European nations as part of their recent hedge against US counterparty risk.

New comment by jl6 in "Welcome to the Porcelain Insulator Collector's World of Mud"

jl6 — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 22:54:46 +0000

No disrespect to Arnold Rimmer, but that telegraph pole society has got nothing on the insulator folk.

New comment by jl6 in "Welcome to the Porcelain Insulator Collector's World of Mud"

jl6 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 11:06:36 +0000

Well I can’t say I understand the appeal of collecting insulators, but I’m completely in love with the idea that there are people who enjoy such a niche hobby with such intensity, and apparently have been enjoying it for decades, and have societies and conventions and everything. Unbelievable. This is what the internet is for.

New comment by jl6 in ".name Termination"

jl6 — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:48:30 +0000

I can only assume somebody was asleep on the job when this scheme was approved, because the outcome is in direct contradiction to ICANN’s mission statement:

> Its enduring mission is to ensure the stable, secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems.

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/about-icann

Arbitrary termination of service is not stability.

Enabling name hijacking is not security.

The answer cannot be a rival name scheme based on decentralization or crypto or whatever. Those are never going to help normal non-wizard users. The answer has to be to make the regulators do their job.

New comment by jl6 in "Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors (2015)"

jl6 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 11:55:32 +0000

I think “medium” is a key enabler for being able to sustain a regular schedule of reactor building. It’s way easier to raise $3bn every 3 years than $30bn every 30 years.

New comment by jl6 in "Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors (2015)"

jl6 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:17:39 +0000

Feels like there is a "too small" range where fixed costs make a reactor design uneconomic, and perhaps a "too big" range where they cost so much that they are rare strategic investments without the benefit of a production line.

Is there a happy medium? Some of the modern SMR proposals aren't all that small. There's a 470MW Rolls Royce unit, for example.

New comment by jl6 in "Firefox intent to ship: JPEG XL"

jl6 — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:39:23 +0000

Great outcome, and I hope the weight of mainstream browser support will spur camera and phone manufacturers to emit native JXLs from their devices.

New comment by jl6 in "Beware Management Consultants"

jl6 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:08:14 +0000

Not sure about high espionage, but information laundering is the right phrase for how it usually works: consultants cut across organizational boundaries, gathering useful information from the people who know what's actually going on (the rank-and-file employees) and packaging it for CxOs in a way that allows them to present an opportunity as their own idea, or a risk as not their fault. Nice, safe, clean information.