Hacker News: jrajav

New comment by jrajav in "How to earn a billion dollars"

jrajav — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:17:51 +0000

This is conflating businesses that solve billion dollar problems with people who individually contribute so much to a business that they solved the billion dollar problem all on their own. The latter is probably possible, but it's not necessarily the case that all billionaires and up today were such individuals.

It might be that if personal wealth alone were (effectively, by taxation) capped to $100m, we would still have exactly as much collective wealth, innovation, and value creation as we do today. Possibly more, because of more wealth distributed onto shared infrastructure and into the fluid economy.

New comment by jrajav in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

jrajav — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:55:31 +0000

Not much stops them from saying it's due to national security, when it's actually due to the guy in the chair having a fit of emotions. And the current admin has a very long streak of declaring things as national emergencies when those things just so happen to be something they recently lost face on.

New comment by jrajav in "Power Tools Got Worse on Purpose. Who Owns DeWalt, Craftsman, and Milwaukee?"

jrajav — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:00:25 +0000

Who's breaking down your door with muscle to make you pay for Ryobi?

New comment by jrajav in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce"

jrajav — Sat, 09 May 2026 15:38:03 +0000

It can be simultaneously true that the US has a serious wealth inequality problem (and other serious problems), and that other countries have problems far more severe, causing people to want to relocate to the US.

New comment by jrajav in "Formatting a 25M-line codebase overnight"

jrajav — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:31:01 +0000

This is exactly the remedy to the PR issue. I've "lucked" into owning a Prettier formatting pass at two different places now, and did the same process at each - full pass on master, simple step-by-step process to follow to update any PR by running the format script.

New comment by jrajav in "Show HN: Ableton Live MCP"

jrajav — Sun, 03 May 2026 23:13:31 +0000

Thanks for your well considered response. I disagree with the notion that extensive classical training is required in order to make beautiful, noteworthy music. There are innumerable counterproofs of this in every era of music. I also disagree that fully and deeply owning/designing one's tools is required - though I understand that we are more specifically talking about generative tools, I personally argue there's not enough meaningful distinction. One chooses to exercise intent, whether the tool is acoustic or digital, general or hyper-focused. And fully understanding the workings of every tool is a fool's errand in this modern age.

Whether these then extend to AI and LLMs I still can't fully say. There is, obviously, some kind of qualitative leap here. I'm not fully settled.

But I guess I lean more towards - it is a tool, let people use it to make their own beauty.

New comment by jrajav in "Show HN: Ableton Live MCP"

jrajav — Sun, 03 May 2026 21:49:02 +0000

Can I ask what the specific markers / qualifiers are for you to consider (let's call them) 'classical' generative and algorithmic techniques fair game in creative composition, but LLM agent based techniques not so?

To me, it seems like the "do it for me" aspect is similar, just at different levels of abstraction.

New comment by jrajav in "Show HN: Ableton Live MCP"

jrajav — Sun, 03 May 2026 21:46:16 +0000

I guess the guidelines don't apply to you, as long as you disagree vehemently enough with the OP's basic intent.

New comment by jrajav in "Online age verification is the hill to die on"

jrajav — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:54:39 +0000

It's not _completely_ shrouded in mystery - it started after Facebook got slapped by the EU for irresponsible handling of underage users, and since began a heavily funded lobbying push to drag competitors down with them. https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...

Of course, it's probably also been coopted by the neverending stream of nanny-state political power grabs in both the US and EU.

New comment by jrajav in "Online age verification is the hill to die on"

jrajav — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:47:53 +0000

This is almost verbatim the same argument that people make in support of allowing child labor in factories.

Children do not need, nor are they entitled to, any kind of "freedom" to work for a living.

New comment by jrajav in "EFF is leaving X"

jrajav — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:49:16 +0000

Only one of the individuals in this comparison has a Wikipedia page dedicated to the event and coverage of it.

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

jrajav — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:12:49 +0000

Why is Safari as bad as Chrome?

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

jrajav — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:11:24 +0000

I daily drove Zen for months. The design and implementation are overall fantastic. Unfortunately it still has chronic performance issues, gobbling up CPU randomly - and they don't seem to be too focused on despite it being a commonly reported issue.

I don't want to burn out my battery quicker than usual, so I was forced to switch off. I'm currently trying Orion instead and have been loving it - aside from several poorly implemented websites just not working on it. And the Cloudflare false positives, but that's as much or more an issue on Zen.

New comment by jrajav in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

jrajav — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:35:20 +0000

Allegations of cherry-picking scant bits of evidence to support a claim are less effective when that claim is held up by vast quantities of distinct, high-quality evidence.

New comment by jrajav in "MIT Living Wage Calculator"

jrajav — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:54:32 +0000

> This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable.

This is a debatable goalpost. It seems more reasonable to me to assume that meeting basic shelter needs includes having a private room to oneself. The only reason to argue otherwise is to try to drive down the wage further, and is that at all necessary? Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago, and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades, while housing costs have soared in recent times. Yet this whole time, GDP continues to rise. It seems that our society can easily support much higher minimum wages (and this would likely have only a positive effect of stimulating the economy), but simply chooses not to.

New comment by jrajav in "Bose has released API docs and opened the API for its EoL SoundTouch speakers"

jrajav — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:56:25 +0000

Signal reproduction matters quite a bit more for music production than it does for music listening and enjoyment. That's why producers and engineers look for 'monitors', rather than hi-fi speakers.

Hi-fi speakers, tube amps, and other accessories generally "degrade" the sound with added harmonics and natural smile EQs. That's what makes them sound more pleasing.

(I'm not disagreeing with you, just adding more color.)

New comment by jrajav in "After Windows Update, Password icon invisible, click where it used to be"

jrajav — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 17:25:45 +0000

You've either been very lucky or haven't been using much older software. macOS updates routinely cause issues early in the release cycle, particularly with backwards compatibility. Working in creative fields with lots of niche applications and plugins in use makes this a lot more apparent. Catalina in particular was a total nightmare.

New comment by jrajav in "The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed"

jrajav — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 02:17:48 +0000

China is the only country that is not aligned with the US and has the military might and production capacity to go toe to toe with the US in an all-out war. Russia would drain their coffers within a year. China is likely to start out producing the US on a similar timeframe. It is pretty reasonable to assume that China is top of mind for any war planning.

New comment by jrajav in "Deepnote, a Jupyter alternative, is going open source"

jrajav — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 22:42:10 +0000

Not quite a counterexample, since piracy derives all of its value from commercial works, and those who want access to them.

New comment by jrajav in "Gold hits $4,000 an ounce for the first time"

jrajav — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 03:19:56 +0000

What makes you think the decline is _mainly_ due to this, and not due to other events this year that could plausibly have a significant effect on the value of the dollar?