Hacker News: karahime

New comment by karahime in "AI Data Centers Are Driving Up Power Bills – This Map Shows Where"

karahime — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:45:08 +0000

Indeed. It's not even really baffling, just load density supporting better economies of scale, translating into cheaper overall end rates.

New comment by karahime in "AI companies are shredding rare books"

karahime — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:04:34 +0000

No. Again, it's copyright that says "create a symbolic version and destroy the source, so that the thing may enter a controlled regime". Copyright is, in literal terms, a restriction on your right to copy.

New comment by karahime in "Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts"

karahime — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:52:22 +0000

It is rather sad, actually.

New comment by karahime in "AI companies are shredding rare books"

karahime — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:59:11 +0000

No, it isn't. Nothing about training a model requires this. You're thinking of copyright, which does treat information this way.

New comment by karahime in "GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization"

karahime — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:08:20 +0000

It's interesting to see the old "Why would we go to space when there are still uncured diseases" show up in a place like this. Science and discovery are singular, all discovery aids all discovery.

New comment by karahime in "Everybody's Weirded Out by AI–Except the People Who Foist It on Us"

karahime — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 22:16:10 +0000

I think it's pretty justified. The internet was unfairly maligned as a place solely for weirdos, nerds, and the unhinged by a lot of media for a long time, and often still is, even as everyone is online. You're thinking of the fanfare, but the fanfare is what is being treated dismissively as "just hype" within this same comparison.

New comment by karahime in "The kids with phones are alright"

karahime — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:55:34 +0000

You fall back on agree to disagree, twice, here, when you're accusing me of thinking only of my own perspective. It's not courteous to agree with something for the sake of agreement, nor is misrepresenting what we can say from an experiment useful for "showing patterns". You can use analogies without making poorly constructed, sweepingly grandiose ones.

Beyond that, like any parent, you have a lot of latitude in how you choose to treat your children, but I'm not going to agree that isolating them from computers is helping just because you frame it as "gentle", and I'm not going to say that we should replicate that elsewhere.

New comment by karahime in "The kids with phones are alright"

karahime — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:37:35 +0000

Old style rat drug experiments with rats in a barren cage being administered morphine are barely a good behavioral model for rats, let alone people. This is the aforementioned moral panic language. If the point was that solid it wouldn't need to make this multi-step analogy.

New comment by karahime in "The kids with phones are alright"

karahime — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:18:22 +0000

No, they're not, and yes, it is. I sincerely hope we do not take phones and other computers from future generations. That would be a terrible thing to do to them.

New comment by karahime in "Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke"

karahime — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:55:38 +0000

If we expand the placeholder, I think "Anything that can be rewritten in a language with excellent performance and safety characteristics will be rewritten in a language with excellent performance and safety characteristics" is a desirable state of affairs.

New comment by karahime in "AI 2040: Plan A"

karahime — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 09:35:53 +0000

I don't think it's a gotcha at all, they openly said it and were pondering how that might help them. Misinformation plays more to sides that are wrong about more things, and I don't consider misinformation my ally in anything.

New comment by karahime in "AI 2040: Plan A"

karahime — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:30:47 +0000

You should consider why the best ally to your position is misinformation.

New comment by karahime in "45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC"

karahime — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 21:12:22 +0000

Nobody wants to look at it, but I think this is a lot of it. The original Prince of Persia PC/Amiga version retailed at $39.95, or roughly $100 in today's money. In fact, roughly $100 in 2026 dollars was actually quite a stable price point for a very long time.

A $60 game in 2006 is also roughly $100 in 2026 dollars. I think what happened is that around then, people generally decided that "$60 is the price of a AAA game, and anything more is a sham". If I had to bet, I'd guess that that was around when a lot of the public got into gaming as something that wasn't just "for nerds".

I think that if people were willing to drop $100 up front, base price for a game, you would not find the microtransaction, ultimate edition, day 1 DLC shenanigans that you see. Companies would find it easy to say "But of course all skins are unlockable in game!"

New comment by karahime in "Successful Companies Go Blind"

karahime — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:40:09 +0000

I agree with this, and would add that it's hard in part because it's always been hard, and people have overcome. I can only imagine the difficulty of coming up with something like HTTP, or a suspension bridge, or algebra, without the mental scaffolding already being there. If you go back and read the original discussions of these, they include a ton of what seems like circuitous explanation for what we take for granted as "simple" ideas, but which are absolutely not simple at all if you have to pull them from the primordial void sight unseen.

New comment by karahime in "EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA"

karahime — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 12:50:50 +0000

Which is exactly the problem with this whole discussion. On the far side, you hear that it's heroin! It's fentanyl! It's alcohol! Facebook groups are the modern opium den! But when actually challenged, it's oh no no, that's a metaphor, it's metaphorical fentanyl, not real fentanyl. People on Instagram are metaphorically injecting metaphorical drugs into their metaphorical veins.

It's a poor basis for policy and thought. I would wager 20 francs that none of these people have ever seen a heroin OD. The whole discussion centers around a maximally impactful comparison but the middle of the comparison is hollow.

New comment by karahime in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

karahime — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 10:27:00 +0000

On the world being different now, you know, the post tries to make the case that it's not, and that the situation was also like this before LLMs. It tries to diagnose some deep root cause.

What I'm saying, though, is that if this were a Python project that were rewritten in C++ for speed, I think all of the above would be wildly out of line for GvR to write a teardown about how he tried to tell them how to write fast Python, but they were just too VC brained to listen.

It's not about the tone of the blog post. As a language designer, you already have complete control over what you want your language to be able to express, in a very literal and direct way. If he didn't like the Zig code of Bun, maybe that suggests that he's not putting the things he actually wants to be in Zig in Zig, or hasn't defined the separation between the language and what is written in it cleanly enough. Or, you accept that that's the beauty of it, and that poorly written code that runs runs.

It's not that in the end he couldn't control what Bun does, it's that he couldn't and shouldn't have been able to control that in the beginning, but the post is acting like he should have been able to assume direct control anyway.

New comment by karahime in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

karahime — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:30:32 +0000

Isn't this what makes it so strange, though? You didn't see K&R publish "so-and-so writes bad C", or Stroustrup decrying the Boost maintainers as hacks. Linus used to do this sort of thing, but mostly to things that directly affected the kernel, and even that eventually led to changed behavior and a code of conduct.

The post disclaims the ambassador relationship, but treats Bun as having all of the responsibility of being an ambassador anyway. If Bun is in Zig's house, like the monthly meetings and the core team code review suggest, then somehow the outcome reflects on Zig. If not, then that's fine, but then it begins and ends at "They were a project written in Zig, and now they're not". He can't have both "It's their fault because their code was slop" and "it's not my business".

New comment by karahime in "What's slowing down the AI buildout"

karahime — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 20:20:57 +0000

Most of the US's problems on this have little to do with putting too much priority on safety. There are countries that show that you can have a sane regulatory process and still get well priced nuclear. France from the 70s through the 90s and South Korea are the classic examples. Neither compromised on what's actually needed, but both cleared the way on redundant walls that don't demonstrate or stop anything bad from happening. You can achieve both greater nuclear safety and reduced process burden through standardization, which is how most places that have done it got it done.

New comment by karahime in "[dead]"

karahime — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:25:16 +0000

No. GAAP already prevents what it is implying from occurring, and the website is aware enough of this to admit it in the footnotes, but tries its best to distract from that with big, spicy implications on top. GAAP revenue is booked when there are real deliverables at arm's length pricing, and isn't when there isn't.

New comment by karahime in "The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous"

karahime — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 22:58:46 +0000

I agree, and think the effects on learning should be doubly emphasized. One can lock down everything and everyone to the highest degree possible, think of every possible edge case, set controls 2, 3, 4, 10 steps away from them, but not only is this not beneficial to society overall due to how it hurts adjacent information, it's not even beneficial to the goal in question, since it creates a brittle situation with locks that can't be changed or updated in a world which is always changing and always updating.