Hacker News: kraf

New comment by kraf in "An Alien Mind"

kraf — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 04:58:58 +0000

It'll learn how to not get caught lying.

Lying can unfortunately help you achieve goals very effectively, especially economical and political ones.

New comment by kraf in "Oceans hit highest temperature on record"

kraf — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 11:20:57 +0000

You can just as easily argue that markets caused all this. They don't incentivize the preservation of the planet or even life at all. There is no reason to believe that anything that comes out of markets organically is good, they don't converge towards worlds that have sound values. If they do in some instance then it's just by happenstance as in the solar example.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...

Also this seems to contradict your fossil fuel paragraph completely, the US is amongst the world's highest fossil fuel consumers per person: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels?fuel=total&m...

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

kraf — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:36:30 +0000

I'm not familiar with what you're talking about. Can you share a real world example of a case like this? You're saying a social media comment about a crime is somehow punished harshly and much harsher than the crime itself?

New comment by kraf in "Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels"

kraf — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:40:10 +0000

I've noticed this as well and I'm rather concerned about it. Those cheap rip offs will ruin countless classics for her and it's really sad. I'm looking for the most boring stuff for her to watch just so she doesn't become fully jaded by age 18.

Side note: if you need new stories, I've found a lot of weird and fun stuff to read on Royal Road.

New comment by kraf in "EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0"

kraf — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 19:19:47 +0000

> What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, [...]

I thought WhatsApp is removing e2e encryption. The article should replace the wrong example with something like Signal

New comment by kraf in "Grok 4.5"

kraf — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:05:22 +0000

And it's all the same to you? You don't care which values those things have? Of course there will always be underlying values. I wouldn't go as far as calling everything political narratives.

I think it's just pretty clear that Elon's values are not what most people want the world to be shaped by.

New comment by kraf in "Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness"

kraf — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 05:00:48 +0000

You may be wrong here and Apple seems to be the one copying the feature. Someone mentioned KineStop in this thread and that's been around since 2018.

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

kraf — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:49:35 +0000

I asked ChatGPT how many billionaires the US can have if every one of them has "just" 1 billion and if everyone else has basically nothing (i.e. zero net worth).

It said that the theoretical maximum is 174,000. In a country of 340 million.

That sounds to me like the chance to make it is a lot lower than 0.05%

Maybe we should just stop pretending that everyone can make it and that it's mostly people who already come about with vast amounts of luck (means = luck, opportunity = luck) who have even a chance to make it.

People with cool startup ideas cannot just make it. Working hard is not enough. Growth is not good enough. They will likely just be destroyed in an increasingly unfair and predatory market.

New comment by kraf in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

kraf — Tue, 12 May 2026 09:44:00 +0000

That's what I'm thinking too. There is a lot of noise and I know teams where the majority of the people writing Python just have no idea what they're doing.

I'm working with Clojure which is used mostly by senior engineers and it still blows my mind how well Claude writes software in it even though it's a fringe language. It's even able to pick up in-house DSLs written with macros.

New comment by kraf in "Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable"

kraf — Sun, 10 May 2026 05:08:05 +0000

They create toxic products that make the entire world more toxic. How they still manage to not have any responsibility while being editors and publishers is beyond me. I couldn't imagine how their insides wouldn't be toxic as well. Nice people don't do this.

New comment by kraf in "I Am Not A Number. In memory of the more than 72,000 Palestinians killed"

kraf — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:23:01 +0000

Sources can be found here. I was actually surprised myself how damning this looks.

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

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

New comment by kraf in "SpaceX files to go public"

kraf — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 04:36:35 +0000

But why did you invest on those grounds? Is profit not your goal here?

New comment by kraf in "System76 on Age Verification Laws"

kraf — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 07:46:52 +0000

Comparing today's internet to the 90s is hardly fair. It has become extremely predatory, and most places youth gravitate towards are controlled by algorithms with the goal of getting them hooked on the platforms to make them available for manipulation by the platform's customers.

Of course, there will be stories of smart kids doing amazing things with access to vast troves of information, but the average story is much sadder.

The EU is working on a type of digital ID that an age-restricted platform would ask for, which only gives the platform the age information and no further PII.

Companies (not talking about system76) amazingly always find the shittyest interpretations of their obligations to make sure to destroy the regulations intention as much as they can. The cookie popups should have been an option in the browser asking the user whether they want to be tracked and platforms were meant to respect this flag. Not every site asking individually, not all this dark pattern annoyance. It's mind-blowing that that was tanked so hard.

New comment by kraf in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"

kraf — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 18:37:42 +0000

Love the headline and curious what the pope actually believes that brains do.

New comment by kraf in "I’m joining OpenAI"

kraf — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 05:45:21 +0000

I usually don't notice these things but in the picture in the bottom it's almost exclusively white men.

New comment by kraf in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me"

kraf — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 12:13:39 +0000

No it's not, an agent is an agent. You can use other people like tools too but they are still agents. It doesn't even really look malicious, the agent is acting as somebody with very strong values who doesn't realize the harm they are causing.

New comment by kraf in "Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban"

kraf — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 06:54:04 +0000

This is not about stopping kids from communicating. The list of negative consequences of being on social media is long and real.

A government regulating something is also not authoritarian.

"Government bad" is not an argument by the way, and also not a given. It's just libertarian confusion.

New comment by kraf in "AirPods live translation blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts"

kraf — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 04:54:07 +0000

> who's to blame here

It's ok to wait longer for a product to make sure it's safe instead of the ol' "move fast and break things". Having ever new "interesting" stuff to play with to feed our endless boredom is not the only thing worth caring about.

New comment by kraf in "Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones"

kraf — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 11:02:50 +0000

Nah he's not. Stuff has been pretty stable, impressively so. Especially if you keep to certain hardware options which Apple users also accept.

New comment by kraf in "Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones"

kraf — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 11:00:46 +0000

It's been many years since I had my last driver issue. I find that impressive considering how many different platforms Linux has to run on.

Have you noticed how bad the Docker experience is on Macs though, after how many years?