Hacker News: lordgroff

New comment by lordgroff in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

lordgroff — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:59:03 +0000

It's incredibly distressing, but I think the issue here lies with 'we'. Those at the very top are a very, shall we say, unique group. Those who seek power at such a level are not like the rest of us. There's established research showing that psychopathic and sociopathic traits are vastly more common among the "CEO class". It's not that wealth and power _makes_ them so, it's that relatively few are willing to be completely amoral or malicious in order to obtain as much power as possible. I believe that this effect is greatly magnified at the very top.

It's a tale as old as Plato: those most likely to WANT to rule are exactly the 'candidates' who absolutely should not.

New comment by lordgroff in "The MacBook Neo"

lordgroff — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:31:31 +0000

Linux will always be a second class citizen on Apple hardware. I have the M1 and have tried Linux a few times at different stages of maturity. As it is right now, it's still a far cry from the experience of a Linux on x86 hardware, and specifically Thinkpads. Bottom line is, even though I really like my laptop, I do NOT like Mac OS (and with every update I like it _less_) and will probably go back to a thinkpad for my next laptop. It's a big shame.

New comment by lordgroff in "US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February"

lordgroff — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:34:23 +0000

These are shockingly high.

New comment by lordgroff in "High-Level Is the Goal"

lordgroff — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 14:36:04 +0000

There's Lazarus / FPC. Fast, small. Extremely quick compiler. The language has its warts but very readable and relatively simple yet powerful. Uncool and treated like a relic though

New comment by lordgroff in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"

lordgroff — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:44:24 +0000

The idea that any country does 'friends' is, frankly, incredibly naive. Besides, Carney doesn't want to be friends with China, he wants to open up the market between the two countries. Of course, everyone here was better off when the trade flows crossed the natural north/south border, but this dependence created a weakness in a situation where our neighbourly hegemon decided to not be so neighbourly anymore. Turns out we weren't friends either.

New comment by lordgroff in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"

lordgroff — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:38:44 +0000

It has nothing to do with Venezuela, and the move has been long time coming. It's not 'on top of all the prior' rhetoric, it is _ALL_ the rhetoric.

Let me be clear: here in Canada, the idea we are ever going to have anything like the same relationship with the United States again is held by a small and shrinking minority. And with every day, with the shit show that's happening down south, this becomes more true. The old adage is true, trust takes years to build and seconds to break.

As for China, I doubt anyone among the Canadian leadership, and most people here, "trusts" China, but it has nothing to do with trust but with cold hard calculus of who we can sell our stuff to. China is a big market, and speaking of trust, China has not threatened us with annexation. Words matter, as do deeds.

Culture is important, but has relatively little to do with geopolitics. Europe had thousands of years of shared history and values, and 2 world wars.

New comment by lordgroff in "Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker"

lordgroff — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:48:20 +0000

And for which there's often no serious alternative to in many domains anyway.

New comment by lordgroff in "Rust--: Rust without the borrow checker"

lordgroff — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:44:47 +0000

The attitude expressed here and that tends to surface in any Rust discussion is the reason I completely lost interest in the language.

New comment by lordgroff in "How to Obsessively Tune WezTerm"

lordgroff — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 20:39:26 +0000

Kitty and wez both have the ability to present graphics on the terminal which may sound like a solution in search of a problem, but once you start using the capability, it's hard to live without it.

Wez is also cross platform so I get to use it on my Linux and Mac and my (Ugh) Windows work machine. Configuration being done in Lua is also something I quite like, but your mileage may vary on that one.

New comment by lordgroff in "The United States has lower life expectancy than most similarly wealthy nations"

lordgroff — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 16:34:47 +0000

It seemed to me that you were attributing the lower life expectancy due to US' diversity compared to many wealthy nations. My point was: Canada is similarly diverse and yet its life expectancy is higher.

New comment by lordgroff in "The United States has lower life expectancy than most similarly wealthy nations"

lordgroff — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 15:59:24 +0000

So is Canada -- more so in fact -- and yet...

New comment by lordgroff in "Git without a forge"

lordgroff — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 13:08:01 +0000

If Fossil let me rebase, I'd never use git for personal projects again. I love the whole all-in-one approach and it's all so functional. But the (almost extreme) hostility to a rebase workflow makes it a no go for me, and I'm sure many others.

New comment by lordgroff in "Trump says he has directed Treasury to stop minting new pennies"

lordgroff — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 14:53:34 +0000

Canadian here, currently absolutely in shock of what's happening down south (and your president is constantly threatening to bring us in on this circus against our will -- if someone told me this would be happening a few short months ago, I would have laughed).

But honest question, since his approval rating is positive (!!!), I thought your whole founding ethos was a rebellion against complete powers of a king, yet a lot of your "freedom" people are cheering it on. How can this be explained? Is the cognitive dissonance just so massive??? Here in Canada, we HAVE a king, yet he doesn't rule us...

New comment by lordgroff in "Is XYplorer really written in VB6?"

lordgroff — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 14:30:03 +0000

PHP never did do a py2->3, but instead took the js route of adding things while being very cautious indeed if breaking compatibility.

I really have very little annoyance with PHP despite retaining some WTFs. In fact, with a modern language server and psalm I find it downright comfortable.

New comment by lordgroff in "PHP Docker image just hit 1B pulls on Docker Hub"

lordgroff — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 15:06:35 +0000

> For a "dead" language, PHP sure seems to have a lot of life left in it!

I honestly have not met, in real life, anyone that has thought PHP is dead. People that hated PHP? Oh yeah, I've met plenty of such people, often from using it in anger in pre-7+ days. And, (to be fair) for a language nerd, even new PHP is not exactly an exciting language. It's productive, but so very far from glamorous.

But dead? How can it be? Wordpress is an absolute behemoth. Laravel is large. Symphony finds plenty of use in the biggishOrg space. Even Drupal is not dead. Who in their right mind could think it's dead?

New comment by lordgroff in "Dependency management fatigue, or why I ditched React for Go+HTMX+Templ"

lordgroff — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 16:13:24 +0000

That was kind of my take on this article as well. We're comparing libraries with lots of breaking-API churn vs. libraries that don't do as much, in another language.

When it comes to React itself, only breaking changes I ever experienced were 17->18 and that was such a simple fix it's not worth talking about.

New comment by lordgroff in "South Korean president declares martial law, parliament votes to lift it"

lordgroff — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 15:46:26 +0000

Please--do tell more re: China. I hear a lot of parroting of negative talking point about China here in Canada, I see a lot of crazy footage from China that looks like the future, but I'd love to know more about your actual experience.

New comment by lordgroff in "The size of BYD's factory"

lordgroff — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:56:55 +0000

I had the pleasure of seeing one in Mexico recently. If this car is garbage, sign me up! But alas, it's impossible because we decided that since we can't compete we'll just make them essentially illegal.

New comment by lordgroff in "The size of BYD's factory"

lordgroff — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:50:44 +0000

I always hear this as a criticism of China but then I watch some footage of the actual place and it looks like it lives in the future (to be fair, it's uneven, but let me tell you I've traveled to the US enough times to be shocked at how uneven it can get). Sure, there's real problems I'm sure, where isn't there, but here in Canada by the time we've built a kilometer of an LRT line massively over budget, China has added a new high speed rail line.

New comment by lordgroff in "New Calculation Finds we are close to the Kessler Syndrome [video]"

lordgroff — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 13:09:56 +0000

We've seen Russians shoot their own satellites, officially to ensure no large object re-entry (or some such nonsense, I don't remember), but I'm 10000% that it's a demonstration to the United States. If the Russians can do it, I'm sure China either already can or is very close to there. It's time to stop pretending that US can enforce rules by fiat without ramifications that scale from getting space assets blown up to a global war.

The world is already dangerously unstable and here we are discussing new ideas on how to make it more so.