Hacker News: low_tech_love

New comment by low_tech_love in "Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division"

low_tech_love — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:24:14 +0000

I read this in the wiki format (I guess it’s mostly the same thing?) and thought it was a lot of fun, with may caveats (which is totally fine). My main criticism is that the idea of antimemetics in the book was let too loose, almost as if there are no limits whatsoever to what it can achieve, physically or psychologically, so that made it hard for me to wrap my head around the puzzle. There are basically no rules the universe of antimemetics, so the possibilities felt so massive and out of control that they did not fit into the paper so to speak. I feel like good SCP storytelling is usually harrowing but also “tangible”; there must be some set of rules that the universe adheres to so that we can join the mystery and explore the limits of what could happen (or be achieved) with that set of rules. When the effects of something are so broad that they completely rewrite the reality so as to e physically and mentally invincible/invisible, then the story feels more like a drop in an ocean rather than a complete product. Regardless, I enjoyed it!

New comment by low_tech_love in "The Mystery of Rennes-Le-Château, Part 1: The Priest's Treasure"

low_tech_love — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 12:51:00 +0000

I am among those who love GK3, but I wouldn't say it's my favorite in the series. It does have a great ambience, and really makes you feel like a tourist in rural France.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Aliens.gov ~ domain registered 17MAR2026"

low_tech_love — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 07:28:21 +0000

I never get why people think these things will work. The only ones who take deals like this are honest people who are struggling. Criminals don’t self deport, they want to stay, not leave. It’s the same in Europe, they make laws to deport people for small bureaucratic details, honest people say “yes sir” and leave, but the criminals don’t give a shit, they just stay. So you deport the good ones and keep the bad ones, what the hell do you get from that? I guess the real point is that nobody in politics really cares about illegal aliens and criminals, they only want the power that comes from populism.

New comment by low_tech_love in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

low_tech_love — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:32:53 +0000

Maybe slightly harder to test for, but one thing that LLMs love to do also is making comma-separated (with a final “and”) lists with three items. It looks good, sounds human, and has just the right size—not too long, not too short.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Valve's job rejection letter to a high school teen is a class act"

low_tech_love — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:07:14 +0000

2015 might as well be a century ago… I doubt this would happen today.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

low_tech_love — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 10:40:04 +0000

And quite frankly, they don't give a fuck. They have been conditioned not to give a fuck from an early age; the system works 99% of the time, so nobody really has to care about each other. There is literally no benefit in giving a fuck about another person, in fact it is quite possible that you'll end up being punished by the system for breaking the rules. It is a Leviathan whale state swimming through the sea with millions of little fish sucking on it, and they sure as hell don't care about the few who fall off during the trip.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

low_tech_love — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 10:34:16 +0000

My point is that, in a country where people act like well, people (and not robots), someone would be bothered by this and might try to solve the problem in some creative and unexpected way. Someone might think "damn, we're ruining these peoples' christmas, let's do something" and then fix it somehow. Here it's more like "well bummer, deal with it" in both cases. I doubt that a bunch of adult, highly-skilled people could not have a conversation over the phone and arrange for a train to stop 5 minutes on a track so people could get off. Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident? I think that a lack of willingness to give a fuck is much more likely.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

low_tech_love — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 10:30:44 +0000

The most important thing is to learn to expect and plan ahead, so that you don't get caught by surprise as much as it is reasonably possible. I do not expect anyone to act with humanity, so I start playing the system as early as possible. If I think something might be a problem in two weeks, I start calling them today, knowing that it'll take them two weeks minimum to take me seriously. If I go the the ER, I take movies and games with me (and lots of paracetamol) because I know it'll take several hours for anyone to even say hello to me, let alone do something concrete. I also, maybe more importantly, do not expect anything from the human side. Basically I see them as robots, so I deal with them as robots: explain everything calmly, repeat myself 100 times, and even more importantly, do not get angry. You get angry, you lose. It doesn't matter if you have an internal bleeding and you're dying, the moment you start screaming, nobody will take you seriously anymore. You have to be slow, strong, and systematic: repeat yourself, call again in 1h, then in 4h, then next morning, then next morning, until at some point something happens.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

low_tech_love — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 14:54:18 +0000

I’d say it’s mostly a North-European thing, not the whole world. I am a latin american living in Sweden and the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it). They trust the system so much that whenever it doesn’t work, it’s basically ”well bummer”. You become the 1% for which the system has failed, and you’re supposed to just take one for the team (since everyone else is having a good time anyway). The thing is simply that you have to learn to see the good side of the system and understand that you can’t have the cake and eat it too, unfortunately.

New comment by low_tech_love in "The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle"

low_tech_love — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 13:54:46 +0000

Yes a bit like modern car companies do by pushing out whatever untested experimental feature they have and let the customers figure them out (or die).

New comment by low_tech_love in "Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive"

low_tech_love — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 08:49:44 +0000

No, he’s blaming the car manufacturer for turning him (and all of us) into their free crash dummies.

New comment by low_tech_love in "The realities of being a pop star"

low_tech_love — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 12:30:54 +0000

Say what you will about this piece, I didn’t detect any AI in it and for that I thank Charli. I’ve been desperately for any original thoughts whatever that come out of a human being’s brain and in that sense it was an interesting read. However the real pearl was the link to Lou Reed’s interview, what a gem! It got me into a rabbit hole of watching Lou Reed making “fun” of obnoxious journalists on YouTube and I haven’t laughed this much in a long time. It also reminded me of this classic one from Iggy Pop: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=78S0yrMLfTU&pp=ygUcaWdneSBwb3A...

Edit: Actually that link is incomplete, this is also important: https://youtu.be/YJEvZHN9E6s

New comment by low_tech_love in "The realities of being a pop star"

low_tech_love — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 12:25:56 +0000

I also think she missed the point there. Normal people bust their asses on a daily basis to do a good job at whatever it is they do, with more often than not, under rewarding compensation and a lot of problems to overcome. I think it is normal for average people to think that it isn’t fair that some of these people are getting so much overwhelmingly good stuff for things that can be reasonably seen as futile.

New comment by low_tech_love in "FAWK: LLMs can write a language interpreter"

low_tech_love — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 14:14:15 +0000

Slightly off-topic: I have an honest question for all of you out there who love Advent of Code, please don't take this the wrong way, it is a real curiosity: what is it for you that makes the AoC challenge so special when compared with all of the thousands of other coding challenges/exercises/competitions out there? I've been doing coding challenges for a long time and I never got anything special out of AoC, so I'm really curious. Is it simply that it reached a wider audience?

New comment by low_tech_love in "Movie posters from Ghana in the 1980s and 90s"

low_tech_love — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 18:33:29 +0000

The worst part of this is how it has this kind of buzzfeed-like style of semi-tongue-in-cheek-but-still-politically-correct aesthetics. Is this what regression to the mean is in the future of AI writing? Are we doomed to read buzzfeed everywhere now?

New comment by low_tech_love in "Movie posters from Ghana in the 1980s and 90s"

low_tech_love — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 18:28:37 +0000

Amazing images, shitty lazy meaningless AI text.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Work is not school: Surviving institutional stupidity"

low_tech_love — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 05:58:37 +0000

"no one is out to get you" yeah... no.

New comment by low_tech_love in "I got the highest score on ARC-AGI again swapping Python for English"

low_tech_love — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 12:46:19 +0000

Try to get your LLM of choice to find its way out of a labyrinth that you describe in text form. It's absolutely awful even with the simplest mazes. I'm not sure the problem here is memory, though? I think it has to do with spatial reasoning. I'd be willing to bet every company right now is working on spatial reasoning (at least up to 3D) and as soon as that is working, a huge amount of pieces will fall into place.

New comment by low_tech_love in "Strange CW Keys"

low_tech_love — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 07:59:41 +0000

Nice, they used an obscure reference to explain another obscure reference, requiring two nested levels of explanation.

New comment by low_tech_love in "My AI-driven identity crisis"

low_tech_love — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 08:09:42 +0000

You’re not wrong, but I was addressing a specific point the author made in a specific sentence. The idea that people will get some sort of universal salary and be left alone to just do some woodworking in their backyard (in a non-profitable way I mean) is to me absurd. It doesn’t matter if AI solves all the problems of humankind; if someone sees you getting a salary without “earning” it (whatever the hell that means), then you will be bothered, no question about it.