Hacker News: macintux

New comment by macintux in "U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators"

macintux — Sat, 23 May 2026 01:09:07 +0000

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

New comment by macintux in "1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation"

macintux — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:36:20 +0000

To anyone for whom Houston is a bit too far of a drive (plus the fact that the museum now seems closed), but Cincinnati is not: Union Terminal is another beautiful example of art deco.

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

I spent hours photographing in there last summer. Free tours available which will take you into some of the back offices with more art deco goodness.

New comment by macintux in "Valve removes free game from Steam after players discover it contains malware"

macintux — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:57:49 +0000

I remember, ~20 years ago, there was some free Christmas elf game (Flash?) that went viral and everyone was playing it. Struck me as a perfect vector for malware, I was a little surprised that didn’t happen.

New comment by macintux in "The AI Elephant in the Room"

macintux — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:45:44 +0000

I value traceability, and I value understanding the "why" of the code. For me, the prompts are useful for both.

New comment by macintux in "Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)"

macintux — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:52:46 +0000

Or not coming here at all.

New comment by macintux in "Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE"

macintux — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:55:37 +0000

> That's why we're fed the narrative that social media is evil and needs to be regulated or banned at all costs.

Social media prioritizing algorithms that feed off division and anger is evil.

If Facebook & Twitter were still ways to simply keep in touch with friends, family, and interest groups, I don't think anyone would care (other than the ads).

New comment by macintux in "Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit"

macintux — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:49:48 +0000

Name all the times Biden fired someone from his administration for failing to obtain a conviction of a political opponent, and I'll take this false equivalence seriously.

New comment by macintux in "Incident Report: Railway Blocked by Google Cloud [resolved]"

macintux — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:55:26 +0000

You’re giving Google far more credit than they’ve earned.

New comment by macintux in "Disney erased FiveThirtyEight"

macintux — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:00:19 +0000

Your description sounds more like evil vs boring, which is an easy choice for me.

And frankly I’ll vote for incompetence over evil too. Because, y’know, evil.

New comment by macintux in "Disney erased FiveThirtyEight"

macintux — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:55:48 +0000

Sore losers don’t generally write at length about their own mistakes and poor decisions that led to the ultimate demise of their baby.

New comment by macintux in "AI is a technology not a product"

macintux — Mon, 18 May 2026 01:22:42 +0000

Setting aside the blind and others with challenges for whom voice has the potential to be (if it isn’t already) a magical interface, I find it great for my HomePod for very narrow use cases. Wake me at 7am. Tell me the weather forecast for the weekend. Have I received any new messages?

New comment by macintux in "VoIP brings back old-fashioned pay phones to rural Vermont (2025)"

macintux — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:34:28 +0000

That sounds alarming, but from reading more about it, it doesn't seem like it would be relevant to this, although in the long run it's certainly possible that calling from a payphone would never actually reach someone directly, being shunted to the "you probably don't care about this" purgatory voicemail.

https://www.mintz.com/insights-center/viewpoints/2776/2025-1...

But that would seem true today as well.

New comment by macintux in "Prolog Basics Explained with Pokémon"

macintux — Sun, 17 May 2026 12:03:44 +0000

It continues to be immensely surprising to me that Joe Armstrong was able to write the initial Erlang implementation in Prolog. I wish I’d asked him about getting a copy of the source code.

New comment by macintux in "US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI"

macintux — Sat, 16 May 2026 18:55:47 +0000

The problem is that the C Suite folks can hang onto their delusions longer than most people can get by without gainful employment.

New comment by macintux in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

macintux — Sat, 16 May 2026 17:44:02 +0000

Not to mention the countries heavily reliant on LNG from Qatar that are facing a very difficult time.

New comment by macintux in "MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble"

macintux — Fri, 15 May 2026 01:03:35 +0000

Yep: tap to click and 3-finger drag are amazing. I know mice are useful, particularly for games, but every time I'm forced to use one when helping someone with their computer I absolutely rage at it. Apple's trackpads, and software for same, are a big reason I'm not tempted to go back to Linux.

New comment by macintux in "Claude for Legal"

macintux — Thu, 14 May 2026 23:44:20 +0000

Shades of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...

New comment by macintux in "Claude for Legal"

macintux — Thu, 14 May 2026 23:42:53 +0000

I think the problem is that laws overlap, with decades of case law clarifying their interactions. Looking at one law probably isn't enough to determine whether an LLM is lying to you.

New comment by macintux in "Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise"

macintux — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:17:42 +0000

I took a job in another state in large part because one of the interviewers was a highly skilled sysadmin that I wanted to learn from (I had basically backed myself into system administration as a career at my first job, a startup, so I didn't have a lot of people to lean on to learn my trade).

Of course, he turned in his notice shortly after I arrived, because he had found his successor. So, that didn't work out so well for me.

New comment by macintux in "Learning Software Architecture"

macintux — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:23:34 +0000

So. What.

People, particularly non-native English speakers, are going to use LLMs to help with their writing. Complaining about it adds nothing to the discussion.