Hacker News: marcosdumay

New comment by marcosdumay in "France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls"

marcosdumay — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:48:03 +0000

ANATEL says we will have authenticated numbers by 2028. After that, it's a matter of pressuring the government to punish the people doing the undesired calls.

The second implementation (AFAIK, we are in the 3rd now) of that no-call list was quite successful in pressuring companies. It can be done.

New comment by marcosdumay in "France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls"

marcosdumay — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:35:31 +0000

AFAIK, the problem is that the system works like international mail used to.

There are strict barriers at the borders to ensure everybody pays their dues. But once a call is accepted, there's no control at all about where it's going to.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer's"

marcosdumay — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:11:26 +0000

It's worth publication and awareness within people studying Alzheimer.

It's absolutely not worth publication with clickbait title and distorted description to the general public.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Is it all just vapourware?"

marcosdumay — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:19:31 +0000

Nah, the GP's claim is weeks for each feature, versus a few months in total. On a greenfield project.

Weeks for each feature in a greenfield project... Yeah, LLMs make unworking code way faster than that.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Monitors for Work"

marcosdumay — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:07:39 +0000

> I guess the workaround (with any monitor, really) is to ensure that the light sources are not behind you.

Offices are notoriously bad at optimizing that kind of thing.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength"

marcosdumay — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 17:16:04 +0000

LLMs are a much better experience than what web search has become nowadays. And they probably are a better experience than what standard search could ever be.

But yeah, that doesn't mean they are doing much more than search.

New comment by marcosdumay in "The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale"

marcosdumay — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:31:42 +0000

It solves static files... If you are extremely careful to set the executable properties of your PHP scripts.

No other.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Tiny black holes may be exploding stars across the Milky Way"

marcosdumay — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:53:38 +0000

It seems to relate much more to the size of the proposal than to its confidence.

Even more because the confidence changes all the time, but people do go around renaming well known ideas

New comment by marcosdumay in "GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2"

marcosdumay — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:06:34 +0000

Hurd is not just a kernel, but yes, it does provide approximately the same functionality of Linux.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Discovery Loop"

marcosdumay — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:52:53 +0000

Not to say we shouldn't grow plants... But we can do it 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more efficiently with machines.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Discovery Loop"

marcosdumay — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:48:19 +0000

Where do you find the information for 2026?

New comment by marcosdumay in "TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In"

marcosdumay — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:53:24 +0000

Well... Your example is way more likely than the GP's LLM getting the facts right.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area"

marcosdumay — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:42:26 +0000

> since they couldn't have been more than a decade behind the smallpox/diseases

They weren't. It took centuries for them to make any inroad into the Amazon.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

marcosdumay — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:15:07 +0000

Since some time around 2024, the problems started to grow way more numerous than they already were; the workarounds started to be disallowed; and more broken software started to be pushed as necessary for basic functionality. People were adapted to a certain level of breakage, but are seeing a different one.

Last time I remember them doing something similar was on the last days of XP / earlier Vista time. But it wasn't so bad at the time.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Decades-old fish sauce at abandoned factory in Canada finally being removed"

marcosdumay — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:58:00 +0000

That article doesn't have any extra information that wasn't in the original poster on this thread.

As fas as everybody here knows, it's rotten fish, salt and vinegar.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time"

marcosdumay — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:16:10 +0000

People don't like factory work. Given options, they will choose to do some less physically wearing work that pays more, and pay somebody else to do it.

Robots are the answer to reindustrialize the developed world, but that necessarily keeps industry smaller than services.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time"

marcosdumay — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:16:54 +0000

Looks stable:

https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/industrial-production-m...

Of course, stable is probably bad here. But it's not declining.

New comment by marcosdumay in "C++ float-to-int conversion can be undefined behavior"

marcosdumay — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:06:59 +0000

Architecture dependent is not the same as undefined.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Wind and solar overtake fossil fuels in Germany for the first time"

marcosdumay — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:58:38 +0000

What is not on the title:

For an entire year, that year being 2025.

Also, yes, absolute generation from fossil fuels is declining quickly. The total generation is changing way more slowly than that share.

New comment by marcosdumay in "Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code"

marcosdumay — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:04:06 +0000

So... AGI in 6 months?