Hacker News: margalabargala

New comment by margalabargala in "Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers"

margalabargala — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:07:43 +0000

Right, but didn't that one go out the window with your original comment? People follow all the rules some of the time, and some of the rules all the time.

New comment by margalabargala in "Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers"

margalabargala — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 22:02:59 +0000

HN guidelines are that I should choose the most generous interpretation of your comment, not the most likely one. It would be uncharitable and insulting to you to take your comment at face value.

New comment by margalabargala in "Data centers raise nearby temperatures by up to 4 degrees in Phoenix"

margalabargala — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:48:02 +0000

That's surprising to me. You think a gigawatt of heat cannot be felt 500 meters downwind? How near before you experience the temperature rise in the article, if not that?

New comment by margalabargala in "Field measurements of neighborhood-scale air temperature impacts of data centers"

margalabargala — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:47:02 +0000

Right, yes, if people want something studied, grants usually are made available to study it.

New comment by margalabargala in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

margalabargala — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:44:48 +0000

I assure you that is not true.

New comment by margalabargala in "Fixing a bricked Framework laptop"

margalabargala — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:56:38 +0000

Sure, but this is just one issue. How many potential $0.78 connectors exist? If one in 1000 customers has a need for a connector, and there are 40 different potential failure modes where a $0.78 connector would make recovery easier, is that worth the extra $30 per laptop?

New comment by margalabargala in "Shattered skeleton is first confirmed death from trebuchet"

margalabargala — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:45:12 +0000

The skull was found in 61 pieces, which is above the limit for quantity of pieces your skull can shatter into from blunt force while remaining alive.

New comment by margalabargala in "Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?"

margalabargala — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 02:35:16 +0000

I take your point, but unlike everything you mentioned, programming languages have usually been written for others to use, with a handful of Intercal-like exceptions.

Any fully new languages we get will be either doomed from the start, or the language equivalent of TempleOS. Or both.

New comment by margalabargala in "Will you have spent more of your life with computers than your family?"

margalabargala — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:55:34 +0000

Depends what you're doing, doesn't it?

New comment by margalabargala in "Will you have spent more of your life with computers than your family?"

margalabargala — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:34:56 +0000

I agree with most of what you said, however a big point of contention would be that the activities most people tend to spend time doing solo on their computer, do not tend to engender the types of "deep solitude experiences" you talk about

New comment by margalabargala in "Linear algebra done right"

margalabargala — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:47:27 +0000

It may simply be that linear algebra is a difficult topic to become introduced to, and even the best teaching tools cannot make it easy.

New comment by margalabargala in "My Ten Years in No Man's Sky"

margalabargala — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:38:20 +0000

> You can do really complex and interesting stuff with procedural generation, even at-scale. You need a large breadth of well-designed rules, and then you need temporal simulation over that breadth. That simulated history is just as important as having a lot of high quality rules when you want to create a living, breathing world. Ultima Ratio Regum is an example of how important this time aspect really is, that a place needs to have a history.

Dwarf Fortress also does an excellent job of this

New comment by margalabargala in "The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]"

margalabargala — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:19:30 +0000

Their earlier comment got flagged to death and they missed it when they looked.

New comment by margalabargala in "Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast"

margalabargala — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:06:26 +0000

I don't know about that. There's something not quite right going on with you. The deliberate misunderstanding, the faux outrage..just fine, I doubt it.

New comment by margalabargala in "Gmail might partially be to blame for receiving emails from other Sean Conners"

margalabargala — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 05:12:34 +0000

It's always since day 1 been gmail's stance that this was intended behavior.

From the various reports, including by people aware of gmail's stance, gmail may have had a bug allowing it at some point.

New comment by margalabargala in "The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]"

margalabargala — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 03:38:05 +0000

> All I said was that the cost was higher for tax payers than private industry.

Right, yes, generally government services have higher taxpayer costs than private industry that isn't funded by taxpayers...

The question, which has not been answered, is: were equal numbers of people to use private vs IRS services, which would at that scale cost more per filing?

New comment by margalabargala in "The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]"

margalabargala — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 03:32:49 +0000

I doubt this is the reason. In this particular case, it's more likely that a company such as Turbotax paid a sufficient sum of money to the President or one of his family members in exchange for this consideration.

New comment by margalabargala in "Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose"

margalabargala — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 02:55:01 +0000

On the contrary, I would argue that it's true in a totality of AI cases.

To your point, I agree that nominally there should be a way to give conceptual names to paths of weights, and when answering a question, notice which weights were and were not applied and retrospect on that.

That's not what reasoning traces as they currently exist are, though.

New comment by margalabargala in "Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast"

margalabargala — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 01:00:06 +0000

No, you are wrong. Or at least, incomplete.

The comment I replied to said "I need Claude because it's better than no AI.

That's like saying "I need the Porsche because it's better than no car".

Making a "car vs no car" argument is not an argument for an expensive car. Making an argument for an expensive car, requires both car vs no car, and expensive car vs any car. This is what I was pointing out above.

New comment by margalabargala in "Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast"

margalabargala — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 22:09:56 +0000

It doesn't, though.

$200/mo of Claude may give you what would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to create in 2023, but the value of what it creates isn't there anymore. It should be compared against what it would cost to create with other tools, not against the cost of you doing it by hand.

Otherwise would be like justifying an obviously overpriced car, because "it saves me so much compared to carrying things thousands of miles by hand!"