Hacker News: markstos

New comment by markstos in "US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money"

markstos — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:49:52 +0000

Where I can learn more about the genetic need of people of Sámi heritage to eat animal food?

When I tried to search for the details, I found only that it was a traditionally meat heavy diet.

New comment by markstos in "US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money"

markstos — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:46:59 +0000

Link?

New comment by markstos in "US beef prices have soared but farmers aren't making more money"

markstos — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:38:44 +0000

Animal agriculture is a key driver of climate change: https://sentientmedia.org/how-does-livestock-affect-climate-...

Along with the high price, that's one more reason to not buy it.

New comment by markstos in "Discovery Loop"

markstos — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:23:19 +0000

For certain amount of fast growth: yes. Then there's continued "growth-hacking" and enshittification to keep fast revenue growing after the pain point has been solved with dark patterns and questionable tactics.

Why? Because investors poured a bunch of money in to support fast growth and now they want their money back. And incremental growth won't do. Since 9 out of 10 of the investments fail, the surviving one has to continue to growth-hacking revenues.

New comment by markstos in "TokenTown: A visual way to understand how LLMs work"

markstos — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:26:24 +0000

From this I learned LLMs are complex and compute-intensive.

New comment by markstos in "Weathergotchi – an E-Paper Climate Logger"

markstos — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 20:31:04 +0000

I found some kind weather sensor like this in a creek in a sealed clear film canister-sized container.

I took it home and looked up the part number. Looks like it was probably part of a network of sensors monitoring the forest health, but some ziptie broke on this one and ended up starting to get washed away. It ran on a big watch battery. I didn't try to get the data off it.. don't recall how data access worked for it.

New comment by markstos in "Thunderbird Desktop settings research: what we learned from your feedback"

markstos — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 20:22:03 +0000

What's planned for upcoming versions of Thunderbird are in public roadmaps:

https://roadmaps.thunderbird.net/en-US/

New comment by markstos in "Snails' teeth beats spider silk as nature's strongest material (2015)"

markstos — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:41:37 +0000

Polymarket is currently taking bets on whether Snailman appears in the DC or Marvel universe first.

New comment by markstos in "AI 2040: Plan A"

markstos — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:32:25 +0000

The book Sentient is not about AI but abount the most amazing physical senses some other animals have.

The theme of the scientific findings is that while humans excel with none of our physical sensors, we do very well across the board in making use of them thanks to our relatively huge brains.

And fantastical amounts of compute power is exactly what are handing over to AI. The fact that their training data isn't perfect may matter less.

New comment by markstos in "Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives"

markstos — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:05:10 +0000

I co-maintain a popular Linux launcher, Fuzzel, on Codeberg. We have no shortage of contributors despite not being on Github and the quality of contributors there is fairly high. In the past there were performance problems, but it's worked well enough lately.

My personal repos are on Gitlab. The UI is cluttered, but it works well enough.

New comment by markstos in "What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?"

markstos — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:42:51 +0000

Kobo e-readers can connect directly to library e-book stores and download many titles directly for free from libraries.

New comment by markstos in "Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi"

markstos — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:07:56 +0000

I looked at Stow and Chezmoi and also have stuck with YADM. The exact reason is that YADM is so simple and intuitive because it's basically Git-for-dotfiles with so little to learn. Yet it also manages to support alternate and template files.

New comment by markstos in "Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers"

markstos — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:37:56 +0000

Google described Manifest V2 as significant tech debt with new bugs still found there. Either they are lying or it's a non-trivial feature set to continue to support.

So will be interesting to see how many other browsers actually do keep this support alive.

New comment by markstos in "Google Chrome update will close the door on ad blockers"

markstos — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:36:06 +0000

"This will also impact other Chromium-based browsers... Neowin points out that Microsoft Edge and Opera are likely to follow suit."

This is story about browser Chromium browser monoculture and Google's influence over it.

New comment by markstos in "Where is the AI jobs crisis?"

markstos — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:23:04 +0000

The median would be interesting than the mean, as you can be hollowing out the middle, leaving more low-wage workers and a few very highly paid ones and the "average" still looks good.

New comment by markstos in "FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs"

markstos — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:09:17 +0000

Flock is being rejected in a number of cities, thanks to citizens.

New comment by markstos in "WWDC 2026: Apple is Folding"

markstos — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:07:14 +0000

The idea that most people can’t afford a $2,000 phone?

New comment by markstos in "WWDC 2026: Apple is Folding"

markstos — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 14:57:40 +0000

"Please do a bunch of work to support a folding phone model only a few people will be able to afford"

New comment by markstos in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

markstos — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:03:31 +0000

No Population Growth in My Backyard -- NPGIMBY.

New comment by markstos in "Spherical Voronoi Diagram"

markstos — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:13:13 +0000

Voroni is useful for spatial analysis when you want to assign points to a nearest /something/ like airplane positions to the nearest airport.

I used for intersection crash analysis to make sure each crash was assigned to at most intersection. I combined this with a radius around each intersection so crashes too far away were also not attributed to an intersection.

More here: https://mark.stosberg.com/intersection-crash-analysis-with-q...