Hacker News: martindbp

New comment by martindbp in "The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café"

martindbp — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 09:43:01 +0000

Capitalist techbros didn't force anyone to do anything. You need to take responsibility for your own life.

New comment by martindbp in "OpenAI won't make money by 2030 and needs another $207B, HSBC estimates"

martindbp — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 15:57:44 +0000

What they are seeing is insane user and revenue growth. It's that simple. ChatGPT has like a billion users, and it came out 3 years ago. And then AI is getting better every year in a way that internet companies like Google or Facebook didn't. Google peaked very early in terms of usefulness, then it just spent decades monetizing it. AI is not even funded by ads, people are actually paying for it. It's really hard to get people to pay for something. I don't know if the investors will get a nice return, but given the numbers they're seeing I understand why they're doing it.

New comment by martindbp in "Work after work: Notes from an unemployed new grad watching the job market break"

martindbp — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 09:16:03 +0000

I almost get an existential crisis from the fact that this was written by someone in their early 20s

New comment by martindbp in "Starcloud"

martindbp — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 12:04:38 +0000

So what you're saying is we should put them on the moon?

New comment by martindbp in "Meta launches Hyperscape, technology to turn real-world spaces into VR"

martindbp — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 08:07:59 +0000

What's different is that Meta has sold 20+ million headsets, and there is a decent sized user base, albeit much smaller than people expected 5 years ago. This is not a dead technology just because you don't use it. In 2023 Meta Quest had roughly 6.3 million monthly active users.

According to this, 1.63% of Steam MAU have a VR headset which translates to roughly 2 million MAU: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

So, in some sense not a lot, but it has a decent foothold of people using it often. It's clearly different from VR in the past where there were literally a handful or maybe on the order of hundreds of headsets in the world. VR now also has a ton of different niches and use cases beyond games. I also think a comparison with gaming console hardware is more apt than comparing it to something like PC or smartphone sales.

New comment by martindbp in "Meta launches Hyperscape, technology to turn real-world spaces into VR"

martindbp — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 09:00:52 +0000

VR is in the trough of disillusionment phase right now, but I can almost guarantee you we'll see a slow but steady climb from here. The big question is if Meta will continue to invest into the space or if other smaller players will fill its place.

New comment by martindbp in "Seeing like a software company"

martindbp — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 07:56:17 +0000

If you're allocating stuff every frame you'll run into problems quickly. Sure, you can use an object pool or arena allocator, but then you're basically circumventing GC.

New comment by martindbp in "Seeing like a software company"

martindbp — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 09:34:46 +0000

Game dev in general has a much tighter feedback loop than most software. If you're leaking memory, you're doing that a hundred times a second. If your code is slow you get visual stuttering. If you want performant code you need to think about things like cache coherence, you can't use GC etc.

New comment by martindbp in "You’re a slow thinker. Now what?"

martindbp — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 11:47:03 +0000

This is exactly how I'd put it, and also why I absolutely hate context switches. When you're asking me to switch context, for example to a different project, then I have to bring in the project structure, the modules the moving pieces, the problem we're trying to solve, everything before I can remember enough to answer your question.

New comment by martindbp in "Take something you don’t like and try to like it"

martindbp — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 13:49:00 +0000

Would like to know as well. Whenever I suggest something new it's a default "NO!". But if it just happens naturally it's ok. Like if I put on a song and suggest he listen to it, my kid will literally scream and cry like I'm torturing him, but if it happens to be on the radio while driving then suddenly it's fine and he'll love it. I think part of the reason is that everything is on demand these days, unlike when we grew up on broadcast tv and radio.

New comment by martindbp in "Take something you don’t like and try to like it"

martindbp — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 13:38:02 +0000

I remember feeling vaguely threatened by interests that I didn't understand growing up. At one point for instance, my friend was really into anime, and I felt like it's too weird, like you'd need to be a very different kind of person to enjoy that kind of thing. Years later I decided to try it though, and still I have a bit of an aversion to a lot of the tropes of most anime, but there are also quite a few gems in there that I would've missed. I'm reminded of this often because it's common that people just have a blanket "I don't watch cartoons" attitude. I try to remember this when I have an aversion to some kind of music, literature, movie or hobby.

New comment by martindbp in "We’re Not So Special: A new book challenges human exceptionalism"

martindbp — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 12:52:22 +0000

We are also all made of atoms, not sure what you're trying to say here. We are different from the other animals on Earth, we are clearly special. That doesn't mean we're chosen by God or anything like that, but I don't see the sense in downplaying humanity either. We may be the only intelligent species capable of science and space flight in the universe for all we know.

New comment by martindbp in "We’re Not So Special: A new book challenges human exceptionalism"

martindbp — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 06:28:18 +0000

Humans bad. I think it's an ideological off-shoot from environmentalism. If you recognize that humans are the cause of environmental issues then we are the problem. If we are the problem, then we should try to discredit our specialness so that we can motivate there being fewer of us (anti-natalism).

New comment by martindbp in "A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union"

martindbp — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 08:37:31 +0000

Nordics are very capitalist, come and visit

New comment by martindbp in "A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union"

martindbp — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 08:29:58 +0000

I think that lifestyle is easily achieved by basically anyone, you don't need much money to live that kind of life. The problem is that life is only enjoyable if everyone lives the same life. You could save a ton of money and not have to work much if you lived a 70s lifestyle. Many even long for that lifestyle, but it only works if everyone lives it. If you're the only one living in the 70s and everyone else lives in the 2020s, most people would not be happy. Somehow, enduring things is much easier as a group. I remember talking to a Chinese person who said for most of their youth they spent their days studying until 11pm with breaks for lunch and dinner. That would be hell for most western kids, but apparently they didn't suffer too much because they were studying together with their friends who all had to endure the same schedule.

New comment by martindbp in "LLM Inevitabilism"

martindbp — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 11:08:55 +0000

Yes, nobody is claiming it's inevitable based on nothing, it's based on first principles thinking: economics, incentives, game theory, human psychology. Trying to recast this in terms of "predestination" gives me strong wordcel vibes.

New comment by martindbp in "Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business"

martindbp — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 07:20:59 +0000

What's missing from the application of the survivorship bias concept is that it really only applies if failure means death or a total wipeout. Pieter Levels for instance, a known success in the indie hacking scene, has created something like 70 projects and only a handful of them made any money. Presumably he also learned something from each project making the success of the next more likely.

New comment by martindbp in "Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels"

martindbp — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 07:43:05 +0000

Isn't this almost a requirement for getting into some prestigious American universities via selection based on a personal essay? You can't just be like "I had a great childhood in an upper middle-class family with parents who loved me and supported me".

New comment by martindbp in "How long it takes to know if a job is right for you or not"

martindbp — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 13:15:04 +0000

Had no idea .wtf was a thing

New comment by martindbp in "What happens when people don't understand how AI works"

martindbp — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 05:48:10 +0000

Anthropic has done much more in depth research actually introspecting the circuits: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio...