Hacker News: mbty

New comment by mbty in "Show HN: Let your AI agents paint big arrows, boxes and text on your screen"

mbty — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:40:53 +0000

Meh, would have been cool-ish a few years back, now everyone and their grandmas could build something similar given enough tokens. Hard to be excited when similar gadget projects are a dime a dozen. I also don't think that AI use enables much in the way of creativity. It allows people to delegate their judgment to the model, which defaults to humdrum middle-of-the-road choices. Only the very high-level decisions remain personal, leading to a lack of texture past the first glance, so to speak. Not saying that it cannot be used with intentionality, just that it rarely is.

I actually somewhat enjoyed the times when vibed projects were a broken mess, lots of accidental comedy in that era.

New comment by mbty in "Global Glacier Extinction Explorer"

mbty — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:35:40 +0000

Okjökull is considered extinct, yet according to this website it should survive until the 2070s at least? It also gives 2079 for 1.5°C vs. 2075 for 2.7°C (I know that the local dynamic is not the same as the global one, but still).

New comment by mbty in "That fractal that's been up on my wall for years"

mbty — Thu, 29 May 2025 11:38:46 +0000

Really cool and in-depth, thank you!

I believe that there is a typo in the pattern formula (right after "Looking closely you might pick up on the pattern"): it should read

  5**(n/2) instead of 5**n
  5**((n-1)/2) instead of 5**(n-1)

(\overrightarrow{10*4} is [0, 25] but your original formula gives [0, 625])

Also, regarding Knuth's mistake: Youtube comments point out that his fractal is in fact correct; he just mistook the beginning point with the end point. Loosely speaking, the fractal is symmetrical about its middle turn, which is precisely the one Knuth believed to be incorrect. All in all, he still made a fractal-related mistake, so the conclusion holds.