Hacker News: michaelgburton

New comment by michaelgburton in "Montana becomes first state to enshrine 'right to compute' into law"

michaelgburton — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 13:30:15 +0000

Require, maybe not?

But it's a comparatively huge pain in the ass to use a lot of government services where I live without a smartphone.

New comment by michaelgburton in "An Unexpected Benefit from Quitting Coffee – 10 Months In"

michaelgburton — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 18:35:54 +0000

Quitting caffeine has been a no-op for me, but then again, caffeine was a no-op for me prior to that.

Glad it's working out for the author, though!

New comment by michaelgburton in "Standard Thermal: Energy Storage 500x Cheaper Than Batteries"

michaelgburton — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 15:19:46 +0000

Simpler to use the potential energy formula, surely.

E = mgh

m = E/gh

m = 3.6 * 10^6 J / (9.8 m/s^2 * 10m) = 3.6735 * 10^4 kg

New comment by michaelgburton in "Off with Their Heads: Illustrations of Blemmyes (ca. 1175–1724)"

michaelgburton — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 19:18:32 +0000

Love me some nonsensical medieval illustrations. Compare and contrast to 2023 illustration of Blemmyes (from a game I was working on a couple years ago):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HISYcO-WHmk

New comment by michaelgburton in "The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority"

michaelgburton — Tue, 13 May 2025 14:06:53 +0000

One only needs to look at Horizon: Zero Dawn to note that the truth of this is deeply uneven across the games industry. World streaming architectures are incredible technical achievements. So are moddable engines. There are plenty of technical limits being pushed by devs, it's just not done at all levels.

New comment by michaelgburton in "The Tranhumanist Cult Test"

michaelgburton — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 18:12:48 +0000

It's been very easy to observe acceleration in progress over time, and there's a natural question that emerges: Will we reach a point where people can't keep up?

Nothing hand-wavy or silly there. And the discussion of the topic as it was formed in the second half of the 20th century was pretty carefully couched in terms of what-ifs and conservative projection.

New comment by michaelgburton in "The Tranhumanist Cult Test"

michaelgburton — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 14:54:50 +0000

Here's the Vinge paper most folks cite when talking about The Singularity.

https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html

There's a lot of speculation in there, but it's pretty carefully couched in scientific terms, and particularly in what-ifs that satisfy even the most stringent demands for conservative thinking.

New comment by michaelgburton in "The Tranhumanist Cult Test"

michaelgburton — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 14:46:31 +0000

The singularity in this context refers to the point beyond which predictions will fail because we cannot possibly foresee the consequences of certain technological changes.

There's nothing historical about it; it came about as a result of a few different science writers looking into the future and wondering how we keep up in an accelerating technological context.

I actually agree that it's become something else, but the origin of the term was what I was correcting, and its origin isn't something woo-woo, it's firmly based in scientific speculation.

New comment by michaelgburton in "The Tranhumanist Cult Test"

michaelgburton — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 14:19:53 +0000

Um. The Singularity isn't religious in its origin. It's literally a reference to a mathematical singularity.

I'm not entirely opposed to the article's characterization, but this is a big one to get wrong. What the term has become in its pseudo-cult modern context is entirely divorced from what it came out of.

New comment by michaelgburton in "Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam"

michaelgburton — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:51:44 +0000

I was making short games. Specifically I was trying to make games that packed the same density of concentrated entertainment as other media.

The abridgement thing sounds like a smart approach, but ultimately I've gotten more enjoyment from shorter games that don't pack the fat in to begin with.

New comment by michaelgburton in "U.S. pauses all military aid to Ukraine"

michaelgburton — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 18:47:05 +0000

> Top gov officials is jews

Hard to imagine why you get labelled antisemitic

New comment by michaelgburton in "Show HN: I got laid off from Meta and created a minor hit on Steam"

michaelgburton — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 15:34:15 +0000

I literally started a company on that thesis. It failed, but I still believe in that mission.

New comment by michaelgburton in "Why hasn't commercial air travel gotten any faster since the 1960s? (2009)"

michaelgburton — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:23:15 +0000

There are visualization techniques that help with the washing over, but there's also the advice, which CBT therapists do give but randos on the internet always forget, that sometimes you're having anxiety (or another "negative emotion") for a reason, and it's a bad idea to ignore it in those cases.

If you want to get better at the "washing over" thing, maybe try visualizations like: - As you breathe, imagine you're pulling over to the side of the road and watching your anxious thoughts drive past. - As you breathe, imagine taking each anxious thought and placing it on a leaf on a stream and watching it float away

But in general, security theatre is kind of a legit reason to feel anxious - these folks have real power over you and can screw up your life - so it's ok to just feel it in those situations.

New comment by michaelgburton in "Why hasn't commercial air travel gotten any faster since the 1960s? (2009)"

michaelgburton — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 18:16:27 +0000

You sound like you've never had an issue, and hey, congrats, but let's not pretend that there aren't plenty of horror stories and legitimate reasons to worry. And suppressing legitimate worry is a bad habit, particularly for folks who don't have white, male, and several other "default" identity markers in their profile.

New comment by michaelgburton in "The Aging Programmer [video]"

michaelgburton — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 18:16:54 +0000

And yet it all too often gets applied in places where it is objectively stupid.

New comment by michaelgburton in "Ask HN: Where to Work After 40?"

michaelgburton — Thu, 02 Jan 2025 20:04:45 +0000

A buddy of mine introduced me to the concept pair of Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence. That's the short answer to your question. An older dev will have more accumulated experience and will be able to make decisions based on experience much better, but a younger dev will adopt new tools and learn new frameworks faster, and the latter tends to be the heavier load for the average job-lifetime (say 2-5 years) in the modern tech industry.

New comment by michaelgburton in "George Carlin's "Soft Language" (2019)"

michaelgburton — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 17:18:39 +0000

150+ animals per person per year? Citation needed.

New comment by michaelgburton in "Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter"

michaelgburton — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 13:24:11 +0000

Right, but not having kids is also a far bigger cost to many people than any amount of money. Hence we prefer other approaches to the problem.

New comment by michaelgburton in "Ask HN: What's the next big thing that few people are talking about?"

michaelgburton — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 14:52:49 +0000

Nothing about the world's rich folks suggests that they, as a class, are in any way genetically superior to anyone else. Nature vs nurture leans 90 degrees towards nurture.

New comment by michaelgburton in "How Gene Editing Could Ruin Human Evolution"

michaelgburton — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 18:05:00 +0000

It's pretty annoying that this person would have the gall to hitch dead artists to his dead horse when many artists are trying very hard to explain that, in fact, mental illness for the vast majority of them is just a plain old problem and not some mystical insight engine.