Hacker News: mikestorrent

New comment by mikestorrent in "Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9"

mikestorrent — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:38:20 +0000

Always weirds me out to see an iMac running an OS older than OS X. The physical design language really ended up dictating the OS X look, didn't it? Still does, in a way, with Liquid Glass bringing back clear.

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

mikestorrent — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:08:56 +0000

Yes, and we haven't even really begun to nail down computer-use agents yet (can you believe they're still basically just OCR'ing screenshots?)

Once we have something that experiences a desktop interface more like a human does, an entire swathe of tooling that has heretofore been nigh-impossible to automate moves into the fold, and that'll be another explosion of folks finally getting to join the agentic workflow world on their industry specific apps...

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

mikestorrent — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:59:09 +0000

Yes, this one. Look at our governance; look at our coordination-at-scale; look at our collective problem solving. It's abysmal, beyond hope. If we have global scale problems, we are not capable of solving them effectively. We are literally not intelligent enough to handle the problems we are creating. Between rivers of garbage and CO2 levels and war, we have proven ourselves to be woefully unintelligent at the scale needed. If we are lucky, our thin window of survival depends on getting a hell of a lot smarter, real quick.

Consider this: All that hardware that's going into those datacentres right now? In 5 years or so it'll all be on the secondary market... an influx of cheaper compute like you've never seen.

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

mikestorrent — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:53:59 +0000

Yes, and RMS was correct in his Right to Read and so many other things - we're seeing the slow death of the never-enshrined-in-law right to compute. Luckily open-source is big enough to slow this down; we should all be pretty amazed and appreciative that there even are open-weights models at all, out there, because it is a profoundly democratizing thing.

New comment by mikestorrent in "Combustion engine web-based simulator"

mikestorrent — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:54:13 +0000

When you press the gas pedal in your car down (which used to just be a cable to the throttle body), does your car instantaneously increase in speed to match the pedal position?

All you're doing is letting more air in - the RPM is a function of the power the engine generates; more fuel and air than is currently needed for the current load at the current speed = increasing RPMs.

If you put the clutch in, a little blip of the gas is all that's needed to get the RPM quite high very quickly. The moment there's load on there, the same blip will not do very much at all.

New comment by mikestorrent in "Combustion engine web-based simulator"

mikestorrent — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:51:36 +0000

3000? Here I am wishing there was some Wankel Rotary representation and you're shifting at 3000? What are you driving, a Peterbilt?

New comment by mikestorrent in "Parental device use and the adolescent-caregiver attachment bond"

mikestorrent — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 05:58:07 +0000

Sounds like an answer from a non-parent, honestly. There's a lot more to it than that, and virtually every couple I know with children thought about it a lot before going ahead.

The number one reason is because they see other families and the love and joy that their children bring into their lives. This is inspiring, and brings people around to making the decision, even if they know the sacrifices they will have to make.

Boiling it all down to pure biology is stripping parents of agency to fit your worldview.

New comment by mikestorrent in "What Big Food Did to Ice Cream"

mikestorrent — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 05:38:45 +0000

That's the smoking gun -- he was absolutely right. It's not ice cream, it's slop!

New comment by mikestorrent in "EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0"

mikestorrent — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:49:17 +0000

So they should prorogue the entire Parliament and they all take a month off together. Why the fuck should some particular province or riding or whatever miss out on representation on an important issue just because their rep is out for a week on an island somewhere? Could they not have a proxy / surrogate??

New comment by mikestorrent in "Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament"

mikestorrent — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:13:50 +0000

The trouble is that most conventional ways of building a new service are trivial to block. What is needed now is unstoppable messaging and social networking built on top of existing services and protocols that won't be blocked right away, services with more legal protection - like email with GPG, or some kind of steganographically encrypted layer on top of Instagram.

Imagine all I ever posted was cat pics... unless I have your public key and then all of a sudden those pics are decoded into messages of dissent

New comment by mikestorrent in "Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament"

mikestorrent — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:11:00 +0000

It's mostly a lack of properly descriptive words in the language. I think "totalitarian liberalism" or the "managerial state" is probably closer to what we're talking about here. Power is not concentrated in one individual; responsibility and accountability are diffused so far that it is impossible to find someone who actually can do or change anything. "Rational systems" of business process and rigour serve to remove individual wisdom and intuition from the equation entirely. Adding AI on top of this will probably only further entrench it - walls of words protecting people from really improving anything meaningfully.

In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people. Trouble is, the people are seldom even morally aligned with each other in a unified way, so a dictator cannot easily represent their conflicting interests. Representative democracy does at least take a step towards solving that issue.

New comment by mikestorrent in "Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter"

mikestorrent — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:47:44 +0000

At least we're giving out free verification cans

New comment by mikestorrent in "Knoppix"

mikestorrent — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 21:32:27 +0000

This worked for me, once. Putting drives in the freezer has worked 3x. I miss that... when an SSD dies it's just dead

New comment by mikestorrent in "Knoppix"

mikestorrent — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 21:01:54 +0000

did you have a copy of Hiren's in there?

New comment by mikestorrent in "Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)"

mikestorrent — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 20:51:42 +0000

Who gives a shit what time it happens at? It's not like you're actually making the day shorter or longer, man.

New comment by mikestorrent in "Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)"

mikestorrent — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 20:51:20 +0000

Hell no. Never going back.

New comment by mikestorrent in "Old Computer Challenge"

mikestorrent — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 20:50:51 +0000

I bet you a dollar you could get a better machine for free if you looked around ;)

New comment by mikestorrent in "Old Computer Challenge"

mikestorrent — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:26:06 +0000

T400 is definitely cool, I have a T420 I love. But that Aptiva... man, when those were new, they were full of more bloatware than any other machine I'd ever seen. I made bank in high school just reinstalling windows for people on those... it was like 5x faster when I was done with it, easily. I think it's made it impossible for me to see that as a beauty, though.

New comment by mikestorrent in "Old Computer Challenge"

mikestorrent — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:20:41 +0000

But why

New comment by mikestorrent in "Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time (2025)"

mikestorrent — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 05:34:55 +0000

Are you Yanks seriously not going to get this sorted out before winter? BC has moved - can at least the rest of Cascadia get their asses in gear? Come on, California, I do not want to be dealing with a north-south time zone difference with my coworkers