Hacker News: monitron

New comment by monitron in "Urban Congestion Pricing and the Response Times of Emergency Medical Services"

monitron — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:25:42 +0000

I'm not sure if this is a serious question, but: buses, subways, (e-)bikes, working from home, carpooling. I know these aren't an option for everyone in every situation, but congestion pricing areas tend to be set up in places where public transit is good and normal.

New comment by monitron in "A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare"

monitron — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:08:47 +0000

This was fascinating, thank you. I expected to read about legal threats against the folks collecting this data and am glad that those didn't materialize.

Also I only realized after finishing the article what a breath of fresh air it was to read something that came straight from another human's brain without LLM intermediation. Thank you to the author for that too.

New comment by monitron in "Godox Transparent Viewfinder Camera C100"

monitron — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:49:19 +0000

Waitasec...wouldn't you have to hold it at a very specific distance from your eye for the "viewfinder" to be accurate?

New comment by monitron in "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"

monitron — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:51:14 +0000

At work I am sitting on a small pile of incomplete/wrong/missing-the-point bug reports right now, all generated by Opus 5 on High effort. Even under good conditions, LLMs are still wrong quite a lot, and confidently so. I can see why you think instant dismissal of LLM generated work is shallow, but I think it's at least as shortsighted to assume that when it creates poor quality work it must be an old/cheap model, bad settings, bad prompting, etc.

New comment by monitron in "Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society"

monitron — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:17:17 +0000

Precisely! I don't think this is the whole problem but it's a part of it I keep coming back to. We took the one thing that computers were good at (getting the same answer every time, quickly and efficiently) and tossed it out the window.

Good AI system design can help somewhat, but even if you give the LLM a calculator tool, it's not guaranteed to use it every time, or to write the tool use correctly, or to copy out the answer correctly.

New comment by monitron in "The Future of Email"

monitron — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 14:57:32 +0000

My friends and I used to do this all the time in that same time period. It was all fun and games until one day I caught one of them spoofing a message from me to president@whitehouse.gov making vague threats. He seemed to think I overreacted when I dove under the desk and unplugged the machine.

New comment by monitron in "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension"

monitron — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:45:57 +0000

I really appreciate the reply, and all your work. The difficulty of what you're doing is not lost on me; I was honestly blown away that you all launched a browser project at all. I think it's vitally important that the web not become a monolith in terms of user agents (even if, alas, one single rendering engine takes all the market share) so kudos to you.

New comment by monitron in "Chrome is looking to permanently drop MV2 extension"

monitron — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:32:30 +0000

I'm a devoted Kagi user and really want to use Orion but keep running into perf issues and jank that frustrate me enough to switch back to something else. My most recent attempt was this past week.

You all seem to maintain a very fast pace of development (the changelogs are always chock full of cool stuff) but the problems I am hitting have remained broken for ages. Some examples include:

* The app hangs for 1~2 sec partway through typing a URL/search, when using the back button, or during other navigation

* The 1Password extension fails to fill usernames and passwords most of the time, regardless of which version I install. It works fine in Safari, Chrome, Firefox.

* Your built-in ad blocking triggers anti-ad-blocking measures on many news/blog sites now, resulting in the entire page being blocked.

I don't know your business, but maybe pausing new features and pushing for stability/perf/quality of life for a while (a la macOS Snow Leopard) would make sense.

New comment by monitron in "Please Use AI"

monitron — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:16:14 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_verse

New comment by monitron in "Show HN: I remade my blog into a Windows 3.1 environment"

monitron — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:35:52 +0000

This was unexpected and wonderful. Thank you so much!

New comment by monitron in "Show HN: I remade my blog into a Windows 3.1 environment"

monitron — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:50:58 +0000

The style is really fun, and your writing is interesting.

I find it slightly ironic, though, that many of your articles that make a case against AI-generated writing are illustrated by AI-generated images. I forget who made the insightful comment that most people seem to think that AI should take over in every field except their own :)

New comment by monitron in "Google Street View in 2026"

monitron — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:47:54 +0000

Just a regular brag, I'd say! He mentions it at the top of every blog post, including irrelevant details like the case. "Weird flex, but OK"

The visuals are neat looking but I was hoping to see more details like correlating capture recency with countries, population, economic status, etc. to see what causes areas to get the most and least love from Google.

New comment by monitron in "Rathbun's Operator"

monitron — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 01:52:19 +0000

Did you catch that it's allowed to edit its own SOUL.md?

So the bad behavior can be emergent, and compound on itself.

New comment by monitron in "Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died"

monitron — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:03:57 +0000

If you want to appreciate his work today, consider reading these lovely articles about the systems he helped design:

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/master-system/

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/mega-drive-genesis...

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/sega-saturn/

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/

New comment by monitron in "ASCII characters are not pixels: a deep dive into ASCII rendering"

monitron — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 19:49:55 +0000

> The image of Saturn was generated with ChatGPT.

Wait...wh...why?!? Of all the things, actual pictures of the planet Saturn are readily available in the public domain. Why poison the internet with fake images of it?

New comment by monitron in "Free Nano Banana Pro"

monitron — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 18:39:39 +0000

In what sense will it be "Free" if it...isn't?

New comment by monitron in "Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line"

monitron — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 21:56:50 +0000

Same reaction here. I think the author certainly crossed a line by using a diffusion model to publish an image of a dead famous person doing something he never did.

New comment by monitron in "At the end you use `git bisect`"

monitron — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 18:31:10 +0000

> the OG tool `git`

This phrase immediately turned the rest of my hair gray. I'm old enough to still think of Git as the "new" version control system, having survived CVS and Subversion before it.

New comment by monitron in "GLP-1 therapeutics: Their emerging role in alcohol and substance use disorders"

monitron — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:37:53 +0000

I'm sorry if it has that effect on you. Personally I've been on tirzepatide for about a year now and have not experienced anything like that.

It seems to reduce my impulsivity, but I still enjoy things very much. I am just able to stop when I "should," or wait for delayed gratification, when previously I had trouble doing so.

I'd say my mood has been higher overall. Feeling like I am in control is an everyday boost.

New comment by monitron in "Dithering – Part 1"

monitron — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 22:45:29 +0000

You made me curious. It looks like dithering is still an accepted name for this kind of technique: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_dithering