Hacker News: njarboe

New comment by njarboe in "Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?"

njarboe — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:17:33 +0000

The same was probably said when machines started making furniture, cloth, harvesting wheat, etc. A desk made custom by a human to your specs is cool, beautiful, and life giving for both involved. And will cost $10-$50k. Maybe with the AIs and robots doing the grunt work, humans could get back to building things for each other. That would be great but I'm not sure what percentage of people are interested in that though.

New comment by njarboe in "LastPass notifies users of yet another data breach"

njarboe — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:37:19 +0000

A printed list in her purse has certain beneficial properties that a password manager does not.

New comment by njarboe in "Car headlights don't have to be this blinding"

njarboe — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:02:04 +0000

A big problem is bright screens and displays inside of cars at night. Your night vision never kicks in so you need extra bright lights to see, thus these bright lights that only light up a small section of the road. The more dispersed and even lighting of the old lights is so much better.

New comment by njarboe in "Car headlights don't have to be this blinding"

njarboe — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:58:38 +0000

Blame the chicken tax.

New comment by njarboe in "The dead economy theory"

njarboe — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:32:20 +0000

"The economy has absorbed automation before; agricultural employment collapsed from ninety percent of the American workforce to two percent and civilization continued."

This automation happened between around 1910 and 1930. With WWI, the great depression, WWII, Communist Russia, failure of the gold standard, etc., some argue that is when civilization died.

New comment by njarboe in "Newton's law of gravity passes its biggest test"

njarboe — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:13:05 +0000

Dark Unknown Matter would be a better name for lay people to understand what's going on. I'm no cosmologist but isn't it just a placeholder for something that gravity interacts with (and not much else) and we don't know what it currently is. When we discover what it is the name will change.

New comment by njarboe in "Backpacks got worse on purpose"

njarboe — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:53:56 +0000

Agreed. My brother is a painter and has commented, "At least in the past cheap tools were one-time-use, now they are usually zero-time-use. Built so poorly they don't even work out of the box."

New comment by njarboe in "The peril of laziness lost"

njarboe — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:13:09 +0000

German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord (a high-ranking army officer in the Reichswehr/Wehrmacht era):

“I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined.

Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff.

The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90% of every army and are suited to routine duties.

Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership posts, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions.

One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”

New comment by njarboe in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

njarboe — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:45:35 +0000

Would like to see such a system in action. Have any examples? Most go horribly wrong.

Early United States was pretty good but having a western frontier with "free" land was probably the enabling factor that no longer exists.

New comment by njarboe in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

njarboe — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:08:37 +0000

It would be great if everyone felt and was in a major way in control of their life. Equal before the law and not much law. The people who want to create "equality" by preventing people from accumulating wealth also want to accumulate power in the state. A tiny fraction of people will also be running a socialist state.

Aristocrats are going to aristocrat, as they say.

New comment by njarboe in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

njarboe — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:36:49 +0000

What does inequality even mean? Everyone must be identical? The idea of removing inequality is dystopian.

New comment by njarboe in "Live: Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

njarboe — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:15:28 +0000

"deeper shared community goals and aspirations"

When one communities deeply shared goals and aspirations conflict with another's (or subgroups) is when you get war and violence. The eras of relative peace is when you have one empire imposing its will.

New comment by njarboe in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

njarboe — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:11:44 +0000

I think these space projects are great, can create much good will, and give people dangerous things to do that are worth risking the danger for. But war, inequality, and climate mismanagement are political problems that are not going to be solved (if they need to be solved) by science and engineering (the first two at least).

New comment by njarboe in "Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics"

njarboe — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:29:12 +0000

Any scientific paper that does not document how things were done (methodologies) is basically worthless in the search for truth.

New comment by njarboe in "How the world’s first electric grid was built"

njarboe — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 08:35:43 +0000

Wow. Electricity prices went up 8x in Britain since 2005. How can industry there compete internationally?

New comment by njarboe in "The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19"

njarboe — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:47:20 +0000

Lots of tech gets discovered, is heavily patented, and then 20 years late,r when that large first round of patents expire, people start working on and developing the tech.

New comment by njarboe in "Proton Mail Helped FBI Unmask Anonymous 'Stop Cop City' Protester"

njarboe — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:31:28 +0000

Yes. If you send an email from a protonmail account to a gmail account that email is in google's system. Same if in the other direction. Would anyone using protonmail not know this. I would guess at least 99.9% of proton users understand this.

New comment by njarboe in "Banned in California"

njarboe — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:38:11 +0000

I would like to read this website but the font and colors are so poorly selected (read and grey for most of the text) that I'm not willing to struggle to do so. I guess my eyes are just old.

New comment by njarboe in "Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid"

njarboe — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 01:10:34 +0000

It probably could have been true if regulations were not written that said if your nuclear power is going to be cheaper than other sources you have to spend on safety features until it's not cheaper.

Like the internet today, electricity could have been a flat monthly fee determined by your service line limit (similar to bandwidth) with limits in place for excess use.

New comment by njarboe in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"

njarboe — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 20:16:22 +0000

Self driving cars for hire (Waymo, Tesla, others) can be that point-to-point system that is affordable. We will just have to build tunnels to deal with the increase in traffic. Hopefully the Boring Company or someone else can get tunneling costs way down.