Hacker News: obruchez

New comment by obruchez in "The dead Internet is not a theory anymore"

obruchez — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:08:37 +0000

> It's a shame though that this is gonna kill so many sites and projects. Sure we have ChatGPT, but also with things like Google AI summary getting so much better traffic to sites is going to plummet. Without people visiting I think the incentive, heck even motivation, for a ton of the sites is gone. We've seen it with sites like Stack Overflow, but it's probably going to happen to just about everything..

As I see it, this is just an extra step in a long series of tools to just serve information more quickly. Search snippets for search results have always (?) been displayed for each link/page returned. If the information you were looking for was included in those snippets, then you wouldn't need to visit the actual site.

Then at some point there were knowledge cards/panels. Again, if the information you were looking for was in those cards/panels, then you didn't need to click on the links.

Now with LLMs/Gemini, the information is sometimes summarized at the top of the page. You need even less to visit the search results.

Google has always been a kind of cache for the Internet. It's just way more efficient at extracting and displaying information from that cache now.

So, yes, traffic keeps going down. But new knowledge will still need to be produced, right?

New comment by obruchez in "Film students who can no longer sit through films"

obruchez — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:02:34 +0000

I've finished IMDb's top 250 a few years ago. I'm now using this list ("a list of greatest films of all time") as a reference:

https://www.phi-phenomenon.org/

It's merging dozens of "greatest films" lists into a single "master" list.

New comment by obruchez in "Doing the thing is doing the thing"

obruchez — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:08:20 +0000

> Are there really people who "spend weeks planning the perfect architecture" to build some automation tools for themselves? I don't buy that.

I understand that it's not the main point in your comment (you're trying to determine if the parent comment was written using an LLM), but yes, we do exist: I've spent years planning personal projects that remain unimplemented. Don't underestimate the power of procrastination and perfectionism. Oliver Burkeman ("Four Thousand Weeks", etc.) could probably explain that dynamic better than me.

New comment by obruchez in "The mushroom making people hallucinate tiny humans"

obruchez — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 13:20:47 +0000

Do you know this from personal experience or after watching a "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia" episode or a similar documentary?

New comment by obruchez in "Is it a bubble?"

obruchez — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 08:47:15 +0000

It's difficult to know what people really believe, especially after only a few minutes of discussion, but I would say most people I talk to don't believe AGI is even possible. And they probably think their life won't be changed much by LLMs, AI, etc.

New comment by obruchez in "The New AI Consciousness Paper"

obruchez — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 14:57:21 +0000

Isn't that an argument in favor of taking care of wild animals instead of continuing factory farming, though?

New comment by obruchez in "How to stay sane in a world that rewards insanity"

obruchez — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 09:48:56 +0000

I read Ecclesiastes back in 2019. It's probably one of the more interesting books in the Bible. I wasn't particularly impressed with it, but it's a short read, so I still think it's a good suggestion, especially if you're atheist or agnostic.

New comment by obruchez in "Zürich voters ban noisy leaf blowers"

obruchez — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 08:21:03 +0000

I have the opposite anecdote. I left a lot of leaves on our lawn last winter (by pure laziness) and it definitely damaged the lawn. Edit: it was a rather young lawn, I guess (less than 2 years).

New comment by obruchez in "When the job search becomes impossible"

obruchez — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 07:04:02 +0000

The only time I had to hire somebody, the university I was working for in Switzerland made it mandatory for the candidates to send their application via mail, not email. That was back in 2014. I found this odd at the time, but I'm pretty sure it made my job way easier (less applications to review, motivated/serious candidates, etc.).

New comment by obruchez in "'Ad Blocking Is Not Piracy' Decision Overturned by Top German Court"

obruchez — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 07:24:54 +0000

I know people who still love to receive ads in the (physical) mail.

New comment by obruchez in "I'm Done with Ubuntu"

obruchez — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 20:18:17 +0000

My latest LTS upgrade ended up completely breaking my RAID partitions. I had to completely reinstall everything. It took me days. This was not a smooth experience.

New comment by obruchez in "Proposed bill to make it a crime to download DeepSeek in the US"

obruchez — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 07:44:02 +0000

I guess it worked in the sense that most people listen to music using legal services, instead of still using eMule, BitTorrent, etc.

New comment by obruchez in "Emotional support across adulthood: A 60-year study of men’s social networks"

obruchez — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 14:55:17 +0000

Isn't it perfectly normal/healthy to keep some of your private feelings totally private? Your best friends/spouses shouldn't necessarily be your psychotherapists.

New comment by obruchez in "I am rich and have no idea what to do"

obruchez — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 14:49:39 +0000

Having kept a diary/journal since 1993 and reading old entries daily, I'm struck by how we often see the past through rose-tinted glasses. The opposite is also true: I tend to forget happy moments from long ago.

New comment by obruchez in "Fucking Tired of AI"

obruchez — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 07:33:43 +0000

Kurzweil's book "The Singularity is Near" was published in 2005 and at the time he placed the technological singularity in 2045, so 40 years in the future. He said it was "near", because most people thought at the time that either it would never happen or it would happen in thousands or millions of years.

New comment by obruchez in "AGI is far from inevitable"

obruchez — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 09:09:53 +0000

What's ASI?

New comment by obruchez in "A rare disorder makes people see monsters"

obruchez — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 10:02:34 +0000

TIL: in French, "nightmare" is "cauchemar" and has the same etymology (the second part, at least).

New comment by obruchez in "Caffeine suppresses cerebral grey matter responses to chronic sleep restriction"

obruchez — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 09:19:59 +0000

I've been suffering of anxiety for decades. Nothing really serious. I stopped caffeine for one month in 2022, cold turkey. No coffee. No tea. No chocolate. I stopped alcohol as well (I don't drink much, so it wasn't really hard). I track a lot of things daily and during this abstinence period, my anxiety didn't decrease. On the contrary, it (very slightly) increased. This, of course, was not a controlled/blinded experiment, the duration was rather short (1 month), N=1, and I actually did two experiments at the same time (caffeine + alcohol), which is not optimal.

In summary, my conclusion is that I prefer drinking coffee (max 2-3 small cups daily, in the morning) than not.

Still, I'd like to try the experiment again in the future and stop caffeine for a longer period this time (3 months?).

Edit: I'm a slow metabolizer (rs762551 = AC).

New comment by obruchez in "Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder"

obruchez — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 12:16:16 +0000

You mean Shopify?

New comment by obruchez in "Traffic noise hurts children's brains"

obruchez — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 08:27:07 +0000

In Europe at least, where most (?) transmissions are still manual, you will still get way more noise from an ICE vehicle than an electric vehicle at low speed. This is my experience everywhere here in cities, on small roads, etc. This is largely caused by the fact that people tend to not drive in an optimal manner (i.e. using a low gear instead of a higher one).