Hacker News: ompogUe

New comment by ompogUe in "Unreal Agent"

ompogUe — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:28:36 +0000

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

New comment by ompogUe in "Uber shuts operations in Nigeria and Uganda with immediate effect"

ompogUe — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:56:39 +0000

Wonder how much this was influenced by both drivers and riders gaming the system.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IYaBPIwope0

New comment by ompogUe in "Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12M Given to DHH"

ompogUe — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 18:21:24 +0000

Not sure where this was ever a mainstream narrative.

I guess if by mainstream culture you mean some sort of thin-skinned incel echo chamber. Which, yes, those "men" are pretty weak and pitiful, but I've never seen and calls to kill any of them.

New comment by ompogUe in "Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12M Given to DHH"

ompogUe — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 18:15:59 +0000

I guess if you want to live in a hateful society, you'd accept it in the interests of hateful free speech. Kind of a race to the bottom, though.

However, if you look, for example, at the history of constitutional amendments over the centuries, turns out they've consistently been to provide more inclusivity/less hate. And that's arguably what made america great.

Seems the maga crowd wants to make America great at being stupid, mean and weak, instead of that inspirational light on the hill.

New comment by ompogUe in "If You Knew God Exists, Wouldn't You Become a Priest?"

ompogUe — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:53:58 +0000

Seems he's neither benevolent nor omniscient if he didn't know we'd "rebel", and then was so shallow about punishing us for it.

New comment by ompogUe in "I turned my security cameras into an automatic bird identification system"

ompogUe — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:20:55 +0000

Did a similar thing where I had a neighbor who raised dobermans and rottweilers - it's a bit difficult to code with 8 or 9 large dogs barking in the yard outside your window.

Set up an amp and speakers that would pump out ultrasonic noise when it heard the barking, sending them running to the other side of their house.

New comment by ompogUe in "PM Carney announces largest clean energy investment in North American history"

ompogUe — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:04:05 +0000

Yes, go back to sleep. I will always be out of fashion when the hip look is being an ostrich with it's head up it's butt.

New comment by ompogUe in "Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree"

ompogUe — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 23:57:09 +0000

If we're joking:

A Roman walks into a bar and says, "Can I have a martinus?"

The bartender asks, "Don't you mean a martini?"

The Roman responds, "If I wanted a double, I would have asked for it."

New comment by ompogUe in "How we made a text-to-speech model respond in sub-50 ms"

ompogUe — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 23:46:46 +0000

Does hardware count? Like a Roland VT-4?

New comment by ompogUe in "New Worlds: We are living in the future of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson"

ompogUe — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 23:18:25 +0000

Hear, hear! Cadillac using Led Zeppelin broke something in me.

I'm on the fence with the Beastie Boys getting used in movie fight scenes. They said they'd never do ads. Elevates the scenes, but it also elevates the IP of Disney and Paramount.

New comment by ompogUe in "PM Carney announces largest clean energy investment in North American history"

ompogUe — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 03:31:01 +0000

Nope, the pure evil award goes to Stephen Harper. He literally auctioned off and trashed decades of paper scientific research reports to get rid of all of those pesky climate statistics.

New comment by ompogUe in "John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)"

ompogUe — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:04:43 +0000

Craziest part of the dolphin story is before he got the NASA funding and subsequent debauchery.

In the 50s when he started to study them, he learned that you cannot open up their brains while they were still alive and poke at them. Apparently killed 5 or 6 of them that way before trying different ways to study them.

New comment by ompogUe in "Everything I Know (1975)"

ompogUe — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:07:59 +0000

Reread this within the last 3 months. Read originally as the first book in my Industrial Design coursework.

New comment by ompogUe in "Why etymologies matter: How tracing words can illuminate history (2024)"

ompogUe — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:45:20 +0000

This has been a self-deprecating joke in SW Louisiana since at least the 1970s. But an oil rich Acadian and "hollow statue" said in a Cajun accent.

New comment by ompogUe in "AI Firms Are Buying Up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them"

ompogUe — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:52:11 +0000

Once again, see Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge. Foresaw exactly this. Written in 2006, takes place in 2025.

New comment by ompogUe in "Meta's glasses will turn off the camera if you tamper with the privacy light"

ompogUe — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 00:08:48 +0000

Really, the original vision 20+ years ago (i.e. Rainbow's End), was that the user would have an overlay of the world they wanted to live in.

Where your pub might appear to you to be swords and sorcery world, with an orc for a bartender, the bartender would be in a sci-fi world and you would be a robot.

The cameras were needed to keep track of the real world.

I agree though, and this whole pervy use case wasn't really envisioned as much then.

New comment by ompogUe in "Spain Orders Blacklist of Palantir from Public and Private Companies"

ompogUe — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 22:29:01 +0000

> says that it's easier to change the world by inventing new technology than through democracy

It had a better ring to it to me when Buckminster Fuller said essentially this. He was trying to do it through design rather than control.

New comment by ompogUe in "Scientists reveal surprising mechanism behind Venus flytrap's rapid snap"

ompogUe — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:38:38 +0000

My understanding was that they don't shut immediately upon touch to avoid false positives (leaves, water droplets). They only close up a second touch (something alive). They actually count.

Also, talks about the cells softening, but fails to mention what I think is most interesting: those cells contain water under super high pressure.

New comment by ompogUe in "Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC"

ompogUe — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:50:10 +0000

Was on a team that was trying to sell AltaVista a social media presence (before facebook/myspace/etc). Our people were mostly using Google, but we still wanted the client. One of the "moderation experts" on our side (i.e. - not tech or busniess) who evidently didn't understand what AltaVista was about asked them "Why don't you just use Google? It's better".

New comment by ompogUe in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

ompogUe — Sat, 23 May 2026 02:27:35 +0000

As the owner of a Juno 106, I can't disagree. In the 90's, to me, it was Panasonic video gear that I found amazing. Had to take apart a couple of toughbooks tonight, and they are great little machines.

Although, to me, what I've always loved about Japan is how they will take every medium that arrives on the scene and treat it with loving craftsmanship. From jazz to skateboarding to yo-yos.