Hacker News: pancakemouse

New comment by pancakemouse in "Cambodia unveils a statue of famous landmine-sniffing rat Magawa"

pancakemouse — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:57:56 +0000

If you visit Siem Reap, you can visit the APOPO visitor centre, and see the rats (and a demonstration!) for yourself. Highly recommended.

- http://apopo.org/support-us/apopo-visitor-center/

New comment by pancakemouse in "Electric vehicle sales are booming in South America – without Tesla"

pancakemouse — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 01:55:49 +0000

> resulting in 3-ton vehicles

And a surge in road deaths.

New comment by pancakemouse in "Replicate is joining Cloudflare"

pancakemouse — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 16:52:52 +0000

I wonder if they'll continue to support and develop Cog [0], which I've found quite useful for local deployments of models (as well as to Replicate's servers).

[0] https://github.com/replicate/cog

New comment by pancakemouse in "AI-generated 'poverty porn' fake images being used by aid agencies"

pancakemouse — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 14:29:33 +0000

Not at all snarky because I have no idea what the real answer is here, but although this sounds pretty good, it strikes me how in conflict this would be with most peoples' ideals if we tried any sort of system to scale this to larger populations (like a city).

Perhaps we want privacy-but-not-anonymity. Or perhaps society doesn't scale easily.

New comment by pancakemouse in "The cost of turning down wind turbines in Britain"

pancakemouse — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 13:08:33 +0000

> And you'd better believe wherever they buried the lines they'd have objections and expensive consultations about the disruption and the HoUsE VaLuEs caused by trenching, drilling and service structures.

But those are temporary disruptions. Overground lines are permanent.

The reason utilities and the Grid prefers overground is: it's cheaper. It's not better. It's cheaper.

Don't blame NIMBYs for that.

New comment by pancakemouse in "Claude Code 2.0"

pancakemouse — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:10:19 +0000

Something I've seen discussed very little is that Claude Code can be opened in a directory tree of any type of document you like (reports, spreadsheets, designs, papers, research, ...) and you can play around in all sorts of ways. Anthropic themselves hint at this by saying their whole organisation uses it, but the `Code` moniker is probably limiting adoption. They could release a generalised agent with a friendlier UI tomorrow and get much wider workplace adoption.

New comment by pancakemouse in "Why are there so many rationalist cults?"

pancakemouse — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 18:03:49 +0000

My favourite bumper sticker, "Militant Agnostic. I don't know, and neither do you."

New comment by pancakemouse in "GPT-5: Key characteristics, pricing and system card"

pancakemouse — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 13:08:47 +0000

> I want to build a tool that can render SVG to an image, then return that image so the model can see what it has drawn. For reasons.

New comment by pancakemouse in "I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file"

pancakemouse — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 16:29:27 +0000

What this shows to me, as someone who has committed some of the unholy crimes above, is that people want their system, however esoteric, to come naturally to them.

I think reading docs, understanding a new system which someone else has designed, and fitting one's brain into _their_ organisational structure is the hard part. Harder than designing one's own system. It's the reason many don't stick with an off-the-shelf app. Including Org mode.

New comment by pancakemouse in "GPT-5: Key characteristics, pricing and system card"

pancakemouse — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 19:08:07 +0000

Practically the first thing I do after a new model release is try to upgrade `llm`. Thank you, @simonw !

New comment by pancakemouse in "Reintroductions of beavers into the wild in several parts of England"

pancakemouse — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 07:58:19 +0000

The same has happened in the United Kingdom wrt deer and predators including wolves (which are locally extinct) -- a blunt instrument because we can think of no other way of protecting livestock. The result is we "have to" regularly cull thousands of animals instead of letting an ecosystem manage itself.

New comment by pancakemouse in "Show HN: LA Wildfire Satellite Analysis"

pancakemouse — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 18:20:13 +0000

> preventable

Preventable via multiple methods, you've been downvoted presumably for seeming insensitivity, but it seems a valid question. Water is plentiful, it's a rich area. This stuff can be prevented. Why wasn't it?

New comment by pancakemouse in "Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?"

pancakemouse — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:32:58 +0000

Will there be any conflict between Musk's supposed eco-credentials and Trump's ambitions to destroy everything green?

New comment by pancakemouse in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)"

pancakemouse — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 17:20:36 +0000

Fantastic. I hope it inspires some epic journeys!

New comment by pancakemouse in "Just use a monorepo"

pancakemouse — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 23:51:43 +0000

Regarding your first point, a good alternative to Bazel is https://please.build/ - its build graph can solve exactly this problem in CI.

New comment by pancakemouse in "Just use a monorepo"

pancakemouse — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 23:48:42 +0000

Anecdotally, as a developer I really appreciate a well-thought-out monorepo. All the code is there. You don't have to dig around anything legacy or outdated. Searching is a breeze and it's _fast_. Updating both simple and complex logic is equally easy. You don't need to somehow discover that some other repo uses the thing you changed. Everything has the same deployment process. The tests test the thing, as soon as you push it - instead of months down the line, when someone finds forgotten repo again and oh, it's never been tested with the new functionality in our main repos. Dependency hell doesn't really exist.

There seems to be more discipline around monorepos because they're collectively owned, whereas many repos across an org each become someone's baby, and practices diverge until teams in the _same company_ fork each others' repos because they don't get along.