Hacker News: phrotoma

New comment by phrotoma in "Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com Alternative"

phrotoma — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:11:58 +0000

Fucking instagram.

I wrote a bot to scrape the feeds of local event organizers and extract their events for me so I wouldn't have to look at that damned site just to find out what's going on. My account was banned for bot activity.

Never posted, commented, liked, or interacted in any way. Just read feeds and exported data.

Abandoned the project and blocked instagram at the DNS level for all my devices.

Fuck instagram.

New comment by phrotoma in "If AI coding is lowering your code quality, you're not managing quality right"

phrotoma — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:27:48 +0000

It's a different of degree, not kind.

Anybody who has reviewed pull requests can tell you that sooner or later you approve a PR after many rounds of changes because it's finally "good enough".

Fighting with a robot to just do the damned thing is less fraught because they don't get offended by critiques but it takes more round trips to get them pointed in the direction you want.

New comment by phrotoma in "Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)"

phrotoma — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 10:14:35 +0000

Folks enjoying this book and discussion may also enjoy this miniseries which predates youtube. "The Scene" is a fictional dramatization about a warez release group told entirely through the perspective of group members by way of screencasts of their online interactions.

I recall thinking it was a cool and novel way to tell a story at the time it was released, but admittedly I haven't revisitted it in a couple decades so it may seem tame by todays standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scene_(miniseries)

Episode one: https://youtu.be/ImLy5mqj8WI

New comment by phrotoma in "How to Write with an LLM"

phrotoma — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 10:06:17 +0000

Agreeing with a person is not the same thing as agreeing with a robot.

New comment by phrotoma in "Doing Everyone Else's Job"

phrotoma — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:25:27 +0000

That org is too large for you. At large orgs when you see a problem you think you can fix, someone will tell you that's not your job. At small orgs when you see a problem you think you can fix someone will thank their lucky stars you offered to help.

New comment by phrotoma in "Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing"

phrotoma — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:06:56 +0000

Just gonna go ahead and adopt the phrase "spin up my fans" to describe pissing me off.

New comment by phrotoma in "iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27"

phrotoma — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 09:52:31 +0000

I finally upgraded to Tahoe a couple weeks ago after putting it off for ages. As soon as it came up, my external monitor (connected by DVI to a caldigit dock) started being flaky af. I have to reconnect 2-3 times to get it to properly detect.

cool beans.

New comment by phrotoma in "The Nature of Dance"

phrotoma — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 10:52:26 +0000

In my day job I am an instructor. It has become fashionable of late to shit on the idea of learning styles for various reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Criticism

New comment by phrotoma in "Show HN: Bodily Oddities"

phrotoma — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 10:49:01 +0000

Definitely a gag.

New comment by phrotoma in "Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence"

phrotoma — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:25:35 +0000

Well shit. I'm a huge fan of the band Artic Monkeys but I know nothing about festival guides. Is there a connection?

New comment by phrotoma in "Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns"

phrotoma — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 08:54:51 +0000

old.reddit still works anonymously for me. maybe an a/b test?

New comment by phrotoma in "Meta Security Researcher's AI Agent Accidentally Deleted Her Emails"

phrotoma — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:20:54 +0000

Yep. Too bad Vagrant is useless these days :/

New comment by phrotoma in "Meta Security Researcher's AI Agent Accidentally Deleted Her Emails"

phrotoma — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:20:14 +0000

Containerizing sucks when you want to work on something containerized. If your goal is to have the agent iterate on a container it's much less headache to just put the whole thing in a VM and let it `docker build` and `docker run` whatever it wants to.

New comment by phrotoma in "What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)"

phrotoma — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:41:18 +0000

Honestly I'm so old that I'm not sure if this remark is satire or an actual attempt to tell me that I'm out of touch. Is writing like this considered normal now?

New comment by phrotoma in "What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)"

phrotoma — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 21:36:53 +0000

Sure sign of llm free writing, baffling sentence construction.

New comment by phrotoma in "Tether: iMessage, SMS, etc. on Linux"

phrotoma — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 18:09:34 +0000

Also curious. I keep messages.google.com in a pinned tab but the number of times I have to go find my phone and re-authenticate is too damned high.

New comment by phrotoma in "U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective"

phrotoma — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 13:38:07 +0000

Yep. A minor 10 foot speedbump that has me reaching for my 12 foot ladder.

New comment by phrotoma in "Black hole singularity is a surface not a point"

phrotoma — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:48:27 +0000

Perhaps you're thinking of something like this?

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

New comment by phrotoma in "Crafting QR Codes: A deep dive into QR code art (2024)"

phrotoma — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 09:45:58 +0000

Oh man, I've had the authors qrframe app bookmarked for a while but never knew about this blog post. Great read.

https://qrframe.kylezhe.ng/

New comment by phrotoma in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

phrotoma — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 09:17:19 +0000

Repeal all prohibition. It enriches cartels and incites corruption. Take all the money pissed up the wall fighting drug crime and spend it on treatment and rehab. Let corporations sell pharmaceutical grade drugs like heroin (junkies don't actually want fentanyl, it wears off too fast while heroin lasts for hours) and pay some fucking tax.