Hacker News: pnexk

New comment by pnexk in "Stealing Is a Skill"

pnexk — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:46:36 +0000

In a similar vein, one of my favorite HN comments in the context of the modernist movement. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27243252

New comment by pnexk in "Ask HN: Are people optimistic about the future?"

pnexk — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 11:59:00 +0000

Sounds like South Africa possibly.

New comment by pnexk in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

pnexk — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:39:25 +0000

Another example of how we’re all collectively becoming worse at properly reading and parsing longer text.

Really does make me wonder about backtracking on our breakthroughs in literacy rates.

New comment by pnexk in "The Problem with the Ferrari Luce EV Offers a Lesson for Every Leader"

pnexk — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:15:41 +0000

I wish there was an article on this matter that wasn’t written like a capitalist industrial consumer taste manufacturing piece. Takes longer to get to the point too, but that’s just me.

New comment by pnexk in "We've made the world too complicated"

pnexk — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:24:18 +0000

TFA’s author notes they’ve watched Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalization. As someone who is vary of his Century of Self documentary, I think it’s worth remembering how deceptive visual mediums can be.

It’s not that textual arguments and essays cannot mislead and make muddled arguments… but presentation and style in documentaries/video essays have an immense capability to convince the average viewer of an articulated idea or claim’s factuality in a way that text cannot.

None of this is to say documentaries or YouTube essays cannot make correct points or share beautiful ideas that are grounded, but that it’s far more difficult to disentangle half-truths, correct statements from half baked ideas presented with historical footage and sober background music.

New comment by pnexk in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

pnexk — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:30:39 +0000

Hit the nail on the head with that framing. So many articles are now coming out addressing the anxieties about adoption of a new technology, but we genuinely don’t really need it as a society.

I still wonder if we really needed the iPhone or many other things we’re told is “progress” and innovation in an arrow of time manner. The future is not set in stone and things need not play out in this manner at all. Unlike the iPhone where most were excited by its possibilities (even if they traded precious privacy in the name of convenience), there’s not a clear reason that this version of LLM driven technologies represent significant upsides than downsides.

New comment by pnexk in "I won't download your app. The web version is a-ok"

pnexk — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:01:58 +0000

It is also the case that PCs are still more expensive than phones. Had a work colleague in one of my first customer facing service jobs who relied almost completely on an android phone to get everything done from mortgage applications to entertainment before I gifted them one of my lesser used laptops.

New comment by pnexk in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

pnexk — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 01:32:46 +0000

You created this account exclusively to articulate transphobic misinformation?

New comment by pnexk in "The Brand Age"

pnexk — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 01:56:42 +0000

true. This is a good essay but there’s, as to be expected, not too much of an acknowledgement of the economic and political backdrop of the arena this played out in. A lot of discussions of this essay therefore get diluted into musings about aspects of human nature and its tendency to obsess over status and while missing the broader point about the role these sorts of corpo strategies play in modern societal wellbeing.

New comment by pnexk in "The Brand Age"

pnexk — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 01:34:53 +0000

I’d wish for a more pointed rebuttal than merely a post complaining that the writer now sucks on here. It seems substantial to a degree of a post to me at least even if not whole in its conclusions.

New comment by pnexk in "GPT-5.4"

pnexk — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:28:53 +0000

Helpful type of nagging for me. Most here would agree they are not a positive aspect of the modern digital experience, calling it out gently without hostility is not bad. It might not be quite self policing but some of that with good reason is not bad for healthy communities IMO.

New comment by pnexk in "Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts"

pnexk — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 04:17:52 +0000

Clearly an AI bot posting slop. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46753519 being another example.

I wonder if there’s known ideas on how to protect the quality of discourse on here from this type of intrusion :<

New comment by pnexk in "Microgpt"

pnexk — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 04:12:18 +0000

Firsthand evidence of AI bot accounts posting slop on here/astroturfing I suppose.

New comment by pnexk in "Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025)"

pnexk — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 23:31:59 +0000

Tangentially, I think that the “excuse” for these platforms that they need to make money enabled a lot of the current dystopian level of ad tracking.

Network effects be damned, we should all be a little more willing to pay to be part of platforms hosting digital communities or at least contribute in some way to the infrastructure.

New comment by pnexk in "Why The Jetsons still matters (2012)"

pnexk — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 13:39:39 +0000

On the contrary, it being published in 2012 makes it feel a little closer to 20th century mode of traditional media cultural criticism which felt a little more grounded than it is now in established media.

It’s also interesting for me because it’s a small slice of insight into the cultural consciousness of people’s perceptions of the trajectory of technology and its ills & promises at the time. It may sound like I’m exaggerating how long ago this was, but it really does feel like 2015 onwards was a large disruption from the expected status quo in the West in both good and bad ways. Not just in politics (Cambridge analytica?)but also in the way the general public perceived the technology industry and the nature of the kind of force it is at large in society.

What's Wrong with NIH Grants?

pnexk — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:43:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.statecraft.pub/p/whats-wrong-with-nih-grants

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722605

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by pnexk in "Canada Announces Divorce from America"

pnexk — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:51:11 +0000

> This is a large, obvious, mistake.

It seems quite rational a response to the decisions taken by a larger neighboring nation’s state unexpectedly increasing hostility.

New comment by pnexk in "U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier"

pnexk — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 19:16:59 +0000

Would also recommend the Moody's Talks podcast led by Mark Zandi, the Moody's Analytics chief economist. He's been more or less talking about this for months now and sounded the alarm much earlier than others about this prospect.

New comment by pnexk in "I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class"

pnexk — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 05:37:47 +0000

I think this is covered in Micheal Easter’s notion that as societies become more comfortable, our brains lower the threshold of what constitutes a “problem” in our lives. We’re wired not only to be great at problem solving but also discovering new ones. Think this is based on prevalence theory related research in psychology.

How Metamodernism Makes Meaning

pnexk — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 04:57:53 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@ScooterDMiller/informed-na%C3%AFvet%C3%A9-f788063f8116

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394537

Points: 2

# Comments: 0