Hacker News: prescriptivist

New comment by prescriptivist in "REO Trucks I4 4WD Pickup Truck Starts at $21,500"

prescriptivist — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:39:10 +0000

People are so worked up online in places like Reddit and YouTube comments about how there aren't small trucks anymore. It feels almost like a strange mania. So it makes sense that someone like this would come along and capitalize on that (and probably never produce anything). People will throw $25 at a company without intention to actually purchase the truck, just because they feel some weird memetic vibe to support a small truck movement or whatever.

New comment by prescriptivist in "REO Trucks I4 4WD Pickup Truck Starts at $21,500"

prescriptivist — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:35:22 +0000

These are called EREVs in China and are fairly popular. Ford has a patent for one in trucks but never built it. It makes a ton of sense. Use the generator to get extended range, but avoid all the moving parts of a driveline.

New comment by prescriptivist in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

prescriptivist — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 01:36:27 +0000

I live in the land of trees (Maine) and cell service sucks, line of sight between microwave towers is a non-starter AFAICT, but line of sight to the sky is do-able everywhere.

New comment by prescriptivist in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

prescriptivist — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 03:57:58 +0000

A more accurate description would be that starlink will become the trunk, and possibly the service. Local cell services will own the poles but will essentially provide access for starlink customers. It's not a bad business idea, actually. People pay $30-40 a line for starlink cell service, starlink provides the big pipes so to speak and splits the bill with the local companies that put up the last mile towers.

In rural areas you can put up isolated 5G towers that have their own dish connection to starlink, no need to string a line to the towers anymore...

New comment by prescriptivist in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

prescriptivist — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 03:44:01 +0000

If you wish to stop it, then stop it.

New comment by prescriptivist in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

prescriptivist — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:08:19 +0000

Yeah, I meant to point out there that there is a tension between the technology that I don't mind, but the infrastructure for it that I do mind. I don't really know what the answer is. I do know that we're probably not going to put this toothpaste back in the tube.

New comment by prescriptivist in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

prescriptivist — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 18:17:14 +0000

I spent last weekend under some of the darkest sky you'll find in the eastern US. Miles from cell service. I had a starlink portable with me and it was nice to get some service and stay in touch, but to watch the sky is to see satellites everywhere.

I've spent a dozen or so weeklong stretches in the last few years completely off grid, only connection being bringing up the inReach once a day. At this point I actually get anxiety at the end of such a trip, knowing that I'm going to be wading through a morass of notifications and slack/email/texts. Doing a once or twice a day sync via starlink didn't really bother me so much when I'm out in the backcountry this last trip.

I'd love to be rid of all of it, but that's not how the world works today.

New comment by prescriptivist in "Ford AI hiccups push carmaker to rehire ‘gray beard’ inspectors"

prescriptivist — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:43:24 +0000

Sorry but this reeks of marketing. To what extent was Ford actually attempting to replace these engineers with AI tools in the last three years or were they just letting them go by attrition? Was this the result of an actual AI influenced layoff? I read both the Verge and the Bloomberg piece and none of this seems to be articulated but it sure does seem to capture a vibe right now that companies are footgunning themselves all over the place with LLMs, despite no evidence of this being related to any of that...

New comment by prescriptivist in "Claude Design"

prescriptivist — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:58:49 +0000

> good writing, good art, thoughtful code architecture

If you are talking about a consumer product, one of these is not like the others.

New comment by prescriptivist in "North American English Dialects"

prescriptivist — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 05:51:43 +0000

Just an update to this. I realize I misspoke and misnamed where that last accent comes from. It's too late for me to edit the original comment, so I'm just going to drop it in here. There's no such thing as the Allagash Valley, only the St. John Valley.

New comment by prescriptivist in "North American English Dialects"

prescriptivist — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 02:48:34 +0000

Maine has multiple distinct accents, though like the parent said, it's not worth making the distinction unless it's for a project like this.

In southern Maine, the accent is moderate and is more of a general northern New England accent. Yahd = yard, that kind of thing.

The iconic Maine accent is the Downeast accent and is still kicking up/down there. It's kind of nasally and has a lilt to it. You have to dig through a morass of influencer content on youtube to find an authentic example of it, but this is a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZDpx1aLovc

But there are a number of different accents throughout Maine. My favorite without a doubt is the accent in way northern Maine, from the Allagash Valley. It's just a pleasant accent. This is a good example: https://soundcloud.com/mpbn/troy-jackson-allagash-logging

New comment by prescriptivist in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

prescriptivist — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:48:15 +0000

There's no shortage of third places in the American suburbs, you just have to drive to them. I'm sympathetic to the argument that walkable third places are better third places because I lived car-free in New York City for a decade and enjoyed many of them. But living in the suburbs or exurbs doesn't inherently mean you don't have access to shared communal spaces.

If I believed there is a crisis of isolation in the United States and degradation of community, I would first focus on more recent technologies, say ones introduced around 2007, than on technologies introduced in the early 1900s.

New comment by prescriptivist in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

prescriptivist — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:33:54 +0000

I didn't really say what my perspective is on whether the suburbs are good or bad or cars are good or bad. I think there are plenty of reasonable arguments as to whether they are or not. What I am dubious about is that they are somehow the source of some hand-wavy "widespread" mental health issue in America.

New comment by prescriptivist in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

prescriptivist — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:48:35 +0000

> You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people.

Yes, you could say that, though I'm not sure who would actually say that seriously.

New comment by prescriptivist in "OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports"

prescriptivist — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:26:47 +0000

> And yet the companies doing that in those previous generations managed to produce huge profits significantly faster than Generative AI has.

Have you considered a simple answer to this inconsistency? The market and investors does not demand that these AI companies make a profit. The only reason companies are expected to make profits is because either those who own shares in the company expect it, or those willing to invest in a company expect it.

New comment by prescriptivist in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"

prescriptivist — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:25:07 +0000

Correct, seems like my memory failed me on that one.

New comment by prescriptivist in "OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports"

prescriptivist — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:17:06 +0000

On top of that, the APIs/Tools/Function Calls into the real world don't exist yet. But consumer products are going to start eventually exposing functionality to these LLMs. By that time, I wonder if we'll all have an edge-inference box sitting in every one of our houses that we buy from a consumer products company like Apple or from Amazon, or directly from OpenAI or Anthropic. These little brains will be the low latency central nervous system of a lot of things in our homes, and gateways to the larger models in the cloud. Or at least that's how I imagine it sorting out in the future.

New comment by prescriptivist in "OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports"

prescriptivist — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 06:11:11 +0000

Comparing the IPO market today to the IPO market in the late 90s is not very instructive. You could have IPO'd a lemonade stand in 1998 and raised $10 million.

New comment by prescriptivist in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"

prescriptivist — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 03:42:55 +0000

> The lead singer caught my eye and gave me a wide grin

Daft Punk doesn't have a singer and unless it was a very early show they wouldn't have seen them smile. Most big beat shows wouldn't have a dedicated vocalist. I'd guess Underworld or Prodigy, but lean toward Underworld.

New comment by prescriptivist in "Writing Lisp is AI resistant and I'm sad"

prescriptivist — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 04:45:27 +0000

I used Emacs for about a decade and then switched to VS Code about eight years ago. I was curious about the state of Claude Code integration with Emacs, so I installed it to try out a couple of the Claude packages. My old .emacs.d that I toiled many hours to build is somewhere on some old hard drive, so I decided to just use Claude code to configure Emacs from scratch with a set of sane defaults.

I proceeded to spend about 45 minutes configuring Emacs. Not because Claude struggled with it, but because Claude was amazing at it and I just kept pushing it well beyond sane default territory. It was weirdly enthralling to have Claude nail customizations that I wouldn't have even bothered trying back in the day due to my poor elisp skills. It was a genuinely fun little exercise. But I went back to VS Code.