Hacker News: qubex

New comment by qubex in "Ask HN: What Got You into Rust?"

qubex — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 21:32:49 +0000

Nothing: I couldn’t care less about it.

New comment by qubex in "US federal budget deficit jumps 12% in one year to nearly $2 Trillion"

qubex — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:34:41 +0000

Ah.

So you don’t understand the concept of sovereignty then.

New comment by qubex in "US federal budget deficit jumps 12% in one year to nearly $2 Trillion"

qubex — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:20:12 +0000

That is an amazingly flawed idea. By that reasoning, only a neutral budget is acceptable, and a positive debt surplus a boon. Unfortunately, the opposite is empirically true: the only places running total budget surpluses tend to be undemocratic shitholes because they need to promise nothing and do not rely upon the consent of the governed to loan them savings and pay them taxes.

That is quite beside the point that sovereign debt is considered one of the safest places to store savings and by diminishing the stockpile of debt with a budget in surplus one is diminishing the economy’s ability to save at a low risk level.

New comment by qubex in "New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing"

qubex — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:09:57 +0000

Remember it needs to get criminalised everywhere for it to stop happening.

I think I’m going to have a crack at with with Claude and REA this weekend, if nothing else comes up.

New comment by qubex in "New Withings Users Must Pay $99/Year for Apple Health Syncing"

qubex — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:07:29 +0000

I’m grandfathered-in (account created in 2013 or something like that) but I voted their app down to one star on the Apple App Store and stated they’re committing highway robbery.

New comment by qubex in "A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU"

qubex — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 13:06:50 +0000

And Wargames. Oh an Antitrust too.

New comment by qubex in "A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU"

qubex — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:36:37 +0000

Indeed. “RISC is good.”

New comment by qubex in "Utah to let AI examine patients and prescribe medication without human oversight"

qubex — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:36:07 +0000

#whatcouldpossiblygowrong

New comment by qubex in "Resurrecting iChat Audio and Video Conferencing"

qubex — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:16:41 +0000

Maybe I’m confusing the two.

New comment by qubex in "Resurrecting iChat Audio and Video Conferencing"

qubex — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:04:38 +0000

I remember Jobs promising it would be released as an open standard. What happened behind the scenes to prevent that occurring?

New comment by qubex in "Regular AI users are more likely to hold quality jobs"

qubex — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:59:01 +0000

If it’s an expensive and/or rate limited good, the self-selection bias needs to be corrected for. It is the former and from what I can understand the latter hasn’t been. It’s not statistics, it’s numerology.

New comment by qubex in "FIA to investigate software bug after Bahrain GP in Malaysia"

qubex — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:49:57 +0000

Dunno about anybody else, but I’d like to watch Formula One drivers compete amongst each other whilst plodding along in vehicles that are behaving like Tuk-Tuks and see the FIA providing the public food and water over the multi-day ordeal.

New comment by qubex in "A minimal kernel in Swift, running in QEMU"

qubex — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:38:14 +0000

“machine emulators for hackers”

“Hack the Planet!”? “Mess with the best die like the rest”? WTF?

New comment by qubex in "Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?"

qubex — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 19:45:13 +0000

Sheet music is no more music than mathematical notation is mathematics. (Indeed both notations have roots in the same kind of two-dimensional seventeenth century calligraphic tradition.) However, as you point out, mathematics is indeed the study of patterns, structures, and relationships, and music is not. It is a structure and has relationships, but it is not a “metaphor of metaphors” as mathematics is. Case in point: modern visual art post-photography is much more affine to music than mathematics is, because after depiction became not quite trivial but literally photographic from the daguerreotype onwards, the role of the visual arts became the solicitation of emotion and the conveyance of narrative. Music has syntax, indeed it has very many, but it is not the study of syntaxes in the manner in which mathematics is.

New comment by qubex in "Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?"

qubex — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 16:03:39 +0000

I’m saying that though argument by analogy is very persuasive, “math is music” is a metaphor that is fundamentally unsound as the grounds for reasoning from. I’m not talking about the mathematical aspects of music (which, as you correctly point out, can be found to exist) but that music is performative and aesthetic, whereas mathematics is all about internal consistency.

New comment by qubex in "Dutch governments builds alternative for Microsoft based on NixOS"

qubex — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 10:32:03 +0000

Ultimately, yes: governmental actions are backed by force in the case of noncompliance.

New comment by qubex in "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"

qubex — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:17:06 +0000

I’m pretty sure I can make it recurse.

New comment by qubex in "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"

qubex — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 23:22:15 +0000

I guess “so nothing”. The model is fundamentally broken. Adding a third dimension to certain cells by giving them a new type (‘tuple’, ‘list’?) whilst also having multiple sheets that aren’t (really) addressable is a disaster for the semantics.

New comment by qubex in "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"

qubex — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 23:09:27 +0000

There is an argument to be made somewhere that Microsoft should’ve pressed much more hardly upon Access and the separation between data and operations thereupon than the conglomerate mess that is Excel.

New comment by qubex in "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"

qubex — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 23:07:40 +0000

In a rigid lattice, aye.