Hacker News: quirkot

New comment by quirkot in "Insects don't swarm at LED lights"

quirkot — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 20:27:06 +0000

Yeah, i know that's how the physics works, but effectively my computer monitor doesn't flicker for me but a strobe light does. Whatever the proper term for that is what I'm talking aobut

New comment by quirkot in "Insects don't swarm at LED lights"

quirkot — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 20:13:45 +0000

I wonder how much of it is also the LED flicker. If I was a small bug and moving quickly with a high visual refresh rate, I would probably hate the experience of the LED flicker

New comment by quirkot in "What I learned from six months of being stupid on purpose"

quirkot — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:16:15 +0000

It's nice to see the kids having the same sorts of discoveries the olds had once upon a time. Specifics change, but we're just stupid humans spinning around the sun together

New comment by quirkot in "San Francisco Onion Futures Company"

quirkot — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 04:59:48 +0000

Legal defense is basically "nuh uh"

New comment by quirkot in "I had Gemini train its own replacement for $9"

quirkot — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:35:02 +0000

I think this is the way. An LLM is an expensive general purpose tool and for repeatable tasks, after it's clarified the process flow, it builds cheaper special purpose tools for each step

New comment by quirkot in "Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously"

quirkot — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:49:51 +0000

it's also the set of incentives that produces not-technically-illegal pump and dump schemes when the startup is sold to the market via IPO

New comment by quirkot in "Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously"

quirkot — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:20:01 +0000

a business makes money selling a product or service.

a startup makes money selling the startup

New comment by quirkot in "The "File" menu isn't about files"

quirkot — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 19:00:48 +0000

It's a real Chesterton's fence situation. There's a lot of latent information contained in a tradition of calling the first menu item "File" including expectations around what can be found there.

You could also say it pierced the metaphor and no longer refers to files on a computer, but to the concept of filing that computer files were named after.

New comment by quirkot in "Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage"

quirkot — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 01:37:00 +0000

> At the end of the day, these communities don’t care if your code works at all...

I think the key word to all this is "communities." If you can make something alone, just do it. If you enjoy gathering together to build a bigger thing, often the bigger thing is 1/3 an excuse to gather together. In that way, the LLM is like revealing the answer to a murder mystery game too early and expecting it still to be fun for everyone.

New comment by quirkot in "That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing"

quirkot — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:35:33 +0000

I mean... they're called "agents," they must do what they're told and they don't get paid. Sounds pretty slavey.

New comment by quirkot in "That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing"

quirkot — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:46:59 +0000

> Thus, anyone who wants to corral that kind of entity and make it do their bidding? Yeah, they want slaves.

That's the horror buried underneath all the tech, policy, and gloss. The real, animal brain, desire that drives most of this is: I'd like a slave I don't have to feel bad about.

New comment by quirkot in "Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)"

quirkot — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:24:37 +0000

I cannot express how much I drank this kool-aid. When there were still updates every 2-3 years I would scour google maps to try and find the site. Based on Long Now promo images and local newspaper photos, this is my leading contender. The dirt roads were all gradually expanded and construction equipment was visible here in the 2009-2013 time frame. https://maps.app.goo.gl/3QWhyYGu7DrD8jQWA

New comment by quirkot in "Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)"

quirkot — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:21:18 +0000

banging on the door like a madman where's the clock? where's the clock we all donated money for? tell us about the clock you cowards!

New comment by quirkot in "Punch Yourself in the Face with Reality"

quirkot — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:36:04 +0000

Such a great synopsis. The things that are easy to signal (landing page, presentation deck, logo, etc) have never been the make-or-break aspect. The part that's always been hard, that remains hard, is that a business must solve a problem for people. Even B2B is solving business problems for specific people. And people are a difficult, difficult problem to solve.

New comment by quirkot in "Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke"

quirkot — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:36:24 +0000

In terms of removing friction, I think of moving a boulder. Wheels = good. Ice slide = bad

New comment by quirkot in "Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor"

quirkot — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:59:55 +0000

you'll have to take that up with the folks from worldnuclearwastereport.org

New comment by quirkot in "Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor"

quirkot — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 19:18:01 +0000

Footnote has the backup. 2-3x is guesstimate, but it doesn't really matter. The answer is there's just not much waste to store

New comment by quirkot in "Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor"

quirkot — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:21:45 +0000

Europe has about 60,000 tons of nuclear waste storage[1], so lets say the global nuclear waste quantity is 2-3x or 120,000 to 180,000 tons. That sounds like a lot, however it's less than 2 weeks of coal deliveries to a coal plant (at 1 train of 115 cars each with 116 tons of coal = 13,340 tons delivered per day[2]). To take another approach, the average landfill size is 600 acres[3].

The "eh, just bury it" approach is really not a bad one. Its not even that much stuff to bury

[1] https://worldnuclearwastereport.org/

[2] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=16651

[3] https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2021/04/15/hidden-damage-la...

New comment by quirkot in "Daisugi, the Japanese technique of growing trees out of other trees (2020)"

quirkot — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 13:40:38 +0000

In english this is called pollarding a tree. Historically it has been used for smaller wood pieces (firewood, etc). It's fuctionally different [from daisugi] because you don't get construction grade timber from it

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

[edit: clarification]

New comment by quirkot in "Do we need billionaires?"

quirkot — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:17:17 +0000

If you want good checks against a government, one dude rich enough to field an army has historically been a bad way to keep the government in existence