Hacker News: ranprieur

New comment by ranprieur in "The lost joy of music piracy"

ranprieur — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:35:50 +0000

I still do it. Spotify is good for making playlists but I don't use it for listening. I collect mp3s, bought on Bandcamp or downloaded from Soulseek, and listen on an old Sansa Clip mp3 player.

New comment by ranprieur in "It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history"

ranprieur — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:32:08 +0000

Reading is declining because of computers, which are a much more fragile and dependent technology than text on paper.

New comment by ranprieur in "Cannabis users face substantially higher risk of heart attack (2025)"

ranprieur — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 16:11:44 +0000

A supplement called genistein mitigates the risk:

https://www.med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/04/marijuana...

New comment by ranprieur in "Chest Fridge (2009)"

ranprieur — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:06:45 +0000

I did this, with a regular chest freezer and a thermostat. It used hardly any energy, but it was hard to clean and died after about five years.

New comment by ranprieur in "Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring"

ranprieur — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:08:28 +0000

This isn't new to AI. The same kind of thing happens in movie test screenings, or with autotune. If something is intended for a large audience, there's always an incentive to remove the weird stuff.

New comment by ranprieur in "Launching the Rural Guaranteed Minimum Income Initiative"

ranprieur — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:59:14 +0000

This is better than nothing, but the big advantage of the UBI is that there is no bureaucracy deciding who gets it and doesn't get it. If there are any conditions on the income, then there's a constant danger that the program will become another tool of control.

New comment by ranprieur in "Proof of Corn"

ranprieur — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:27:03 +0000

> AI doesn't need to drive a tractor. It needs to orchestrate the systems and people who do.

Pure dystopia.

New comment by ranprieur in "All AI Videos Are Harmful (2025)"

ranprieur — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:26:25 +0000

I've been making music videos with a very satisfying creative process: Use AI to make a ton of images, pick the very best ones, and carefully arrange them in the right order. Example: https://youtu.be/r-_dJNgt3SM

New comment by ranprieur in "The Miracle of Wörgl"

ranprieur — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:46:42 +0000

This article fails to mention why the currency circulated so fast. It was depreciating: it was defined as gradually losing value, so hoarding didn't work, and the people with money had a strong incentive to spend it. The article makes it sound like these currencies worked because they were local. They worked because they depreciated, and it's possible to do this on a national level.

Other writings about this: A book chapter, The Currency of Cooperation: https://ascentofhumanity.com/text/chapter-7-02/

And a short piece about Brakteaten money: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Brakteaten_Money

New comment by ranprieur in "Why an abundance of choice is not the same as freedom"

ranprieur — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 18:24:07 +0000

The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing.

New comment by ranprieur in "Eschatological thinking: why Peter Thiel is talking about the Antichrist"

ranprieur — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 03:56:40 +0000

Because he's jealous?

New comment by ranprieur in "What if technology is our weakness?"

ranprieur — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 03:03:42 +0000

A great book on this subject is In The Absence of the Sacred by Jerry Mander. He argues convincingly that the correct biological metaphor for technological progress is not evolution, but inbreeding. We are turning our attention more and more into worlds of our own construction.

Still, there's a lot of cool technology out there, and a lot of room to use it better.

New comment by ranprieur in "The year of peak might and magic"

ranprieur — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:50:02 +0000

I agree with the author: Heroes II is my favorite of the series, just for the innocent vibe. Also, Heroes IV is underrated. It got bad reviews because it came out buggy, but the bugs were fixed in updates, and of all the HOMM games, it has the best soundtrack.

New comment by ranprieur in "The United States has lower life expectancy than most similarly wealthy nations"

ranprieur — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 16:05:53 +0000

Because the medical system doesn't.

New comment by ranprieur in "Successful people set constraints rather than chasing goals"

ranprieur — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 15:57:19 +0000

I like this idea, but my problem is with the word "successful". Setting constraints rather than chasing goals leads to doing interesting things. But there's no guarantee you'll ever be recognized or rewarded.

New comment by ranprieur in "The Who Cares Era"

ranprieur — Wed, 28 May 2025 18:08:06 +0000

"Efficiency" is selfishness. It's a word for when people in power want to give less and get more.

New comment by ranprieur in "How friction is being redistributed in today's economy"

ranprieur — Sun, 11 May 2025 16:41:00 +0000

Key sentence: "When systems that were designed for resilience are optimized instead for efficiency, they break."

New comment by ranprieur in "Observations from people-watching"

ranprieur — Sun, 11 May 2025 05:06:30 +0000

There's some good stuff here, but some of it is just wrong. Sometimes the person with the loudest laugh is laughing the most authentically.

New comment by ranprieur in "The cult of doing business"

ranprieur — Sat, 10 May 2025 16:27:28 +0000

This all makes more sense if you go through the article, and every time you see the word "work", substitute "work for money".

New comment by ranprieur in "Ask HN: Do your eyes bug you even though your prescription is "correct"?"

ranprieur — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 17:49:55 +0000

When I was young, every time I got a 20-20 prescription, my eyes got worse. When I stopped going to the optometrist, my eyes stopped getting worse. Now I wear glasses that only correct to around 20-40. I take them off for reading, and I have weaker glasses for the computer screen. Supposedly I have astigmatism but I use no astigmatism correction and can see fine.