Hacker News: rappatic

New comment by rappatic in "I dumped Apple’s word list"

rappatic — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 21:17:46 +0000

> I dumped Apple's word list

Claude dumped Apple's word list, and obviously wrote the article too.

New comment by rappatic in "Investor-owned utilities charge 23% more for electricity than public providers"

rappatic — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 15:39:37 +0000

Sure, because you’re also paying for public utilities in other ways (taxes, inflation, regulations, etc). The government can’t give you anything it hasn’t first taken from you in one way or another.

New comment by rappatic in "Show HN: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021"

rappatic — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:33:58 +0000

I wish you’d at least take the effort to de-LLMify the vibecoded site and copy text

New comment by rappatic in "Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode"

rappatic — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 20:25:39 +0000

I have taught Python to high schoolers before and this is frustratingly common. Students will name their files `string.py` or similar and get crashes with esoteric error messages. It's a difficult stumbling block for someone who's just learning the basics

New comment by rappatic in "I trained a small transformer in 1.5hrs and it beats many LLMs"

rappatic — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:59:04 +0000

I don’t have any kind of ML background but I have always thought of sample efficiency as the great unsolved problem of AI. We humans have unbelievably good sample efficiency; often we can durably learn something on just a single example or two. This is the main area in which LLMs are vastly, vastly behind us.

New comment by rappatic in "What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022)"

rappatic — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 22:27:13 +0000

Funnily enough, the underlying signal is what’s nonsensical; the individual sentences are always well structured

New comment by rappatic in "Aphantasia Beginner's Guide"

rappatic — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:07:57 +0000

I agree. The afterimage test was a major red flag for me. To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand. I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow superimpose something onto their actual field of vision at will. Of course, this is not possible.

Edit: it’s also telling that this website sells an “Aphantasia Membership” for a monthly fee.

New comment by rappatic in "Ameliorate"

rappatic — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 18:31:05 +0000

In which direction are you supposed to read these charts? The arrows seem to point from conclusion/solution to reasoning, but the reasoning is at the top which makes me feel like I should read it first. It would be less confusing for there to be a single convention (eg “reasoning/evidence at the top with arrows flowing mostly down towards the conclusion”).

Similarly, I was confused by the use of both active and passive: eg sometimes “creates” and sometimes “created by,” with different arrow directions for each.

New comment by rappatic in "I'm becoming AI-blind"

rappatic — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:01:05 +0000

Claude has become noticeably, painfully worse at writing in the last six months. At this point it’s practically useless for anything except code.

New comment by rappatic in "Anti-AI fonts are useless and harmful"

rappatic — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:58:18 +0000

Ironic that an article about bad fonts would use such an ugly, garish font

New comment by rappatic in "The Amazon tax"

rappatic — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:19:12 +0000

> Assuming it's real, I'm not going to put much faith in the opinions of the American public.

You’re talking about Amazon’s actual customers here. Is Amazon supposed to ignore the opinion of their customers for the opinion of some commenter on HN?

New comment by rappatic in "India has paved the way for charging merchants a fee on UPI transactions"

rappatic — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:10:34 +0000

Apparently even BBC reporters now use LLMs to draft their articles.

New comment by rappatic in "British runner Josh Kerr breaks world record for mile which stood for 27 years"

rappatic — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:01:10 +0000

East African dominance over track events has largely ended. The 1500m world record is held by a West African, while the mile and 3000m world records are now held by white Europeans. The 5000m at the recent World Championships had no East African medalists, and the 10000m had just one. Same goes for the most recent Olympic 5000m.

Compare this with the Olympic and World Championship podiums for the 2000s and 2010s; I don't believe a non-East-African-born athlete won a single 5000/10000m medal for 20 years straight.

British runner Josh Kerr breaks 27-year-old world record in the mile

rappatic — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:06:03 +0000

Article URL: https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a73175937/josh-kerr-breaks-mile-world-record/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48958791

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by rappatic in "Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity"

rappatic — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 11:46:20 +0000

Translation: “you will just pay more for electricity at other times of day”

New comment by rappatic in "Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles"

rappatic — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:16:51 +0000

The quality of HN articles has degraded rapidly in the last year. It seems a meaningful fraction of articles posted here, especially most blog posts, are now AI generated. (Of course, this is the case for the rest of the internet too, but HN has always been a haven from the rest of the internet.)

New comment by rappatic in "Most arguments are about ego, not ideas"

rappatic — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:49:36 +0000

LLM-generated slop. Please don't post wastes of our time like this

New comment by rappatic in "EU commissioners shut down air conditioning for employees, leave theirs on"

rappatic — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 01:22:11 +0000

I feel rather silly, all the news about the heat deaths in Paris must’ve crossed wires in my brain. But it seems the two cities have similar temperature extremes, so my point is the same

New comment by rappatic in "EU commissioners shut down air conditioning for employees, leave theirs on"

rappatic — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 19:47:00 +0000

> but if you get a really cold spell and it drops to -35C

Temperatures near 40C have been recorded in Paris dozens of times since the early 2000s. I don't think the winter temperature in Paris has ever dropped much below -20C, let alone -35C. So this isn't a very fair analogy.

New comment by rappatic in "EU commissioners shut down air conditioning for employees, leave theirs on"

rappatic — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:33:08 +0000

> Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day

It's like satire. What is AC for if not extreme heat?