Hacker News: raumgeist

New comment by raumgeist in "Dopamine Fracking"

raumgeist — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:50:03 +0000

Reminds me of Adornos "Dialektik der Aufklärung" and its take on what he calls the "Kulturindustrie". Almost 100 years ago he foresaw how the cultural offerings of society get commodified and chopped into bite sized chunks for each individual to receive theirs. He did not forsee us taking it this far, nor the addictive nature of the consumption though.

An additional danger is how this pulls all of us down. Staying with the articles example, by adding artificial strawberries flavour to everything those that could have enjoyed the natural experience never get the opportunity to do so, preventing them from acquiring the taste. Cultural offerings do have some educational responsibility after all.

New comment by raumgeist in "Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns"

raumgeist — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:03:07 +0000

We as a society would profit from not categorizing everything in terms of its usefulness. Things can and should be allowed to just be. That being said, UBI would probably result in more useful things not less. There are so many cases of jobs and things that seem to just be busywork or outright scams. There are also a lot of things that only appear useful if you never take the time to think about them. A plastic straw that will pollute the environment for thousands of years just so i can have a drink for two minutes? That is useless. Every street in every city being lined by cars that don't move for 95% of the time? That is useless and insane. Imagine what marvelous machines we could have built instead.

Also, I find the online discussion around UBI to be quite weird. I don't think anyone serious is advocating for it to be particularly high. In my opinion, UBI should cover your necessities plus some so you can participate in society. This gives everyone the opportunity to take it slow or focus on personal projects without fear. Everything luxurious can not, and should not, be affordable with UBI. This will leave ample opportunity for people to still care about and want to work.

Humans will always do. It is in our nature. But not letting people get homeless or starve to death might enable those of us that don't want to do what our overlords deem useful to do the things our society so desperately needs. I don't need some poor fool to cook my burger for me. I'd rather take turns with my friends that now have free time.

New comment by raumgeist in "Codemaps: Understand Code, Before You Vibe It"

raumgeist — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 12:10:13 +0000

I really like the idea of visualizing code in any other way than text and have given it some thought from time to time. However, I think the problem here can quickly become that you tend to fall in love with a bad idea. No one, and I don't mean that in bad faith, wants to look at these diagrams. Usually they do not communicate the meaning they intend to do, and I find that I have to spend some time understanding what exactly is meant by any type of box or arrow. What people might want to look at is their mental visualization of the code or math they are working on (or their LLM made for them). At least to me, that is much more tied to what the data will look like at runtime and how different parts from different data-structures will interact with each other. If you were to visualize a flutter app, and nowhere in that visualization the tree-like structure of the widget-tree would appear as such, that would collide with my mental model of how such an app functions. This visualization will be induced by reading the code, much like reading a novel will produce pictures in your head. I'm not sure LLMs are the technology that will produce code-movies you would rather watch.