Hacker News: rembicilious

New comment by rembicilious in "Rich Sutton on AI creativity and discovery"

rembicilious — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 03:36:57 +0000

"So that is my call to arms. If we want the full power of AI scientists, then we should share the goals with them so they can create, evaluate, discover, and in these ways fully participate in achieving the goals. Let’s be bold! Let’s fully automate Creativity and Discovery!"

Should we automate exercise and play as well? How about learning?

The machine didn't have a soul, so we donated ours.

Eureka! My AI found it!

New comment by rembicilious in "Byrne's Euclid"

rembicilious — Sun, 24 May 2026 02:19:54 +0000

For me it iſ the old timey eſſ that iſ moſt diſracting.

New comment by rembicilious in "'No way to prevent this,' says only package manager where this regularly happens"

rembicilious — Sat, 16 May 2026 04:32:39 +0000

Is this a dogfooding joke?

New comment by rembicilious in "Shunting-Yard Animation"

rembicilious — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:46:00 +0000

If I start the train and then type a nested bracket expression like 2+(2-(3/5)) the train jumps the track

New comment by rembicilious in "Uncle Sam wants to scan your iris and collect your DNA, citizen or not"

rembicilious — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 05:09:20 +0000

Many SSNs have been compromised already. The jig is up. It was never supposed to be an identity system but organisations keep insisting on using it as one. Even if they aren’t literally publicly available and easily obtainable, they should be treated as such.

https://constella.ai/verifying-the-national-public-data-brea...

New comment by rembicilious in "Reflecting on a Year of Gamedev in Zig"

rembicilious — Fri, 02 May 2025 08:08:48 +0000

I don’t really think chat is a step back (discord may be a step back vs irc or I am just graying). Learning newish tech in chat has always been way more engaging for me than wiki or forum style communication.

IME chat attracts people who devote a lot of energy to the topic, including top contributors and power users. If you have questions about the latest features or obscure use cases there isn’t a better place to go.

Forum and wiki are great formats too, with different strengths. But if you are frustrated because you can’t seem to find help in those formats, head for the chat.

Some communities archive their chat. This seems like a great source of data to bootstrap a wiki or faq.

New comment by rembicilious in "The internet is killing old PC hardware [video]"

rembicilious — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:23:19 +0000

I don’t ever install NoScript on family/friend devices. It just breaks their experience. I have knowledgeable coworkers that won’t use it because it’s not worth the hassle for them.

So I agree it is an anti-pattern for typical use cases.

But if you’re trying to get the most out of old hardware, it will make some websites more usable.

New comment by rembicilious in "The internet is killing old PC hardware [video]"

rembicilious — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 08:46:12 +0000

My favorite Firefox plugin is NoScript. There is often an incredible amount of third-party JavaScript running on commercial web sites. NoScript turns all the JavaScript off by default, and then you can whitelist it temporarily (or permanently, your choice) at the per domain level. (I will never whitelist google tag manager, how is it present on every freaking website?)

So I visit thing-i-want.com and it doesn’t load because NoScript is currently disabling JS for that domain. No problem, I temporarily enable JS for thing-i-want.com

The page refreshes and suddenly NoScript is disabling JS for 10 more domains!

That seems excessive, maybe the page doesn’t need ALL of those scripts to function. I will enable that cloudfront domain and that one that has “static content” in the name.

Page refreshes.

Okay it mostly works now but also NoScript is showing disabled JavaScript from 5 more domains!

..Anyways Sometimes sites are running scripts from 15 or more domains and sometimes they are nested 4 domains deep. It’s absurd and OF COURSE it overwhelms older devices.

If you want to use a modern browser on an older device, use a browser with a script blocking plugin

New comment by rembicilious in "Complex Systems and Quantitative Mereology"

rembicilious — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 07:01:15 +0000

I thought it might be a typo and was thrilled to be introduced to a new subject!

New comment by rembicilious in "I bought a container full of Chinese electric excavators. Here's what showed up"

rembicilious — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 07:30:37 +0000

Please, the exceedingly wealthy don’t muck out their own barn. Where I live a piece of equipment like an excavator is a great investment. It’s a tax write off and it frees up time for you to do other more valuable tasks instead of breaking your back with a shovel for far too long. Many (most) people will take out a loan to purchase a piece of equipment with the expectation that it will “pay for itself” over it’s service life.

New comment by rembicilious in "How to Cure Acid Reflux with Simple Exercise: An Anecdotal Study"

rembicilious — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 06:49:08 +0000

Cure Acid Reflux by Eating Doggy Style

New comment by rembicilious in "Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court"

rembicilious — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 03:12:34 +0000

There’s plenty of hate for X on HN and abroad. I don’t think the crowd on HN is going to have the same reaction to Wikimedia taking a hardline stance against censorship.

Blocking the world’s foremost encyclopaedia vs blocking an extremely popular gossip app.

Sadly, an Indian competitor would appear, probably by ripping off Wikimedia’s own content.

New comment by rembicilious in "DMNO: Environment Variables Evolved"

rembicilious — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 05:50:28 +0000

It appears to me that DMNO gathers then sets your environment variables at run time. It can gather them from a local config or from a multitude of network locations like a git repo or a website or a S3 bucket or run a function to calculate it now.

You could already be doing all that with any scripting language, maybe Ansible and friends, but DMNO is more focused and seems to depend on Vite, so it’s also got a narrower (but huge) audience.

DMNO also includes multiple features that test if any environment variables are being accidentally leaked somehow.

New comment by rembicilious in "The "email is authentication" pattern"

rembicilious — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 00:46:01 +0000

Personally, I don’t care to share the username to any account, password protected or not. On a related note I think it is terrible security to have display name be the same as user login name.

New comment by rembicilious in "Is AI eating all the energy?"

rembicilious — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 03:49:21 +0000

You trigger an idea of AI evolution in my brain. AI needs power to proliferate. AI that encouraged power consumption and de-emphasised climate issues naturally thrived. Like a successful virus; no thought required. Survival of the fittest.

New comment by rembicilious in "Rocket explodes during testing at UK's new spaceport in Shetland"

rembicilious — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 18:49:00 +0000

I couldn’t get the video on bbc website to load for me but this one worked https://www.shetlandtimes.co.uk/2024/08/20/video-captures-sh...

New comment by rembicilious in "Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon"

rembicilious — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 05:45:29 +0000

Is this really true? Maybe it just makes sense to put high demand refrigerated products in the refrigerated room near the loading dock where the refrigerated trailer is unloaded?

New comment by rembicilious in "A rare disorder makes people see monsters"

rembicilious — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 19:05:46 +0000

I initially read this:

“A rare disorder makes people sea monsters”

I have a disorder that makes see monsters sea monsters.

New comment by rembicilious in "Difference between running Postgres for yourself and for others"

rembicilious — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 17:06:21 +0000

Thank you, that makes a lot of sense. I should have intuited that, but I couldn’t quite make the connection. I really appreciate the write up, it gave me a lot to think about as someone who has only ever managed my own DB.

New comment by rembicilious in "Difference between running Postgres for yourself and for others"

rembicilious — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 04:45:25 +0000

From the article: “If the user isn’t actively working on the database, PostgreSQL won’t generate a WAL file each minute. WAL files are by default 16 MB and PostgreSQL waits for the 16 MB to fill up. So, your restore granularity could be much longer, and you may not be able to restore to a particular minute in time.

You can overcome this problem by setting the archive_timeout and forcing Postgres to generate a new WAL file every minute. With this configuration, Postgres would create a new WAL file when it hits the 1-minute or 16 MB threshold, whichever comes first.

The second issue with backup/restore is “no activity”. In this case, PostgreSQL wouldn’t create a new file even if the archive_timeout is set. As a solution, you can generate artificial write activity by calling pg_current_xact_id().”

Can you explain why to create a WAL file even though there is no activity?