Hacker News: riffraff

New comment by riffraff in "Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots"

riffraff — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 06:13:47 +0000

This will not be known by most people, the intent is to change what an LLM will answer when you ask certain questions.

A friend of mine noted the other day that chatgot will answer "yes" to the question of whether Israel is committing genocide.

The Israeli government does not want that.

New comment by riffraff in "Ask HN: What's the best way to raise our kids?"

riffraff — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 22:39:11 +0000

Keep them alive, love them, and don't stress too much. It's very hard to do better than that, but that is plenty.

New comment by riffraff in "Olo (Color)"

riffraff — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:16:52 +0000

I think it's described as a "greenish purple" in some of the books.

New comment by riffraff in "Olo (Color)"

riffraff — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:15:22 +0000

Ultraviolet is prnamed that because of the Latin meaning of ultra as "beyond", as it's "beyond violet" in the spectrum, same as infrared is "below red".

This would be "sideways green" perhaps :)

New comment by riffraff in "A spectre is haunting Unicode"

riffraff — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 07:13:29 +0000

Many times I have asked my Hungarian wife whether a sound is "a" or "a with an accent" (A vs Á), but they are different letters in Hungarian, not just variations of one as they are in Italian. We made a mess with "accent unification".

Which is always fun when you think that clearly nobody thinks of "o or o with a leg" (O vs Q).

New comment by riffraff in "Ordinary Abundance"

riffraff — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:26:08 +0000

Ah, I regularly used to read cleaning product labels on the toilet, hello fellow human!

New comment by riffraff in "Ordinary Abundance"

riffraff — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 06:18:03 +0000

Wonderful, and even misses a lot of things! Glass windows that let light in but not cold and rain. Smokeless cooking. Mattresses that don't need to be fluffed up. We're accustomed to so, so many things. Toilets!

New comment by riffraff in "How Gödel's Proof Works (2020)"

riffraff — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:49:41 +0000

I would say "never actually finished", but I think this is quite true.

New comment by riffraff in "How Gödel's Proof Works (2020)"

riffraff — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:48:42 +0000

I am a Strange Loop is basically GEB but written properly instead of being a random collation of ideas.

Unrusprisingly, since many years went by. But I still love the quirkiness of GEB

(Also, he has other books between the two, I deeply enjoyed Le Ton Beau de Marot, about translations)

New comment by riffraff in "Can I use my Outputs to train an AI model?"

riffraff — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:27:38 +0000

I had the same thought.

"We need to control the model to protect you from evil robots, except it's fine if the evil robots are not competing with our business" is hilariously hypocritical.

New comment by riffraff in "If I own Claude's outputs why can't I train my own model on them?"

riffraff — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:25:30 +0000

I think they care about the reasoning traces and such being used for training, not the effectively final output.

New comment by riffraff in "Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf"

riffraff — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 06:16:40 +0000

The book "not the end of the world" by Hanna Ritchie makes a neat point that humans have never lived in what we would call a sustainable way, but it's possible for this generation to be the first one that does.

New comment by riffraff in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

riffraff — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:25:46 +0000

> Pre-Trump, anti-vaxxers were notorious left-wing granola types

so, exactly RFK's type :)

New comment by riffraff in "France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls"

riffraff — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:55:20 +0000

How many door to door salesman do you encounter? Where do you live, if you can share?

I haven't seen one in decades, and even then it was usually some pamphlets or books to support a cause or the other.

On the phone (Italy), OTOH, I used to get daily scam call to buy "Amazon stocks" or change utility providers or install water filters. That seems to have massively faded out due to new regulations tho.

New comment by riffraff in "Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago"

riffraff — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 06:16:34 +0000

It is my hope that increased connectivity and options to study, work, and interact with other people from anywhere will partially revert this trend, but honestly, it seems inevitable.

Part of my family hails from a small Mountain Village which used to be quite alive thirty years ago, but now the majority of the population is above 60, and there's only a handful of children. Small towns have many positive sides, but network effects are too important for people.

New comment by riffraff in "ATProto for Distributed Systems Engineers"

riffraff — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 06:49:17 +0000

> A true social protocol should work like email. Any machine on the network should be able to talk it to any other machine

You may find littlefedi interesting

https://littleone.littlefedi.social/@stefano/blog/2026/08/07...

Harry Potter almost derailed a major UK interconnector project

riffraff — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 05:08:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.rechargenews.com/grid/how-harry-potter-almost-derailed-a-major-uk-interconnector-project/2-1-2025118

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49239415

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by riffraff in "Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium"

riffraff — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:49:10 +0000

Brexit came out of a many years campaign to steer up hate against the EU. Boris Johnson famously said that was his job as a journalist.

And of course, out of the middle class crisis in the 21st century. You have the same discontent outside the EU, except it doesn't get blamed on Bruxelles. That's how Trump gets elected, for example.

New comment by riffraff in "I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them"

riffraff — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:34:17 +0000

I'm also happy we have a single connector but, n=1, I have a couple things that will not work with all cables.

I have no idea why, nor have I bothered to find out, I just marked the cables they came with (which are USB-A to USB-C) same as GP did.

New comment by riffraff in "The title cards in Blade Runner are amazing"

riffraff — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 06:43:05 +0000

I Wish the author would write more articles, I enjoyed these when they came out immensely.