Hacker News: rob74

New comment by rob74 in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

rob74 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:45:17 +0000

Yes. What Elon did with DOGE (including but not limited to destroying USAID) may have been stupid and barely saved any money at all if you look at it as a percentage of the total budget, but it had very real consequences for real people. But, because they were mostly people from Trump's "shithole countries", no one talks about it anymore.

New comment by rob74 in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

rob74 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:30:38 +0000

Or hurting Anthropic without calling it that? Knowing that Anthropic has clashed with the current administration in the past (https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5725327/pentagon-anthro...), and knowing how vindictive (or willing to favor those who suck up to them) they are, I wouldn't be surprised at all...

New comment by rob74 in "Ryanair dark UX patterns summer 2026 refresher"

rob74 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:43:37 +0000

Aer Lingus is a budget airline? And here I was still thinking that they're the flag carrier of Ireland...

(of course, they can be both at the same time)

New comment by rob74 in "Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)"

rob74 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:36:00 +0000

Are switching PSUs more expensive to produce than linear ones? Because, if you think about it, they took several decades to move from higher-end to lower-end products: my Atari 800XE (the third generation of the Atari 800, introduced 1985, so 8 years after the Apple II) still had a linear PSU. So did most cheaper mobile phones (most prominently the good old Nokia feature phones) up until around 2005.

New comment by rob74 in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

rob74 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 08:37:55 +0000

The catch is just that if you lack the capacity to estimate how much computing power [task in brackets] might need, and your agent can autonomously create AWS instances, that might have bad consequences for you (or your bank account).

New comment by rob74 in "Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration"

rob74 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:30:25 +0000

In my experience, for every customer support agent that really wants to help people and cares about their problems, there are at least ten who don't even read what you wrote and answer with prefabricated blocks of text that have little to do with what you asked. If AI customer support actually tries to understand what I ask of it and help me, and there are still (motivated) humans available for the more tricky cases that AI can't handle, that might be a win...

New comment by rob74 in "The oldest surviving animated feature film at 100"

rob74 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:01:33 +0000

Part of the problem is that it wasn't possible to upload it to YouTube until recently (and someone from Germany could still demand for it to be taken down or made unavailable in Germany), while also, being almost 100 years old, it was not released commercially - which both conspired to condemn it to obscurity.

New comment by rob74 in "The oldest surviving animated feature film at 100"

rob74 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 13:55:22 +0000

Animation isn't just hand-drawn animation, it's any kind of movie composed from individual still images. And stop-motion animation is a subcategory of that, no matter if you use clay/putty (like in Wallace & Gromit), Lego figures or paper cutouts (like in this case or also on South Park).

New comment by rob74 in "Port React Compiler to Rust"

rob74 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:36:11 +0000

> LLMs lift the barrier of entry for Rust programming

I think you actually meant "lower the barrier" (which would make it easier to pass the barrier, while lifting it makes it harder)?

New comment by rob74 in "European sentiments towards the US hit an all-time low"

rob74 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:15:02 +0000

[citation needed] - if I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain..., the only source that says that there are more than 1 million killed and wounded (!) Ukrainian soldiers is the Russian Ministry of Defense, which I wouldn't consider very trustworthy...

New comment by rob74 in "European sentiments towards the US hit an all-time low"

rob74 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:01:42 +0000

It's also interesting that, while the "ally" curve is going down for all included countries, in some countries the "partner" (which is a weaker form of ally) curve is going up to partly compensate for that, while in others (mostly southern European, plus Switzerland and, of course, Denmark), it's also going down.

New comment by rob74 in "Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers"

rob74 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:30:05 +0000

> If you have a good architecture and keep good code hygiene

That's a big "if" however - customers have a tendency to come up with requirements that aren't covered (or only covered in awkward ways) by the architecture you envisioned initially, while many of the well-architected parts will remain unused.

New comment by rob74 in "Show HN: GentleOS – A pair of hobby OSes for vintage 32-bit and 16-bit PCs"

rob74 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:29:49 +0000

"Vintage" usually refers to actually old stuff, while "retro" refers to new stuff that looks/sounds/feels like old stuff. So GentleOS is a retro OS designed to run on vintage hardware.

(That distinction wasn't clear to me either, so I had to look it up - TIL).

New comment by rob74 in "Making Graphics Like it's 1993"

rob74 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:22:57 +0000

I just noticed that this might be one of the rare shooters with a female protagonist: the cat has a calico pattern, and those are almost always female (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calico_cat).

New comment by rob74 in "Making Graphics Like it's 1993"

rob74 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:50:49 +0000

This is taking a lot of inspiration from Doom, but the actual raycasting engine is more like Doom's predecessors, the most well-known of which is probably Wolfenstein 3D: perpendicular walls, constant floor and ceiling height. Wolf3D didn't have textured floors and ceilings because of performance reasons, but several other similar games had them. Doom and IIRC Duke Nukem as well used a BSP engine which was much more flexible (walls could intersect at any angle, variable floor and ceiling heights), although the levels were still "flat" (you couldn't have several "stories" inside a level, e.g. you couldn't design a bridge that you could walk over and under).

New comment by rob74 in "How much do amd64 microarchitecture levels help in Go?"

rob74 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 08:54:21 +0000

Either it's a misconfiguration, or it's intentional (only providing a "bare-bones" machine for the lowest price level, even if the underlying hardware would support more)?

New comment by rob74 in "How much do amd64 microarchitecture levels help in Go?"

rob74 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 07:54:18 +0000

Ok, then it will be an explosion of binary size, if you have several code blocks optimized for each architecture level - I'm not very familiar with the subject, but I imagine it would have to be relatively large chunks of code, otherwise the constant branching would eat up the speed advantage.

New comment by rob74 in "AI is slowing down"

rob74 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 06:36:52 +0000

You're partly right. But OTOH, China is (pretty successfully) developing its own AI solutions, and even the (former?) US allies in Europe, America and Asia have become painfully aware that they are dependent on a hostile US administration and tech companies cozying up to that administration, and will be wary of further deepening this dependency, so they will also prefer home-grown solutions. So the addressable market for US companies is much smaller than the global market, even in countries that could theoretically afford Anthropic's and OpenAI's prices.

New comment by rob74 in "Richard Scolyer Has Died"

rob74 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:41:15 +0000

It's actually both - a thing of wonder wrought up by tens of millions of years of mindless evolution. And most scientists would already be happy to be able to "hack" this incredibly complex system to achieve a certain goal (e.g. cure cancer), not "refactor" the whole code, as you seem to be suggesting.

New comment by rob74 in "1worldflag: A blue dot on a transparent background"

rob74 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:54:30 +0000

I think you pointed out very well why it hasn't been used more: lack of durability. Either it has to be some kind of plastic foil, in which case it has to be thin enough to fly in the wind the same way as a traditional flag does, so it will degrade very quickly when exposed to the elements. Or the silk organza suggested on the page, but if it's thin enough to be (almost) transparent I'm not convinced that it would fare much better.

So, nice idea, but completely impractical, which makes it a gimmick.