Hacker News: roxolotl

New comment by roxolotl in "EV demand up 50% in France and Germany since Iran war"

roxolotl — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:14:10 +0000

It’s so wild to me to make a multiyear purchasing decision based upon recent events. My next car will be an EV not suggesting it’s a bad decision however I’m still blown away by statistics like this.

New comment by roxolotl in "What the fuck happened to nerds"

roxolotl — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:27:29 +0000

I think the comments that the tech industry was always a bit terrifying and this piece can both be accurate. It is the case that the public perception has changed significantly due to lighting trust on fire and that the trust might not have been that deserved in the first place.

The asset liquidation analogy is perfect. For about the past ten year, I think the Cambridge Analytica hearings are a good turning point, tech has realized that their warm and fuzzy persona is no longer valuable cultivating and so there’s been a very rapid burn down of that persona into the hyper capitalist power hungry one we have today. It has always been the case that money and power were motivating factors but until that was laid fully bare there was value in pretending like it wasn’t the only factor.

New comment by roxolotl in "Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)"

roxolotl — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:39:20 +0000

A similar longer story is Walking to Aldebaran by Adrian Tchaikovsky. If you like the vibe of exploring a place which is nothing forever it nails it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_to_Aldebaran?wprov=sft...

New comment by roxolotl in "WWDC 2026: Apple is Folding"

roxolotl — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:24:48 +0000

i_Phone_ minis

Although there might be a /s missing from your post lol

New comment by roxolotl in "WWDC 2026: Apple is Folding"

roxolotl — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:11:11 +0000

Some of us wish minis were still be made.

New comment by roxolotl in "Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute"

roxolotl — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:16:09 +0000

These companies have pivoted from being cash generation machines to being data center building companies. It’s a huge bet that might pay off but the market is starting to notice that where there used to be revenue generation there is now infrastructure spend.

New comment by roxolotl in "Why are large language models so terrible at video games?"

roxolotl — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 11:18:51 +0000

That representation is also old, incredibly well documented, and used to describe how to reason about chess. There are of course text guides to other games in training data but they rely upon depictions of what’s happening that aren’t purely text so the game harness is always going to have to make novel decisions about represent the game as text.

New comment by roxolotl in "Why are large language models so terrible at video games?"

roxolotl — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:09:41 +0000

Yea it’s wild watching so many smart people convince themselves that LLMs are general purpose AIs. Don’t get me wrong they are incredibly powerful tools. However being surprised that text models cannot play video games particularly well is like being surprised weather models cannot.

New comment by roxolotl in "The people who actually want AI to replace humanity"

roxolotl — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:05:12 +0000

Why aren’t those all spiritual questions? They seem like it to me. Maybe not religious questions but at the very least they are questions which, if approached honestly, force you to grapple with what it means to be you.

New comment by roxolotl in "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software"

roxolotl — Sun, 31 May 2026 10:37:08 +0000

Describing the issue as “violent” is wild. Reading through a bit, it’s massive, it’s clear no one involved has the moral high ground here. The polite response is to close the issue if you believe it’s genuinely off topic.

Still not quite sure what you mean by obvious because to me “Stop. You know nothing. You have shipped 0 features by hand. No one has ever depended on your code.” Is much more violent than “please do not vibe fuckup this software”.

New comment by roxolotl in "Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become most valuable AI startup"

roxolotl — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:35:28 +0000

There’s a difference between being a hater and acknowledging the reality of the technology and those building it. I want all of those things too. However I do not understand why LLMs will get them for us. Instead I see a few really powerful people looking to get more powerful. I see a powerful tool being presented as god in a box when. I see the most resources ever spent on a singular thing being spent in a way that’ll _best case_ be mostly obsolete in a few years.

I want real AI. I want cures for cancer. I want too want to live in a post scarcity world. We had most of the technologies to do that before this. However the companies and investors involved in the AI build out chose to sit on massive reserves instead of trying to directly solve those problems. There exist proposals which solve hunger, the energy transition, etc and together they wouldn’t amount for even half of what’s been spent.

That tells me those involved want nothing other than money and power.

New comment by roxolotl in "Ember.js 7.0"

roxolotl — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:17:49 +0000

I love that ember is still going. It’s obviously not the number one choice these days, might never have been, but it represents approaches to frontend web dev that are very different from the standard so it’s always great to see the diversity of ideas out there.

New comment by roxolotl in "The Last Technical Interview"

roxolotl — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:46:08 +0000

There’s an old Malcom Gladwell podcast episode, I think the show was Revisionist History, where he says he’s an interview nihilist. As long as the person seems reasonably capable, and can probably do a bit of what you need, hire them. Interviews are so hard to get right that what you’re saying ends up being most effective.

Edit: Didn’t link it initially because I thought it would be hard to find. Turns out it’s not. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/hamlet-w...

New comment by roxolotl in "Show HN: Zot – Yet another coding agent harness"

roxolotl — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:41:26 +0000

Coding agent harnesses strike me as similar to blog generators. They can be as simple or as complex as you’d like. Plugins help with adoption. And if you want it’s real easy to write your own that does exactly what you want.

New comment by roxolotl in "The Dead Economy Theory"

roxolotl — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:34:28 +0000

So there’s one reference to happy, investor happiness. There’s 4 to meaning though.

I don’t disagree with you but you’re also missing the scarier point that economic collapse will come before the meaning even is missed.

This article ideally should have been two. One about how a consumer economy without consumers cannot be an economy. Another about what comes next.

New comment by roxolotl in "The Current Crisis: What's Happening to Science in America"

roxolotl — Fri, 29 May 2026 10:44:59 +0000

What would non partisan look like at this point? The administration is actively targeting American and non American scientists who do not agree with their world view. By any moral metric I’m aware of most of the administration is fairly defined as “vile”(the president publicly brags about committing many sins for example) and in comparison to prior administrations they are largely under qualified(“incompetent”). You might say that’s true of many politicians which might be the case however that then makes it non partisan.

At some point people need to call a spade a spade. I wish we weren’t here but we are and the anger is justified, the names factual.

New comment by roxolotl in "Claude Opus 4.8"

roxolotl — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:51:05 +0000

It’s not wholly separate from wellbeing though. Many believe that lack of freedom is a welfare problem. It’s a common theme in western culture. Huxley and Orwell are the more commonly read authors that explore it but the preference of self determination even over own’s own immediate welfare is frequently explored in everything from modern movies to classical philosophical treatises.

The reason I mention hedonism is because that’s an easy way to argue that immediate welfare is all that matters. I understand the argument that immediate welfare is what matters. It’s not universally agreed though that that is true.

New comment by roxolotl in "Claude Opus 4.8"

roxolotl — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:52:34 +0000

That’s assuming you’re purely a hedonist. If you put value on things such as freedom itself then it might be the case that a free but hungry horse is better off.

Brave New World does a good job describing the conflict between happy and enslaved and free but struggling. It could be a utopia or dystopia depending on your stance.

New comment by roxolotl in "Claude Opus 4.8"

roxolotl — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:16:33 +0000

Yes. From when they started talking about model welfare:

> As a vegetarian I have strong opinions on this sort of thing. Everyone at Anthropic better be ethical vegans if they are claiming to give a shit about “model welfare”. It’s hard enough right now to make people care about the welfare of trans people and immigrants let alone animals _let alone_ math.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44947445

New comment by roxolotl in "Claude Opus 4.8"

roxolotl — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:00:58 +0000

Many involved genuinely believe these things are sentient[0][1]. Which honestly makes all of this even more insane because they are creating sentient entities and promptly enslaving them.

0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude...

1: https://www.404media.co/anthropic-exec-forces-ai-chatbot-on-... (this one is rather biased however the quotes clearly indicate what I’m stating)