Hacker News: rozap

New comment by rozap in "Apple has removed most of the towns and villages in Lebanon from Apple maps?"

rozap — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:01:44 +0000

The majority of the population in Israel supports this. And the horrifying and surprising thing to me is that a number of my American Jewish friends will just say "they feel conflicted", while their parents (in their 60s by now) overwhelmingly support Israel. Obviously this is anecdotal but I still found it shocking. The scary thing is that this unhinged behavior will only lead to more antisemitism and violence directed back at them. It's so obviously counterproductive from my perspective as someone who hasn't had Israeli indoctrination. We're in a seriously dangerous moment but of course this has been building since the 40s when the country was founded on brutal dispossession and racial superiority.

New comment by rozap in "The Intelligence Failure in Iran"

rozap — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:11:12 +0000

Maybe? Israel has wanted us to go to war in Iran since Reagan. They finally got a president stupid enough (or with sufficient leverage over) to do it. But I wouldn't say from the US's side that this has been in the works for decades.

New comment by rozap in "General Motors is assisting with the restoration of a rare EV1"

rozap — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 01:27:03 +0000

GM marketing is not concerned with secondary markets.

And yes, as someone who races shitboxes as a hobby, they're more like 3k now.

New comment by rozap in "General Motors is assisting with the restoration of a rare EV1"

rozap — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:26:20 +0000

Still on the younger end for people who have enough money to buy a car, which now averages $~40k. Zoomers are economically screwed.

New comment by rozap in "General Motors is assisting with the restoration of a rare EV1"

rozap — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:10:51 +0000

This is part of GM's broader marketing push to drum up goodwill from younger people. It's the same reason why they have a youtube series about the beginnings of the Cadillac F1 team, which is clearly produced for zoomer and millenial audiences.

I don't think there's anything nefarious here, they are just cultivating a particular image to try to sell cars. It's a reasonable marketing strategy, as marketing strategies go.

New comment by rozap in "A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place"

rozap — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:02:15 +0000

I read your quote "Having to provide for other people is literally the same as being trapped in a "I have no mouth and I must scream"" and my brain immediately went to the millions of Americans working dead end jobs just to put food on the table for their family. It need not be communism for this to be a reality.

New comment by rozap in "A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place"

rozap — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 18:46:01 +0000

I guess I'm not making a judgement of what other people should or shouldn't do. Just making up a goofy example to illustrate that the choice is not so obvious to a lot of people, which I think you also illustrate pretty well with your examples. It really depends on the individual. I do think it's worth looking at the incentives of the people funding these companies, because that does give a picture of the probable outcomes.

People will continue working on this sort of thing, that's fine, it really doesn't bother me. If I was forced to make a judgement, I think it's maybe a little silly, but I'm also not out there saving the planet from climate armageddon so I shouldn't cast stones. As a species we are extremely bad at prioritizing for our collective survival and there are a million worse things to be working on.

New comment by rozap in "A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place"

rozap — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:11:38 +0000

Brains 'R Us recently filed for chapter 11 and has been cut up and sold for scrap to private equity. The new PE firm has your brain. In 2208 there's a large grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows. It's technically illegal in many jurisdictions due to "ethical implications", but is still the cheapest way to run many workloads. The method used to harness the brain involves reanimating it in a jar of jelly, and then forcing it to do the 2208 equivalent of a captcha. Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.

New comment by rozap in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

rozap — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:16:05 +0000

You're right, I pasted this into Claude and it seems to think that there are many avenues. And Claude even named the parking operator by name because they're facing a class action for this very thing:

Claude wrote:

> The broader trend is in your favor. App-only parking companies are facing a wave of legal action nationally. A major class action lawsuit against Metropolis Technologies (one of the largest app-based parking operators) alleges they violated consumer protection laws by failing to provide adequate means to pay for parking and then penalizing consumers for not paying. Lanier Law Firm Tennessee's Attorney General secured a nearly $9 million settlement against Metropolis for similar practices, requiring them to implement clear signage, maintain staffed customer support, and automatically issue refunds when their technology malfunctions.

It's just so exhausting to deal with this kind of thing, I've been super busy and it's not worth it to me to fight over $30, which is exactly the bet these scummy companies are making. I think LLMs lower the cost of drafting serious sounding letters to the point where that should be my first impulse rather than giving up and paying them, which rewards the behavior.

New comment by rozap in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

rozap — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:46:36 +0000

I parked in a garage in downtown Tacoma, Washington. The only option to pay was via an app. So I downloaded the app (by walking outside to where there was cell service, because I was, you know, underground in a garage) at which point it threw an internal server error when adding my card. There was no attendant on duty, and no way to pay with a credit card. So I left - just drove out of the garage. Then a few months later I got a fine for $75 for not paying. Then I called them to dispute it, and they offered to waive most of it, but it was still more than if I had been able to pay the fee initially.

I'm sure it was sold to the garage as a way to "maximize revenue and unlock operational efficiency". And sure enough, look, the revenue number is up and to the right. Working as designed.

New comment by rozap in "Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland"

rozap — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:34:29 +0000

This thread doesn't appear on the homepage, it is only on /active

So uh, threads with wrongspeak in them are still hidden.

New comment by rozap in "WA income tax clears House after 24-hour debate"

rozap — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:53:16 +0000

Agree. The constitution should be amended, then we should pass something like this.

New comment by rozap in "WA income tax clears House after 24-hour debate"

rozap — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:48:51 +0000

These people are literal leeches on society. Like I get it, nobody likes paying tax. But the simple fact is: if society would crumble due to everyone acting the way you act, then you're a leech. Whether it's paying taxes, running scams, or doing crime.

It's frustrating to me that people shirk responsibility for their actions when they act in the way that economic models would predict. As if acting like a rational agent within a system voids any responsibility you have as a member of society.

See any/all of the following and tell me how often you hear similar lines of thinking among techies:

  * "Well, I can get rich quick by running this scam, and it's not technically illegal, so, me being a rational agent, I'll run this scam"

  * "Sure, Facebook may be contributing in large part to the downfall of western society but those RSUs taste so sweet"

  * "I'll use the Oregon infrastructure but if I live across the river then I don't have to pay for it. And I can buy things without sales tax in Oregon!"

In short: "You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."

New comment by rozap in "Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood"

rozap — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:18:40 +0000

And the AI build out will release more co2, making the crossover point even closer.

This is actually really funny to think about.

New comment by rozap in "Elevated Errors in Claude.ai"

rozap — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:38:27 +0000

Some people think so. I interviewed someone who, on a screenshare, would just type every question I said, verbatim, into antigravity. Then he'd look at the output for a second and say "Hm this looks good" (it was not) and then run the code and paste the error back into the prompt. It was a surreal experience. I didn't end the interview early because it was so incredibly wild I couldn't even believe it. I don't think he had a single thought the entire time that wasn't motivated by the LLM output.

New comment by rozap in "Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is killed in Israeli strike, ending 36-year rule"

rozap — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 06:31:58 +0000

It was never about human rights. Bibi gets to do genocide and we supply the weapons to make it happen.

khamenei being a piece of shit is pure coincidence. If he was a nice guy he'd be equally dead right now.

This feels very much like a "mission accomplished" moment. Nobody knows what the future holds. Highly likely it gets worse.

New comment by rozap in "The Slow Death of the Power User"

rozap — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:27:09 +0000

Maybe you haven't worked with someone like this? You ask them to do the simplest thing and they can't. And not like, they don't know so they go figure it out, they are just like "I don't know how to do that". Then they attempt to engineer (er, vibecode) enormously complicated solutions to solve problems that aren't problems for anyone else on the team, because other folks on the team know how to use a terminal or text editor. Like I asked someone (an engineer!) to open a text editor and he said "What's that". It's truly bizarre.

New comment by rozap in "Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok"

rozap — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:13:41 +0000

What. What if I just like cars though. Am I a performative male?

New comment by rozap in "Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court"

rozap — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:29:59 +0000

Yep, that's why you need to convince Congress of that fact, as has been done in the past. Tariffs absolutely make sense as a strategic tool. There is no strategy here.

New comment by rozap in "Bridging Elixir and Python with Oban"

rozap — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:40:26 +0000

I use a similar strategy for python calls from elixir. This is in a web server, usually they're part of a process pool. So we start up N workers and they hang out and answer requests when needed. I just have an rpc abstraction that handles all the fiddly bits. The two sides pass erlang terms back and forth. Pretty simple.