Hacker News: sc68cal

New comment by sc68cal in "Character.ai's Bankruptcy Documents Show the Economics of AI Don't Work"

sc68cal — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:29:14 +0000

None of that has any relevance to what is happening right now. Character.ai is in chapter 11 bankruptcy, and "oh they should have done it differently, and 404media isn't taking into consideration a completely unproven hypothetical technology that wouldn't have bankrupted them" is not a useful discussion, nor a good critique of their coverage.

New comment by sc68cal in "Character.ai's Bankruptcy Documents Show the Economics of AI Don't Work"

sc68cal — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:22:00 +0000

So, your contention is that 404media isn't taking into consideration a hypothetical where they wouldn't burn millions of dollars each month running something.

New comment by sc68cal in "What happened to the Snowden archive"

sc68cal — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:42:55 +0000

Being killed for your reporting happens to a lot of journalists. I think your comment about "dumb people choosing fear" is incredibly tone deaf. I don't see you risking your life to expose the Panama Papers and being blown up with a bomb for it. It's easy to write something so brave from behind your keyboard.

New comment by sc68cal in "Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust"

sc68cal — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:43:45 +0000

Yes, I saw that's it's via macros, but my point is that it reminded me of some web development practices from a much earlier era, and why we moved towards doing templates and separating app logic from presentation

New comment by sc68cal in "Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust"

sc68cal — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:27:55 +0000

It's interesting to see that they let you mix markup with logic directly in rust, but I have worries about maintainability. I remember the bad old days of PHP where you'd mix markup with logic directly, even when doing OOP with classes and it really made things more difficult long term.

New comment by sc68cal in "US halts flights at busy East Coast airports, says fiber line cut"

sc68cal — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 18:52:11 +0000

There is also a new ATC system being rolled out, as early as today

https://www.airwaysmag.com/new-post/faa-smart-first-deployme...

New comment by sc68cal in "What happened to the Snowden archive"

sc68cal — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:26:50 +0000

This whole situation has severely killed my faith in organizations and people. Snowden put a lot of trust in people that he had every right to believe they would do the right thing, and unfortunately it's been shown that that trust was misplaced.

Through a combination of blackmail, personality clashes, vanity and ego, incompetence, the whole thing just fizzled out completely. A real shame.

New comment by sc68cal in "'My Husband Has No Friends'"

sc68cal — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:48:38 +0000

My pet theory is the elimination of the third place[1] where socialization can happen. Much of this is because the push for higher and higher levels of productivity and profit has made people more and more busy, which leaves less time and energy for these third spaces.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

New comment by sc68cal in "PS5 Linux lead quits: "a bunch of noobs using LLMs" that "they don't understand""

sc68cal — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:53:55 +0000

With how verbose LLMs are and how much code churn they generate, it will be very difficult to extract anything and apply it back upstream

New comment by sc68cal in "Inside Google’s $200bn Wall Street finance machine for Anthropic"

sc68cal — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:48:31 +0000

> For Google’s project, the risk is big if concentrated: $200bn of contracts tied to Anthropic’s ability to pay its chip and data centre leases. It is one piece of a larger dilemma, with demand across the industry resting on a handful of large hyperscalers and frontier AI labs.

This seems very risky to me

New comment by sc68cal in "Gleam Is Now on Tangled"

sc68cal — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:05:32 +0000

I tried Tangled and tried to run my own Knot, the problem I had was I'd create a repository, have it get created correctly on my Knot, but then would never see any updates to the repo on Tangled itself.

The main issue is that even though I had the knot with IPv6 connectivity, it only really reliably worked once I enabled lots of IPv4 NAT'ing and also created a dummy A record for the Knot.

This is a known issue - https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core/issues/494

New comment by sc68cal in "Why I Left Google DeepMind"

sc68cal — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:54:01 +0000

> I would much rather have an onboard AI that can discriminate between unarmed civilians and military assets,

Has this been proven to actually occur? There have been lots of reports that similar systems in Israel that use AI, struck hundreds of targets that were civilian. They did not discriminate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-assisted_targeting_in_the_G...

New comment by sc68cal in "Mark Zuckerberg directed Meta to create a prediction markets app"

sc68cal — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:27:46 +0000

> Social networks didn't really exist before The Facebook.

You never heard of MySpace?

New comment by sc68cal in "TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP"

sc68cal — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:20:14 +0000

That's pretty neat, thanks for sharing

New comment by sc68cal in "Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC"

sc68cal — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:28:12 +0000

"Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."

New comment by sc68cal in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

sc68cal — Thu, 21 May 2026 20:37:23 +0000

How many people took those MP3s and tried to create a company that would IPO for a trillion dollars?

New comment by sc68cal in "Redis and the Cost of Ambition"

sc68cal — Wed, 13 May 2026 19:13:54 +0000

I think that if you develop your application from scratch and directly use Redis as it was intended (data structures over the network) then it makes sense. I've done it for some applications and it's quite nice.

But you have to make the choice to skip using a relational database, and a lot of application frameworks make it very easy to use a relational database out of the box, to the point where you would have to make a conscious choice to use Redis directly, and sometimes for a CRUD app it's easier to just use the RDBMS.

New comment by sc68cal in "Redis and the Cost of Ambition"

sc68cal — Wed, 13 May 2026 15:04:34 +0000

I do agree with the feeling that Redis started to add more and more features as time went on. A lot of that is because the time and cost to stand up a dedicated service (like Kafka, RabbitMq, etc etc) was higher than just putting more data into Redis.

While I agree with the theme that Redis has become more and more complicated and had more features added to it, as part of a monetization push by Redis Inc, it's understandable.

Especially since there are plenty of other posts on HN titled "Just use Postgres" for everything. So, why does Postgres get a pass on being a message queue, distributed lock manager, JSON document store, and vector database, while Redis is not allowed to?

New comment by sc68cal in "Leaving GitHub for Forgejo"

sc68cal — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:38:04 +0000

I have also moved my git repositories to a self-hosted NUC. I have not yet bothered with a HTTP frontend to share it with the world, mostly because I don't want to provide AI scrapers with content and don't want to put the work in to block them.

It's a shame that all these companies that benefited from open source have poisoned the industry like this

New comment by sc68cal in "We sped up bun by 100x"

sc68cal — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:38:34 +0000

So, they implemented a git client in zig, that had some significant speedups for their usecase. However:

> The git CLI test suite consists of 21,329 individual assertions for various git subcommands (that way we can be certain ziggit does suffice as a drop-in replacement for git).

> While we only got through part of the overall test suite, that's still the equivalent of a month's worth of straight developer work (again, without sleep or eating factored in).