Hacker News: scubbo

New comment by scubbo in "English: A vs. An"

scubbo — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 22:29:51 +0000

In this sense, it's a synonym for "language". Usually used as "mother tongue" (meaning, the language one grew up speaking).

New comment by scubbo in "We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub"

scubbo — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 22:11:42 +0000

> expecting compassionate or empathetic behaviour from companies, and [another thing, which is not the same thing as the first thing but merely similar or related]

New comment by scubbo in "We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub"

scubbo — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:08:07 +0000

> your naive and self-centered definition of "trust"

I never gave one? For what it's worth, I agree with your second paragraph, despite your first being needlessly aggressive.

New comment by scubbo in "We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub"

scubbo — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 22:42:21 +0000

> The only reason to keep repeating that kind of worldview is to absolve companies behaving in shitty, toxic or downright evil ways.

Or...to warn people away from ever expecting compassionate or empathetic behaviour from companies, and remind people not to trust them?

New comment by scubbo in "Jellyfin 12.0"

scubbo — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 01:50:14 +0000

Ah - I use Usenet, not Torrents, that'd explain it. Thanks!

New comment by scubbo in "Jellyfin 12.0"

scubbo — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:17:04 +0000

> bypassing Cloudflare CAPTCHAs

Can you say more about this? I've never encountered this problem in nearly a decade of running the same stack.

New comment by scubbo in "Finder is so frustrating and has been since day one"

scubbo — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:14:28 +0000

Not the person you're replying to, but I assume they're referring to the ability to see something like:

``` src ├── app │ └── page.tsx └── components └── header.tsx ```

EDIT: Lol. I'm not even going to edit it. Hacker News, you also suck.

New comment by scubbo in "Can guitar frets perform multiplication?"

scubbo — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 04:29:57 +0000

I read it as "a button for re-enabling JavaScript"

New comment by scubbo in "Starbase, LA"

scubbo — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 21:52:21 +0000

He is (inaccurately) known for his engineering _because of_ his marketing.

New comment by scubbo in "Scrap"

scubbo — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:59:33 +0000

https://imgur.com/a/p6p5WlR

https://www.alzinfo.org/donate/donation_form/, in memory of Terry Pratchett.

New comment by scubbo in "Scrap"

scubbo — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 20:56:20 +0000

I also hate Twitter and cancelled my account.

I'm able to read it while logged out - and if I wasn't, there's xcancel.com, and others.

You're not doing yourself any favours.

New comment by scubbo in "Humazon"

scubbo — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 23:38:43 +0000

> Discovering they weren't didn't change the quality of the writing - it only changed the implied relationship with the author.

> But that's a parasocial experience, not a feature of the words on the page.

So? Consumption of media does not exist in a vacuum - how one feels about the work is inextricably affected by the context in which is was encountered and how one views it. We feel prouder (subconciously or not) of reading works that are considered "great" or "weighty". We feel nostalgia for rereading books from our youth, or affection for a book lent by a loved one.

The writer is not saying that the words _themselves_ were changed by the new information, but that his perception and experience of them was. That experience _is still real_.

> Why do we expect authors to be scrupulously physical

"We" don't. Some people prefer it - others don't care. You're free to fall into the latter camp if you want; but the former is a valid preference, and one which _could_ be served by a market.

New comment by scubbo in "Humazon"

scubbo — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:10:13 +0000

> I see nothing wrong with readers gobbling up AI-written books for the rest of their lives.

> Because to me, authenticity makes for a better reading experience.

This pair of sentences gave me pause, until I realised that they're not in contradiction - the author is deliberately non-judgemental of _others_ making a personal choice that _he himself_ would prefer not to make. Remarkably rare, nowadays.

New comment by scubbo in "Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful"

scubbo — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 01:45:13 +0000

I'm surprised to hear that that was your perspective! I felt that it dealt with otherwise-opaque topics in a very approachable way.

New comment by scubbo in "Bigos (Polish Hunter's Stew) Recipe Builder"

scubbo — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:09:50 +0000

> “Ever eaten scubbo? No? Nothing like a bowl of scubbo when you’re hungry. You can put anything in scubbo. Pork, beef, mutton, rabbit, chicken, duck… anything. Even rats, if you’ve got ’em. It’s food for the marching man, scubbo. Got some on the boil out there right now. You can have some of that, if you like.”

> The squad brightened up.

> Thoundth good,” said Igor. “What’th in it?”

> “Boiling water,” said the corporal. “It’s what we call ‘blind scubbo’"

Monstrous Regiment, Terry Pratchett (GNU)

New comment by scubbo in "Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb"

scubbo — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:44:21 +0000

Fair perspective, though I actually prefer this for two reasons: * When it's proposing responses for me to choose between, a description like "I close the PR and you make a followup" is ambiguous - is "I" there "the entity making the proposition (the LLM)" or "the entity making the choice (me)". * I have a line in my `AGENTS.md` specifically instructing it to call me by my name; if it stops doing so, that's a telltale that context-bloat is pushing out other instructions.

New comment by scubbo in "Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open"

scubbo — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:25:38 +0000

> I am a big YC fan in general

Genuine question - why?

New comment by scubbo in "TIME Is Serving AI Bots a Different Website, with Ads Built In"

scubbo — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:30:15 +0000

Yeah - by comparison with this, "a computer takes over some digital work, thus permitting me to get things done in the real world" is positively benign!

New comment by scubbo in "We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars"

scubbo — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:22:17 +0000

I salute your dedication to understanding and fixing a problem that bothers you - but I must add my voice to those who think that this is not a good design for general use. The viewport is the region within which content should be positioned, and thus within which they should be centred. By your logic, left-aligned content in a browser with a left sidebar should be deliberately covered.

New comment by scubbo in "Show HN: ssh ssh.place"

scubbo — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 04:41:30 +0000

> People understand that reverse hacking can happen when connecting to random ssh server, right?

No, actually, I've never heard of such a vector. How would that work?