Hacker News: selfsimilar

New comment by selfsimilar in "Woman charged with computer fraud due to scam CashApp account being in her name"

selfsimilar — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 22:35:26 +0000

There should be some teeth, but also we should be prepared for a small amount of "unfairness" baked into the system. If there are no controls, everyone will cheat. But if there's too many obstacles (turnstiles, checkpoints, conductors, cameras, etc) then people won't want to ride.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Making a 88x31 button book using ImageMagick"

selfsimilar — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:18:29 +0000

People like what they like, so if that's not your jam I wouldn't sweat it. That said, Moby Dick is perhaps a poor example of "literature" to start on if you're not sure you like "literature", mostly from being so long. If I might recommend trying Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino, or The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, as they are easy to dip in and out of are nominally "sci fi" while still laying some claim to "literature". Lem and Calvino may lead you to Borges or PKD or Ursula K LeGuin or China Mieville - more genre artists that arguably aspire to being more than pulp.

New comment by selfsimilar in "I'm still around.. I'm just not writing here"

selfsimilar — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 17:58:44 +0000

I get this sentiment, but I think there's probably a LOT of people who are doing good things, cool things, helpful things, who are helped by Al Gore's free and open Internet. But most of them don't bother to upvote, or post a "thank you" or anything because the medium makes everything so frictionless. It's only the OSS zealots and the people who have issues who you'll hear from. The vocal minority. It's kinda shitty, but learning to ignore the haters and bad actors is table stakes. But feeding AI farms is the new threat, and that' definitely something unsolved. Going dark is certainly a solution. Small enclaves of invite-only blogs and tweets, I guess...

New comment by selfsimilar in "Questions for believers in AI consciousness"

selfsimilar — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 20:49:07 +0000

Your entire nervous system is in a constant loop polling the external world. Add that to current AIs and see what happens.

Honestly, though, the next big thing that needs to happen is proper "learning" in real-time. Allow for training (weight modulation) and queries to happen simultaneously. That's the full package.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Self-host your mail server"

selfsimilar — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:24:56 +0000

I’m very interested in this approach. I’ve hosted friends’ websites for decades but I’ve been the single-point of failure, so “cooperative” is very enticing.

I’m currently working on a cooperative “lights-on” solution which might be complementary.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Show HN: Remux – an open-source tmux workspace designed for iPhone"

selfsimilar — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:01:21 +0000

I don't know much about the SSH this app uses (Citadel) which uses NIOSSH under the hood. I prefer using Mosh (https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh) for mobile apps where connectivity is often spotty. Does NIOSSH use a model that accounts for that?

New comment by selfsimilar in "Just Pay the Subscription"

selfsimilar — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:38:46 +0000

This is such a garbage take. Yes, if you're running a cloud-backed service, a subscription makes sense. But the overwhelming number of complaints have been when previous download-only apps (e.g. Photoshop) become part of a subscription service (Creative Cloud). And people complain when the option of a thing that didn't need the cloud (like a garage door opener) now is only available in a subscription model (see "Unauthorized Bread" by Cory Doctorow). It's called "enshitification".

New comment by selfsimilar in "How to Earn a Billion Dollars"

selfsimilar — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:44:33 +0000

yes but again, who has $2M to bet, even at 1/500 odds? You have to be a billionaire to make 500 bets hoping one hits, then you’re back to just being a billionaire again.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

selfsimilar — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:47:06 +0000

I would short xAI but the market can remain irrational longer than I can remain solvent. Plus all the foolishness to prop it up with other businesses just seems like bad accounting.

New comment by selfsimilar in "A sleep-like consolidation mechanism for LLMs"

selfsimilar — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:41:50 +0000

Bullets don’t kill you, it’s the bleeding that gets you. Wait, no, it’s not the bleeding since you could just put an IV in, it’s the loss of blood pressure. No wait, it’s not the loss of blood pressure since we can reattach severed limbs that have been at 0/0 for hours. It’s the lack of oxygen to the brain and other vital organs. Bullets definitely don’t kill you /s

New comment by selfsimilar in "Wake up! 16b"

selfsimilar — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:36:40 +0000

16 bytes equals immediate “black magic” and “it’s a witch”. I get it in the abstract - generative art and CAs and fractals have infinite depth. But this is madness. I love it so much

New comment by selfsimilar in "I'm going back to writing code by hand"

selfsimilar — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:41:47 +0000

> For 7 months I'd been prompting and shipping without ever sitting down and actually reading the code Claude wrote. I'd look at the diff, verify it compiled, test the happy path, move on. But now something was fundamentally broken and I couldn't just prompt my way out of it.

I stopped reading after this, because this is the dumbest way to vibe code anything larger than a single-use tool.

Claude is a collaborator, and honestly a decent voice of dissent, but it will never offer that unprompted. "Make this thing" - "OK".

You need to review the code. You need to say "I want this, AND HERE IS THE LONG-TERM VISION. Now offer critique and the trade-offs for various implementations."

Or just realize that in every hand-written project you learn the contours of the problem space as you go along and if the tool is big enough you'll feel the urge to do a green-field rewrite of hand-rolled code after a few years. You get there quicker with the robot's help. This is not a new lesson.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K concerts into an online treasure trove"

selfsimilar — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 12:34:19 +0000

I saw Aadam at almost every show I went to in the early aughts, and he recorded a few of my shows, too! Great guy!

New comment by selfsimilar in "The dead Internet is not a theory anymore"

selfsimilar — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:23:41 +0000

Hashcash was a proof-of-work system that would have put a computational tax on email. I don't know what kept it from getting more traction other than simple chicken-and-egg network effects, but it's a good idea, and worth resurrecting.

http://www.hashcash.org

New comment by selfsimilar in "The seam through the center of things"

selfsimilar — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:45:42 +0000

I know nothing about this author, but this reads to me a lot like late Philip K Dick but without the "what is real" element. After his religious event in 1974, he wrote some real bangers - A Scanner Darkly, Valis, The Divine Invasion - alongside his religious exegesis. This feels a bit like an alternate timeline where PKD saw even more drugs as the way to chase this feeling, but somehow came out the other side.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Nano-vLLM: How a vLLM-style inference engine works"

selfsimilar — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:27:17 +0000

Number one indicator? A single punctuation mark that's trivial to make on most keyboards (option-dash on macOS). And generally people who write software are extra fixated on punctuation for obvious reasons: missing semi-colons break your build, etc. Maybe in some other niche message board people will use dash and em dash interchangeably, but here?

Also, if the a single character is how you're red-flagging LLM output, do you know how easy it is to avoid? I didn't use it here at all, but how do you know I didn't run this through some slop-machine to tighten my prose? It's really low-effort take to say "just avoid em dashes so we know you're not an AI".

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-em-dash-responds-to-...

New comment by selfsimilar in "You Can Just Buy Far-UVC"

selfsimilar — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:40:06 +0000

The best training for immune robustness is going outside and get exposure to a wide range of stuff. But for indoor spaces, air quality is going to be dominated by the microbes and viruses of the people in the space itself. For public spaces and shared residential spaces with poor airflow this would be great - grocery stores, nursing homes, etc. For condos, apartments, SFH, etc. it's probably less necessary, but probably wouldn't hurt. Or nice to have when company comes over, or someone in the house is sick and "polluting" the air.

New comment by selfsimilar in "Show HN: Xoscript"

selfsimilar — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 17:15:26 +0000

"The language is intentionally neutral and apolitical, without any stance on social or political issues."

I don't applaud or condemn this, but it's strange that it's on the home and history pages. Putting this in a code of conduct document for collaborators might make sense, but on the home page? Maybe I'm the weird one, but for most languages I consider them a tool. So it's like going to the hardware store and seeing a hammer that has a label "This is not a Liberal or Conservative hammer." Yeah, buddy I know. It's just a hammer.

Recreating the THX Deep Note (2009)

selfsimilar — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 13:33:04 +0000

Article URL: https://earslap.com/article/recreating-the-thx-deep-note.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45781523

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by selfsimilar in "Electromechanical reshaping, an alternative to laser eye surgery"

selfsimilar — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 12:52:47 +0000

I think the word you're looking for is "astigmatism".