Hacker News: siliconpotato

New comment by siliconpotato in "DoD Officially Drops 180 Faiths from Military's Recognized Religion List"

siliconpotato — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 07:58:04 +0000

Joseph smith claims to have had a new revelation and the book of Mormon is "another gospel". It's fan fiction for Americans and claims that the church became corrupted and are restoring the true church with their non biblical ideas. As such, their ideas are sufficiently divergent from biblical doctrine they are considered not part of the Christian church.

New comment by siliconpotato in "Google changes its search box"

siliconpotato — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:39:41 +0000

"i haven't noticed my soul shrivelling to the size of a pea"

New comment by siliconpotato in "Google changes its search box"

siliconpotato — Wed, 20 May 2026 05:59:11 +0000

In my dreams, this is the moment Mozilla brings a search engine out of stealth mode, and says "sorry for looking like idiots for twenty years, we were secretly working on building a great search engine that doesn't suck or do AI"

New comment by siliconpotato in "Don't Sign in with Google"

siliconpotato — Tue, 19 May 2026 06:38:20 +0000

There's a certain writing style, very short paragraphs, fair amount of repetition that just feels like you've read this post before. And you have, just on different topics but it's always the same feel.

But also lots of negatives to start the sentence, usually with a reinforcement e.g.

your password didn't help. your 2fa didn't help. you were never asked to authenticate. you were asked to authorize. completely different mechanism

New comment by siliconpotato in "The Whole Anthropic Kerfuffle"

siliconpotato — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:31:58 +0000

Find it surprising that there are people still under the delusion that they have an audience of humans on twitter worth speaking to

New comment by siliconpotato in "What happens when you post a real Monet and say it's AI?"

siliconpotato — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:57:09 +0000

it was all engagement bait to auction off some NFT nonsense.

New comment by siliconpotato in "Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs"

siliconpotato — Mon, 04 May 2026 07:11:35 +0000

People in glass houses..The same argument can be levelled at the troublesome activities engaged in by the USA.

New comment by siliconpotato in "Vibe Coding Will Break Your Company"

siliconpotato — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:22:07 +0000

> The bottleneck in the AI era is not production. It is discernment.

there's quite a few variants on the "its not X its Y" in this article that make me wonder how much of this waffle was written by a human

New comment by siliconpotato in "The great Scouse pasty war"

siliconpotato — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:07:54 +0000

> I have nothing against Greggs.

I do. This man is benefitting from your custom: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tyne-39443585

New comment by siliconpotato in "US saw record high of 5,668 books banned in libraries in 2025, says agency"

siliconpotato — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 07:16:20 +0000

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65794363 The author John Green who was top of a recent list said that the Bible was number 6 on the list. As other comments have pointed out, a "ban" is where a library has chosen not to stock a book for reasons including response to a complaint. If school library serves children up to the age of 13, then certain explicit fiction is not appropriate and would be expected to be removed.

New comment by siliconpotato in "Israeli soldiers using sexual assault to force Palestinians out of West Bank"

siliconpotato — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:27:53 +0000

Maybe they were carrying out exodus 20:4...

It's ironic that netanyahu says that Christians are thriving in Israel and more than any other middle Eastern country. Only 2% of Israel identifies as Christian, whereas Lebanon has 37%, which Israel is bombing

New comment by siliconpotato in "I'm never buying another Kindle"

siliconpotato — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:04:40 +0000

However I'm inclined to ignore anyone who pushes their argument as "I'm doing X and you should too". Tell the good and bad things but don't tell me what to do

New comment by siliconpotato in "Got an Old Kindle? It Might Not Work Anymore"

siliconpotato — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 05:25:50 +0000

I replaced the battery in mine. Unlike big tech, I believe in repairing old devices. Something Amazon have not considered is how many of these old devices are used as companion devices for other high end kindle owners. I have a scribe and old paperwhite and use them interchangably, with cloud sync of reading position etc, which won't be possible after 20 may.

New comment by siliconpotato in "Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor"

siliconpotato — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:20:06 +0000

this looks like a recipe for eye strain and poor posture. waiting for the follow up post in a month.

New comment by siliconpotato in "Why Doesn't Anybody Realize We're Going Back to the Moon?"

siliconpotato — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 07:46:12 +0000

They didn't say high speed rail projects that get cancelled and downgraded after doing all the hard bits

New comment by siliconpotato in "Why Doesn't Anybody Realize We're Going Back to the Moon?"

siliconpotato — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 07:07:28 +0000

1) nobody's landing on the moon this time

2) the article was an awful piece of hype, that felt like it was sponsored by the Whitehouse.

3) it's hard to see beyond the US imperialism that hangs heavy over space missions. Trump said "the US is winning in space" and he summed up the intent here

4) I might be a nerd but I really don't get the excitement from my fellow nerds. I wonder if they are simply taken in by the hype machine

New comment by siliconpotato in "Firefox introduces Split View: Two tabs side by side, right where you need them"

siliconpotato — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:37:30 +0000

what if you need 300 web pages open?

New comment by siliconpotato in "FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font"

siliconpotato — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:45:19 +0000

ugh. i came to see why this site failed completely to work as expected. turns out that a human has barely been anywhere near it and thinks that delivering non-working slop is fine. what a waste of my time and printer paper.

New comment by siliconpotato in "FontCrafter: Turn your handwriting into a real font"

siliconpotato — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 14:47:08 +0000

i'm in the UK and most people i know drop cursive for non-joined up handwriting as soon as they get the opportunity.

New comment by siliconpotato in "You are not supposed to install OpenClaw on your personal computer"

siliconpotato — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:58:26 +0000

In a corporate environment most emails are TLDR. Quite often a big boss will forward a mail to the whole department "please read". It's 5 pages of waffle. Is it useful or not? Either I spend ten minutes reading or ignore it, or ask a person or bot for a summary. For a dyslexic person, to read a large block of text that is unclear if it is pointless or not, is a lot of cognitive load that you cannot afford either.