Hacker News: slipperybeluga

New comment by slipperybeluga in "Teardown: A Generic 7-Port USB 3.0 Hub That Wasn't"

slipperybeluga — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:49:14 +0000

This wasn't the case 20 years ago. There was actually a good article on HN a few months ago showing how most of the brands are owned by one company that has ruined them all. Still a few good brands. Need to research https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147665

New comment by slipperybeluga in "Grok 4.5"

slipperybeluga — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:01:51 +0000

I get what you're saying, but I don't see the issue here. 95% of people don't need latest Claude Opus or Fable for their work. Most people are not software engineers. Having a model that excels at other things and is faster, cheaper, accessible directly via social media, and "good enough" is a viable pathway. AI aside, when was the last time your company provided you with the "best" tool? Microsoft has made being third best in the desktop OS and cloud provider markets a highly profitable art form. I think it's too early to pick winners in AI right now.

And as others said here, xAI is also probably throwing money into AI and hoping for a breakthrough. Except in this case it's a rocket company, social media company, cloud compute provider, and satellite ISP all rolled into one that can not only bankroll the development and perform all kinds of crazy accounting shell games but can potentially benefit from any breakthroughs in other lines of business. If those Google and anthropic compute contracts hold, a lot of investment is recouped.

Maybe I'm desensitized from the launching of the Tesla Roadster into space, "bulletproof" cyber truck, and the boring company flamethrower, but this doesn't seem too wild to me.

New comment by slipperybeluga in "Cannabis users face substantially higher risk of heart attack (2025)"

slipperybeluga — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 13:44:24 +0000

The most ridiculous thing about cannabis remaining schedule 1 (high risk of abuse, no known medical use) so long is that there is both prescription THC and CBD. It should have been changed|to a higher (less strict) schedule decades ago with the release of marinol in 1985. Then we could have had a lot more studies being done. Needless to say, not easy to do studies on schedule 1 drugs.

New comment by slipperybeluga in "A Special Wireless-Free Nikon Camera Is Publicly Available for the First Time"

slipperybeluga — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 02:13:55 +0000

Why not switches like the pine phone?

New comment by slipperybeluga in "Iceland reports the presence of mosquitoes as climate warms"

slipperybeluga — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 23:18:46 +0000

This garbage article is a great example of why NPR taxpayer funding should never be restored. Ridiculous, unsubstantiated claim here. No evidence whatsoever of any link to climate change is presented. These mosquitoes came via ship and are thus like any other invasive species. Mosquitoes flourish in Siberia, Greenland, Canada, and the northernmost parts of Alaska, all places hundreds of miles north of the Arctic circle.

New comment by slipperybeluga in "More random home lab things I've recently learned"

slipperybeluga — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 16:13:41 +0000

The best thing I did for my homelab is unplug the raspberry pis and throw them into the crate of no-longer-used-but-wont-throw-away electronics. Switching to an ancient tower PC with on paper poorer specs significantly improved performance and reliability across the board and no more weird issues due to SD cards and flaky network. No worries about causing a house fire with sketchy power supplies. No having to make compromises to make it work like a regular PC with using external drives and no difficulty finding compatible software. Pis are amazing little devices, but my experience from the first gen to v4 is that they are temporary solutions or for use cases that don't have high reliability needs. Just buy a cheap mini PC for the same price and you have so many more options and benefits from the get go.

New comment by slipperybeluga in "Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?"

slipperybeluga — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 19:38:08 +0000

YMMV. it's never worked well for me. works great for the first week, then it stops connecting or i suddenly have several zombie bravia devices, all of which aren't connected.

New comment by slipperybeluga in "Ask HN: What's the best hackable smart TV?"

slipperybeluga — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 19:35:12 +0000

best thing i ever did with my bravia was install a custom launcher via adb to finally rid myself of the endless ads, upsetting news, and terrible suggestions constantly shoved in my face without my consent. nice to be able to uninstall the misc bloat that you can't get to with the gui and just have a simple interface. all i want is to access jellyfin and maybe one or two other apps. much better all around experience now.

here's a nice reference for a lot of the stuff installed on bravia that you can elect to remove via adb:

https://github.com/therealhoodboy/skinny-bravia

New comment by slipperybeluga in "The best worst hack that saved our bacon"

slipperybeluga — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 14:20:32 +0000

Yeah but how many of those customers were relying on the key not being a negative number?

New comment by slipperybeluga in "Why your outdoorsy friend suddenly has a gummy bear power bank"

slipperybeluga — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 13:36:28 +0000

The picture on Amazon says 10Ah. Not interested until there is independent verification. The Haribo licensing lends some legitimacy, but way too many fly by night companies selling a fraction of what they advertise.

New comment by slipperybeluga in "Blackcandy: Self hosted music streaming server"

slipperybeluga — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 15:35:13 +0000

Not so much a planned standard, but Airsonic is about the closest thing. Many servers, clients, and third party tools are airsonic compatible. Navidrome, the current server I'm using is compatible for instance.

New comment by slipperybeluga in "We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines"

slipperybeluga — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 23:22:48 +0000

It's not a self-contained TPN compounder in a hospital cleanroom. It's a machine that has many parts that get wet with sugary water. It has parts that need to be cleaned that seldom are, and judging by the average fast food employee, would probably be better off left alone than further contaminated by them attempting to clean it. Google "soda fountain mold" and you will be stunned to see how nasty these can get. I don't eat fast food often, but I skip the drink unless it's from a meticulously clean place.

New comment by slipperybeluga in "FTC's rule banning fake online reviews goes into effect"

slipperybeluga — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 17:36:09 +0000

This doesn't help when every useless chinese widget on Amazon with a RNG created brand name has literally thousands or even tens of thousands of fake reviews. Yeah like 10,000+ were so enamored with this {insert useless item here} that they felt compelled to leave a 5 star review. Amazon has totally sold out like eBay. I don't shop on either anymore because it's hard to find real brands and feedback and reviews are fake. Not to mention the blatant fakes of major products ...

New comment by slipperybeluga in "Rise of fast-fashion Shein, Temu roils global air cargo industry"

slipperybeluga — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 20:20:19 +0000

Crazy how fast they can pump out products when they have free slave labor and use the absolute lowest quality materials

New comment by slipperybeluga in "Rise of fast-fashion Shein, Temu roils global air cargo industry"

slipperybeluga — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 20:11:17 +0000

Opium worked well in the past