Hacker News: spencerflem

New comment by spencerflem in "Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work"

spencerflem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:13:01 +0000

ZOHO calls their Microsoft Office suite an OS I think.

I feel like if it’s a platform app developers can target to run general purpose user facing software, it can be an OS.

New comment by spencerflem in "Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work"

spencerflem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:47:01 +0000

In some sense, it is. Sandstorm called itself an OS too. Arcan calls itself an Overlay-OS.

I think for any platform for general purpose computing that provides an application model that programs are written to target, it's close enough I don't mind. Ie: it makes sense for some end-user software to have a target for Windows, Linux, Sandstorm, etc.

& from the other side- what does Debian add that lets it call itself an OS? A set environment and package manager that software is specifically packaged for.

New comment by spencerflem in "Don't be a meat proxy"

spencerflem — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:53:26 +0000

Is it? I hear about 10xers all the time

New comment by spencerflem in "LLMs reward expertise"

spencerflem — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 03:24:16 +0000

Or documentation that everyone could read and refer to

New comment by spencerflem in "My personal AI benchmark: “Generate an SVG of a frog with a Habsburg jaw”"

spencerflem — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 04:06:03 +0000

SVG?

New comment by spencerflem in "Wikimedia Foundation refuses union recognition, hires union-busting law firm"

spencerflem — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:46:36 +0000

I am normally the first to complain that people in hacker news are biased against WMF in a way that seems forced and weird (oh no ! they’re sponsoring some cool open culture stuff in addition to running the website ! they pay for more than literally just web server hosting !)

But this is obscene. I’ve cancelled my donation.

New comment by spencerflem in "Amid Increased Scrutiny, ICE Detention and Deportation Data Goes Dark"

spencerflem — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:06:38 +0000

We’ll see. Depends on the primaries. Institutional dems have a pitiful track record on holding people accountable. I expect we’ll see a lot of reaching across the isle and ‘moving forwards, not dwelling on the past’.

New comment by spencerflem in "The Anti-Palantir Manifesto"

spencerflem — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:53:28 +0000

Haha I think we have a different idea of which 1% is making life miserable

New comment by spencerflem in "Data centers trigger voter backlash"

spencerflem — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:49:14 +0000

Which is why it was a mistake to let Republicans vote

New comment by spencerflem in "Data centers trigger voter backlash"

spencerflem — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:38:04 +0000

Who’s saying not to build solar?

New comment by spencerflem in "Data centers trigger voter backlash"

spencerflem — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:33:49 +0000

Yeah it’s freaky. I work in tech too, I know I’m a villain lol

New comment by spencerflem in "Data centers trigger voter backlash"

spencerflem — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:32:29 +0000

Seems pretty obvious- that datacenters very measurably contribute to rising costs of electricity and climate change , and unlike aluminum processing or farming which makes things people want, is used for AI which a lot of people resent. It’s a lose-lose

New comment by spencerflem in "Data centers trigger voter backlash"

spencerflem — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:23:33 +0000

One refrigerator sized rack at a datacenter takes as much power as 150 homes, and they’re using it for technology that disempowers and annoys people. It’s pretty obviously offensive.

All for rezoning golf courses too

New comment by spencerflem in "The AI Hate Progression"

spencerflem — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 01:19:29 +0000

You can have free markets without investments, which imo is the key differentiator between Capitalism and what came before. That’s what ‘capital’ is in capitalism.

In fact, capitalism tends to trend towards monopoly which is the opposite of a free market. Investing in a monopoly tends to be a Very Good Idea for investors but we want a free market so we go against the ideals of capitalism to break up firms and limit acquisitions.

Once you can invest and reliably make money invested by its very nature you get Rich-Get-Richer.

You can say this is a fine trade off for the benefits if you like, but it’s pretty well baked into the design. IMO we don’t have to go all the way to some other -ism either but we have a trillionaire that bought the government, that’s waaaayy too much capitalism if you ask me

New comment by spencerflem in "Printing Gaussian Splats"

spencerflem — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:30:22 +0000

To be fair, if they first vocalize it they could just use Sparse Voxels which is my favorite differentiable rendering technique https://github.com/NVlabs/svraster

New comment by spencerflem in "Jerry's Map"

spencerflem — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:25:18 +0000

I didn’t notice there was a secondary link, sorry. For everyone else, consider this comment a recommendation to click through and watch it then :)

New comment by spencerflem in "Jerry's Map"

spencerflem — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:16:19 +0000

People Make Games just did a terrific documentary on this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Is8N7B9b0GQ&pp=0gcJCUECo7VqN5t...

New comment by spencerflem in "The AI Hate Progression"

spencerflem — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 19:20:41 +0000

The core idea of capitalism is that you spend money to make more money. Rich get richer is the basic idea, you invest and those investments make you more. It very necessarily leads to oligarchy when left unchecked.

New comment by spencerflem in "Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

spencerflem — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:53:23 +0000

I mean, you Can, but I like my friends and myself.

I feel gross about the place I’m at and I don’t want to lose that feeling.

New comment by spencerflem in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

spencerflem — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:38:13 +0000

I was considering pretty heavily getting a teaching license