Hacker News: spicymaki

New comment by spicymaki in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

spicymaki — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:11:54 +0000

That wing of the Republican Party does not exist anymore, they are now centrist Democrats.

New comment by spicymaki in "Everything you do is being recorded"

spicymaki — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:01:35 +0000

Thank you for the heads up! DDOS attacks are pretty concerning, but even more concerning is the potential alteration of content. Diabolical. That said, journalism needs funding more than ever, please if you can, try your best to pay for it.

New comment by spicymaki in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

spicymaki — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:04:26 +0000

> Because our daily complicity ...

Exactly this. We were (still are) complicit in our own destruction and worst yet when other courageous people spoke up we shout them down, hid away, laughed at their folly, or shunned them outright.

New comment by spicymaki in "Nobel Disease"

spicymaki — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:16:43 +0000

Billionaires are also susceptible to extreme forms this disease. It was also known as hubris to the ancient Greeks.

New comment by spicymaki in "Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc"

spicymaki — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:53:45 +0000

First, we need to make it illegal to say you are buying something when you are actually renting. Words mean something.

New comment by spicymaki in "OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened"

spicymaki — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:55:16 +0000

There is just no skepticism these days. We are constantly being lied to by tech leaders.

New comment by spicymaki in "Hacker wipes Romania's land registry database"

spicymaki — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:42:03 +0000

This is going to sound controversial, but sometimes it is good to have a paper copy stored in a secure vault.

New comment by spicymaki in "U of Chicago law school bans laptops from classes amid AI backlash"

spicymaki — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 02:17:35 +0000

> This is a terrible way to learn.

What you are saying is not evidence based. The lecture method has delivered the greatest minds in western and eastern civilization for centuries. The newer pedagogical methods are in-fact failing us to the point that we are approaching post-literacy.

New comment by spicymaki in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

spicymaki — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:15:10 +0000

I asked Gemini to generate a picture of Peter Pan and Wendy (for a workbook I am putting together for youth summer reading) and it preceded to refuse due to copyright. Not everything about that work is owned by Disney. Thankfully the JM Barrie original artwork is public domain and available (and fantastic btw), so I used that instead.

New comment by spicymaki in "Nolan's Odyssey – A technical analysis by a nitpicky Classics student"

spicymaki — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:59:52 +0000

Good analysis, goes through the pros and cons of the adaptation. IMHO Nolan made some strong choices and the result is a great film, don’t miss it! What a time to be alive!

New comment by spicymaki in "U of Chicago law school bans laptops from classes amid AI backlash"

spicymaki — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:59:15 +0000

Large lectures (100+ students) should have little to no interactions between students and lecturers. It has been this way since the 11th century. You are not supposed to be learning the material for the first time during a lecture. Using the syllabus you should do the pre-work and the lecture concretizes the information. Office hours, tutoring, self study, homework, and online/AI resources can be used as tools to deepen your understanding of the material outside of the lecture hall.

New comment by spicymaki in "Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS"

spicymaki — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 14:27:55 +0000

I am genuinely fascinated by this.

I don’t like piling on especially with security vulnerabilities, but man how many red flags do you need to ignore?

They won’t stop abusing us until we stop using their products.

New comment by spicymaki in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

spicymaki — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 22:57:40 +0000

Funny enough I have had this conversation during the ACA “Obama Care” national (US) debate in the early 2000s. I have had one of my colleagues say if we give healthcare to everybody then it will affect his care negatively. He would rather limit it to people who deserve it (through merit) so he can have his pick of quality doctors. These people absolutely do exist.

New comment by spicymaki in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

spicymaki — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:42:24 +0000

I think we are all villains here. Good healthcare coverage is just another status symbol to be attained. If the poor have it then it becomes less of a value. To some degree we are all wired this way and we all suffer because of it.

New comment by spicymaki in "Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation"

spicymaki — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 23:00:06 +0000

Exactly. Nothing is going to get better until consumers realize they have the power (at least for now).

New comment by spicymaki in "Amazon Has Axed Its New Stargate Series"

spicymaki — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:18:30 +0000

Good! Did you really need more Stargate? Just watch the classic movie, and 200+ episodes of SG-1 and then 100+ episodes of Atlantis. Let these franchises rest.

New comment by spicymaki in "Ferrari Luce"

spicymaki — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:03:40 +0000

This is just my subjective opinion, but it looks like the car has a Pixar aesthetic. I am not in to it, but I am glad Ferrari is willing to take some design risks. I am not sure who this is for.

New comment by spicymaki in "Scammers are abusing an internal Microsoft account to send spam links"

spicymaki — Sun, 24 May 2026 16:59:02 +0000

Here is a fun one, my mobile phone company has an account lock along with a pin and OTP over SMS system. In order for me to activate a new device (like an phone upgrade) with eSIM over the phone, I need to unlock my account with account lock, give them the pin over the phone, and read the SMS OTP to the mobile phone rep online. I get doing the account unlock and verbal pin, but I don't get why they ask for the OTP especially when they train us to never share the OTP over the phone. I even asked the rep about it, but he mentioned that you should never share the OTP if you did not initiate the service request. From a security posture point of view I think that stinks. I am not exactly sure how they expect SMS OTP to work in the case where my phone is not functional.

New comment by spicymaki in "How can Apple deal with the memory shortage?"

spicymaki — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:24:51 +0000

Memory optimization is incredibly low hanging fruit. We have been so spoiled with the abundance of memory.

There is just so much code out there that does not manage object life cycles well (over allocation, leaks, etc.), encodes data in text rather than binary representation.

The move to static binaries over dynamic libraries, applications that run web engines underneath rather than cleaner UIs.

I hope the memory shortage will encourage us to focus on efficiency again.

New comment by spicymaki in "How can Apple deal with the memory shortage?"

spicymaki — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:16:33 +0000

The semiconductor fab process changes dynamically to manage yield. It is not a static environment, automating with robotics is fine when things are static like a automotive assembly line, but high end semiconductor fabs are a different beast (The analogy I heard was repairing a plane while in flight). Robots are not purely clean as well they shed contaminates as well, which must be managed too. Entropy is the reason why we still need humans in the loop.