Hacker News: squigz

New comment by squigz in "EFF is leaving X"

squigz — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:41:07 +0000

Since when was the EFF "non-political"?

New comment by squigz in "Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead"

squigz — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 01:40:01 +0000

> Far better to spend those $$ on weddings rather than funerals though !

Is it though? Can you elaborate why you think that?

To me, they seem to serve basically the same purpose. They are both, at the end of the day, a way for family & friends to get together and bond over a person/people.

New comment by squigz in "Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead"

squigz — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:26:17 +0000

That sounds like a very rewarding job. Sure, you have to deal with the grief that so many death-adjacent fields have to, but at least you get the satisfaction of really helping people through those terrible times.

So sorry for your losses.

New comment by squigz in "Help Keep Thunderbird Alive"

squigz — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:33:09 +0000

I think it's more disrespectful to judge so harshly a company - that puts out wonderful, free, open source software - asking for donations 1 or 2 times a year with a message that is easy to close.

New comment by squigz in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

squigz — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 02:48:25 +0000

It's not irrelevant.

GP made a comparison between what we're going through and the Industrial Revolution. Ignoring the negatives of that revolution - like by acting as though the "new world" was uninhabited/unused and so Europeans had a right to its resources - seems like a bad idea.

New comment by squigz in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

squigz — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:50:29 +0000

Things like star and galaxy formation/interactions are (relatively) straightforward, with fairly simple processes/mechanics at the heart of it. It's easier to predict on such a large-scale what's going to happen.

Things are far more complex on a biological level, which makes it harder to make generalized predictions. I see no reason to infer that life would only consistently evolve into organic life as we know it.

New comment by squigz in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

squigz — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:13:31 +0000

Sure, because working on a database plugin is the same as, for example, working on mass surveillance tech.

This sort of handwashing is exactly why the natives were treated the way they were.

New comment by squigz in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

squigz — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 00:01:20 +0000

Sure, of course it's convenient to ignore the native peoples and pretend that prior to the Industrial Revolution the rest of the world outside of Europe was some untapped well of resources that Europeans had a natural right to.

Who might be swept underfoot in this "Information Revolution", I wonder?

New comment by squigz in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

squigz — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 23:30:56 +0000

> remember the new world had only been discovered a few hundred years ago at that point.

By White people*

New comment by squigz in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

squigz — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 23:17:55 +0000

It doesn't seem likely to me that in, just a couple hundred years, humans have developed such a thorough understand of every natural process as all that.

New comment by squigz in "Music for Programming"

squigz — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:37:20 +0000

While I'm not surprised at the general tastes here in the comments (as I mostly share them), I am surprised at the lack of any mention of classical?!

Johann Johannsson and Max Richter are my go-tos.

New comment by squigz in "Ask HN: Is there any interest in a native Qt/C++ Discord client?"

squigz — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 11:07:38 +0000

Why would I switch to a client that doesn't have voice chat, one of the primary use-cases for Discord?

New comment by squigz in "'Backrooms' and the Rise of the Institutional Gothic"

squigz — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 11:22:40 +0000

The movies, sure, but the Backrooms as a concept (and by extension liminal spaces in general) are not necessarily horror.

I don't find them "scary" but I do find them disconcerting.

New comment by squigz in "The Australian government has announced gambling advertising reforms"

squigz — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:39:56 +0000

Would you support the same ban for alcohol?

New comment by squigz in "Show HN: Dull – Instagram Without Reels, YouTube Without Shorts (iOS)"

squigz — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:06:26 +0000

I would much prefer that over them trying to dictate what I can or can't do on my own PC.

New comment by squigz in "Show HN: Dull – Instagram Without Reels, YouTube Without Shorts (iOS)"

squigz — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 03:22:49 +0000

Free for 3 days. $4 a month.

Meanwhile I've had a uBlock Origin list selected since before I can remember and never see shorts or reels or anything else I don't want to.

For free.

We've really lost something with everything being mobile apps...

New comment by squigz in "ISBN Visualization"

squigz — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 04:48:21 +0000

There are 101,000,000 books visualized. Another way of looking at it is how incredible it is that we can catalogue (and archive) so much of humanity's writing.

New comment by squigz in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

squigz — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 02:17:46 +0000

Government employees get bonuses for denying people benefits they're entitled to?

Source, please?

New comment by squigz in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

squigz — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:04:21 +0000

> I don't think the author would have acted this way toward someone who said "sorry, I know it's a burden, I know it's stressful to be at risk of losing these benefits, and I've told that to everyone I can repeatedly." So how much danger is there really that the inconvenience of reloading the fax machine is pushing out someone who is trying to do good?

It's not just the faxing that causes people to act the way Karen (supposedly) acted - it's the anger and maliciousness being directed at them by numerous people, all day, every day, even when they do try to be sympathetic to the fact that the system fucks everyone. But there's only so much empathy one can muster.

(Not to mention the various other factors that push good people out of government, such as working for decades to make the systems better only for them to get worse.)

To be clear, I agree with you to an extent; if instead of being malicious and directing anger at the people doing their best to help, people like the author more calmly expressed their frustration with the system, maybe they can bring it up with their superiors, as you said.

All of it's a mess, and not a single facet of this issue is without blame - not the recipients, not the bureaucrats, not the politicians, and certainly not the voters.

New comment by squigz in "The 'paperwork flood': How I drowned a bureaucrat before dinner"

squigz — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:15:37 +0000

> Maybe they feeling a bit of the pain themselves might make them more likely to speak up. If this becomes a miserable job that no one will stay in, that might provoke a change.

Unfortunately, it might also just cause anyone who wants to do good to leave, leaving people who just need a job and don't care about doing good.