Hacker News: teamonkey

New comment by teamonkey in "After automation: Solo founding will be the default"

teamonkey — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 22:26:33 +0000

I don’t think that’s the same thing at all.

I’m not saying that people will just clone .

I’m asking why anyone would ever invest in a solo software startup, where the scale is necessarily small and achievable at low cost, and AI makes it feasible for many people or corporations to clone any idea of that scale within the time it takes to establish a foot in the market, if it looks remotely valuable.

New comment by teamonkey in "After automation: Solo founding will be the default"

teamonkey — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 20:38:37 +0000

Why would a solo tech startup even exist after automation? Any software that can be done by one person can be done by anyone with an AI subscription a moment after launch. Why would anyone risk investing in that?

New comment by teamonkey in "They war-gamed dimming the Sun. It went worse than you think"

teamonkey — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 23:40:36 +0000

Solar cycle 25 is slightly stronger than cycle 24 but weaker than 23, which peaked in 2001.

https://www.stce.be/content/sc25-tracking

The solar cycle is not the cause of heatwaves and droughts. The graph at the top of this Wikipedia page shows the solar irradiance trending down over decades (which is a natural phenomenon) while temperatures have increased.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_activity_and_climate

New comment by teamonkey in "'500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds"

teamonkey — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:40:01 +0000

Yeah, writing the engine was the point I think. They could have created a GI plugin or modified an existing engine’s renderer. He also created a whole new programming language to write the engine in, which is certainly the displacement activity.

New comment by teamonkey in "'500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds"

teamonkey — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 08:12:33 +0000

> I recall the reason they built an engine from scratch for The Witness was to achieve certain lighting goals

I don’t buy that. Even back then, as an indie developer, the only reason you build your own engine is because you want to build your own engine.

You have to be doing something truly technically impressive to need a new engine and The Witness wasn’t pushing the envelope.

New comment by teamonkey in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

teamonkey — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 07:16:07 +0000

The majority of UK homes are heated by gas-powered boilers that pump hot water through radiators in each room. Often hot water is heated by the same system.

Decarbonisation usually means replacing that boiler with a heat pump which uses electricity to heat water.

New comment by teamonkey in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

teamonkey — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:01:15 +0000

EV adoption in the UK is huge right now, heat pump adoption is happening (though could be faster).

Air conditioning is a weird one, because it’s only been necessary in residential properties for a couple of years, and really still only necessary for a couple of days a year, so a fixed installation isn’t cost effective. Portable units are becoming more popular.

AC has been a requirement in most commercial premises for years. Decades, perhaps.

New comment by teamonkey in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

teamonkey — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 23:48:28 +0000

The main things that will reduce our power bills is a) upgrading the grid to improve transmission and reduce curtailment; and b) adding generation and storage capacity, reducing the amount of high-cost peak gas generation we use.

These things are in progress. A vast amount of generation and storage capacity came online this year and much more still to come. This will gradually take effect, oil conflicts notwithstanding.

New comment by teamonkey in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

teamonkey — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 23:25:34 +0000

Home batteries are much quicker to pay off than solar at the moment. This is largely due to being able to do strong arbitrage between import and export prices at different times of day, and some high guaranteed consumer export tariffs.

There’s no guarantee things will stay that way though, not least because the more storage added to the grid, the more those arbitrage opportunities get soaked up.

New comment by teamonkey in "The United Kingdom generates less electricity per person than in the 1970s"

teamonkey — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 23:03:59 +0000

It isn’t banned.

Well, fracking kind of is, we stopped after we tried it and it caused ground tremors.

New comment by teamonkey in "Thinking will become a hobby"

teamonkey — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 06:54:02 +0000

No, the town’s population has grown in recent years. Lots of house building.

New comment by teamonkey in "Thinking will become a hobby"

teamonkey — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:07:54 +0000

In my town they ALL closed. We previously had 6; we now have a community centre where two different banks operate personal banking consultations for one workday a week each, but they only do appointments, they don’t handle cash or do any banking.

If I want to visit a branch I need to go to the next city.

New comment by teamonkey in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

teamonkey — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 23:54:41 +0000

> The depressing part for me is that once the application was completed, I felt literally nothing on the inside. No sense of joy, pride, nor accomplishment. I was left with a feeling of, "I guess it's good enough to use now?" In fact, upon finishing the application, I have honestly barely used it.

I feel exactly the same. The software gets made remarkably quickly, but there’s no sense of achievement or pride, just a horrible flatness. It’s not made by me, it’s made by an other. I may as well have googled and found an app that already existed. A soulless process.

New comment by teamonkey in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

teamonkey — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 20:30:25 +0000

Correct, it’s not demand-led innovation

New comment by teamonkey in "Time Travel in Braid (2015)"

teamonkey — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:06:23 +0000

Dishonored 2 also has an amazing mission based around a time travel mechanic (A Crack in the Slab).

There are various games that have a ‘time freeze’ mechanic, where you speed up or slow things down, which allows you to manipulate them in some way. Dead Space 3, Psychonauts 2, Dishonored again, at least one of the Prince of Persia sequels.

There are timeloop games where a core mechanic is to repeat the same scenario multiple times, gathering more information each time until you work out how to escape the loop (Outer Wilds, The Forgotten City, 12 Minutes).

Deathloop and its predecessor Prey: Mooncrash have a twist on that where you need to perform the loop multiple times, but the order you do things affects future runs.

And Eternal Threads is a game where you go back and forth along a timeline, viewing scenes and making small changes that affect how future scenes play out.

New comment by teamonkey in "Across the Globe, People Increasingly Say Social Media Is Harming Democracy"

teamonkey — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:30:05 +0000

It’s a matter of difficulty. Social media makes it ridiculously easy.

New comment by teamonkey in "ADHD, autism or complex trauma? [pdf]"

teamonkey — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 21:53:16 +0000

> We're like very puzzled. It's pretty clear that a psy test will find something behavioral,

> Posting this here, Idk why, I'm kind of clueless about what to do at this stage.

It’s tough, but you already know what you need to do.

New comment by teamonkey in "A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting"

teamonkey — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:32:10 +0000

The black hole still exists (probably), the hypothesis that it existed was proven in the past.

New comment by teamonkey in "Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo"

teamonkey — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:21:57 +0000

This is a real deep rabbit hole FYI

New comment by teamonkey in "Dots: Always-on agents"

teamonkey — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:21:50 +0000

“The aunties, continually mulling it over. A process akin to repetitious dreaming, or the protracted spinning of a given fiction. Not that they’re invariably correct, but over a sufficient course they do tend to find the likely suspects.”