Hacker News: theonemind

New comment by theonemind in "Japan enlists 1,800 people to drag 360-tonne castle keep using ropes and rollers"

theonemind — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:29:38 +0000

Article says it’s a symbolic/community building thing. People will do the first 6 meters, machines will do the next 74 meters to finish it

New comment by theonemind in "Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful"

theonemind — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:17:12 +0000

It seems like a frontier model LLM could probably do it in day, probably less. Someone would have to read and correct it, though

New comment by theonemind in "Marc Andreessen Says One Job Is Mostly Safe from AI: Venture Capitalist"

theonemind — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:26:12 +0000

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it - H.L. Mencken

New comment by theonemind in "Moby Dick Workout (2022)"

theonemind — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 03:28:56 +0000

Moby Dick is often quite high on the lists of greatest novels of all time. It seems to me that all of that stuff you think is not part of the good novel trying to get out is part of why it’s considered great, not merely good

I rather take the tedious parts as Ishmael seeing the divine in the world of tedious particulars, although such kludgy pointers as me saying that destroy the real meaning, as the thing represented itself

New comment by theonemind in "Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected"

theonemind — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 01:23:32 +0000

It looks pretty clear LLMs don't get us there by themselves, no amount of duct tape, WD-40, etc. gets us past, say, the mathematical certainty of hallucinations.

I mean, we don't know it any more than we don't know someone won't come out with cold fusion tomorrow, but it's a fundamental breakthrough away from where we're at. This isn't some routine engineering project with a guarantee of completion if you're just willing to keep pouring the billions. That's playing the lotto, you can pour away and get flat nothing.

The only difference is they're pouring billions and praying a rabbit comes out of the hat, but it's actually not much reason to expect they're going to pull the cold-fusion level rabbit out of their hat they'd need to get us past bikes.

New comment by theonemind in "Studio Canal Movies purchased on PlayStation Store removed without refund"

theonemind — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:43:07 +0000

I suppose they started with 451 and decided it was too on-the-nose.

New comment by theonemind in "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software"

theonemind — Sun, 31 May 2026 04:20:21 +0000

I find the way that issue was opened incredible obnoxious, but it is baffling that the maintainers seem to have let AI loose on rsync. Like, why? Why try comparatively experimental crap when your fortune and reputation is made and you're the leader of a niche and immune to market pressure and the people love the thing and it does exactly what it's supposed to and works well?

It's like the Matrix, with the little rant about the primitive human minds not being able to accept paradise. You wrote the perfect tool, you won, almost undisplaceable in a niche, reliable, a metaphorical household name. It makes no sense to anyone to gamble or mess with that, it's just mind boggling.

And that's still a damn obnoxious thing to do in the formal issue tracker. Bad attitude, bad faith.

New comment by theonemind in "Who will buy your services if you fire us all?"

theonemind — Mon, 18 May 2026 22:12:23 +0000

The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limits

Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy

New comment by theonemind in "Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise"

theonemind — Sun, 17 May 2026 20:08:59 +0000

I can't tell whether you're defending AI or blind optimism. I don't agree with either.

New comment by theonemind in "Distributing Mac software is increasing my cortisol levels"

theonemind — Sun, 10 May 2026 04:51:28 +0000

I can charitably believe this comment is not disingenuous, however, there are effectively two options, which are Windows and macOS, regardless of three manufacturers making more Windows machines than Apple at number four with Mac. I would call it an effective duopoly

New comment by theonemind in "Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement"

theonemind — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:42:20 +0000

I saw something about this. It would seem like it would be hard to obtain all of those licenses, probably impossible, and then if you want to go on to pirate more, that you licensed stuff kind of makes it look like you knew or believed you should've done it for all of them, which I think would make infringement willful, and imply some cognizance of guilt?

When you think about the objectives and constraints on the table, and how disproportionately light penalties imposed on large corporations can be, if you can muster any kind of crappy argument, doing absolutely zero licensing is the no-brainer clear win. You get all of the material. You avoid a massive cost. Then the tech friendly Federal courts of the Trump administration will interpret all of the laws as far as possible in your favor and impose the lightest penalties they reasonably can.

It's a no brainer. License none of it, it's more data, it's cheaper, it's easier, the win is blinding. But if you license, you pay so much, if you use anything you didn't license you've tipped your hand on cognizance of guilt, blahblah. The contrast is stark.

New comment by theonemind in "Becoming a father shrinks your cerebrum (2022)"

theonemind — Sat, 02 May 2026 14:30:59 +0000

As someone who cares about such a thing and had no awareness of that, I would tend to disagree. Nytimes gets posted enough that I have encountered the pay wall, but the economist, I’d have had to guess. I also tried to look at the article and didn’t see the year when trying to open the truncated article, and do like to know that I have started reading something old. I just don’t really agree with your comment at all from almost any angle, but I don’t think either one of us has numbers to back up anything

New comment by theonemind in "Meta Tells Staff It Will Cut 10% of Jobs in Push for Efficiency"

theonemind — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:39:12 +0000

You seem to have inverted the ontological primacy of the human race and the economy. Once allocating atoms and energy is a solved problem, the economy is dead. There's a quote, "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." The system exists to serve, it's not a rule of nature or handed down by god.

New comment by theonemind in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

theonemind — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:56:34 +0000

It doesn't seem like it to me. I like watching Ed Zitron rant about it on YouTube. It's fun.

New comment by theonemind in "Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th"

theonemind — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 04:56:48 +0000

Honestly, I wish they couldn’t subsidize with VC cash and such and offer below cost to begin with. Like I wish it were illegal. Basically this allows things like Uber, more or less putting taxis out of business and then being worse than what they replaced.

I’d like to see a lot more than entitled whining. I would like to see the fist of regulation slammed down on the back of these tech shenanigans where they know they’ll never be able to match the prices they’re starting with

New comment by theonemind in "Show HN: boringBar – a taskbar-style dock replacement for macOS"

theonemind — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:51:42 +0000

I know you’ve received plenty of feedback about the subscription being a dealbreaker. There would be no point in me adding that but I would say that I could see myself paying $50 for one version of this without upgrades. Maybe half price for upgrades if you have an existing license. So I probably wouldn’t necessarily mind paying $25 per year per se if it’s not a subscription. Like many other others here, I’m just not gonna go there.

Good luck!

New comment by theonemind in "Apple Business"

theonemind — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:34:23 +0000

I think the average idiot can take a really strong business and weaken the bones for some quarters or years of extra profit, possibly insane profit, before lack of focus on what really made the company strong starts to erode the fundamentals. I think we’re seeing that with Apple personally. It’s just colossal though so there’s a lot of squeezing and a lot of profit before it really catches up. And they don’t even disappear. They just become lumbering monsters like Microsoft, IBM, and HP that people don’t use because they want to. HP was legitimately a great company.

New comment by theonemind in "AirPods Max 2"

theonemind — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:21:24 +0000

Leaf blowers and cars driving past are exactly the kind of thing that ANC works well on, a fairly constant noise. It doesn’t block out other kinds of things well. At least it always seems to go that way for me, so I can’t relate to your comment at all. My experience seems exactly the opposite and I have trouble imagining it differently for anyone else, because it works well against a constant noise kind of in the bass range.

New comment by theonemind in "AirPods Max 2"

theonemind — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:57:49 +0000

That happened to me twice. So I went one more round than you and got the same result again. It seems more like an unreliable product than a fluke.

New comment by theonemind in "AirPods Max 2"

theonemind — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:17:03 +0000

I bought two pairs that each lasted one year. I think this explains it.