Hacker News: trollbridge

New comment by trollbridge in "Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI"

trollbridge — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:52:39 +0000

Making a statement like this is generally part of the terms of the acquisition.

New comment by trollbridge in "Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI"

trollbridge — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:51:32 +0000

Yeah. Much like Astral - acquiring both the product (because they need to use it internally, but don't care about trying to resell / market), and they also want the talent to keep maintaining it / add features they want.

New comment by trollbridge in "Cirrus Labs to join OpenAI"

trollbridge — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:50:39 +0000

The level of aqui-hires is getting interesting - at this point, it appears that if one wants one's career to progress, you need to start some kind of tiny startup like Astral or Bun and hope to be notable enough you can get acquired by someone like OpenAI or Anthropic.

It certainly makes the idea of a career progression / promotion more challenging than it used to be, but perhaps it also opens up some new opportunities. It becomes far more "high stakes" since you have to take the risk of starting and running a startup that ultimately fails if it does not get acqui-hired.

New comment by trollbridge in "Chimpanzees in Uganda locked in eight-year 'civil war', say researchers"

trollbridge — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:29:41 +0000

Don't ant colonies also go to war? I've seen that happen before and it's quite interesting - I read a theory somewhere that part of the purpose of this was to prevent overpopulation, so in the long run _both_ ant colonies do better since they don't "cooperate" and end up overpopulating.

New comment by trollbridge in "A new trick brings stability to quantum operations"

trollbridge — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 10:55:22 +0000

Reminds me the state of nuclear fusion.

New comment by trollbridge in "EFF is leaving X"

trollbridge — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:01:25 +0000

"That part of Twitter."

New comment by trollbridge in "Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again"

trollbridge — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:01:14 +0000

One odd thing I have noticed is that my young children think a COMPAQ Portable III (not the machine I had as a youngster, but similar) is far more interesting to them than a modern, sleek MacBook. I think it's because they can touch it and turn it on and off, it simply occupies more physical space, and it makes more "interesting" noises.

New comment by trollbridge in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

trollbridge — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:40:50 +0000

Might have the effect of making it uneconomic, though, and then they wouldn't get built.

New comment by trollbridge in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

trollbridge — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:35:13 +0000

Perhaps part of the problem here is that most towns that have proposals for AI data centres (including my own) have the developers demanding 10 year tax abatements, so we aren't going to see any of that tax revenue.

New comment by trollbridge in "Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers"

trollbridge — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:29:15 +0000

Evaporated. Given how the water cycle works, it should be expected it will be precipitated back as rain.

New comment by trollbridge in "Bitmap fonts make computers feel like computers again"

trollbridge — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:28:03 +0000

Perhaps because we grew up with it. The VGA 8x16 font reminds me of growing up when I had my first computer that was all mine, with a plasma display where the pixels were clearly visible, yet quite restful on the eyes.

New comment by trollbridge in "EFF is leaving X"

trollbridge — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:19:51 +0000

Well, Twitter has a lot of separate spheres. It's pretty easy to curate just tpot (the part that concerns itself with the Bay area, venture capital, and so forth) by following the right people and then engaging with posts that are on-topic.

New comment by trollbridge in "Open source security at Astral"

trollbridge — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:16:51 +0000

And at this point, it appears running code through an LLM to translate it eliminates copyright (and thus the licence), so $Anycorp can use it.

Our stuff is AGPL3 licenced and if this present trend continues we might just switch to MIT so at least the little guys can take advantage of it the way the big guys can.

New comment by trollbridge in "Floating point from scratch: Hard Mode"

trollbridge — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:36:18 +0000

When writing financial software, one almost always reaches for a decimal library in that language and ends up using that instead of the language's built-in floats. (Sometimes you can use ints, but you can't once you need to do things like described above.)

Overall, yes, results need to be rounded, but it's pretty much financial software 101 not to use floats.

New comment by trollbridge in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

trollbridge — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:11:42 +0000

That's pretty neat, and we should talk. In my household we are currently producing about 75% of our clothing, mostly out of a desire to avoid using fabrics that generate a lot of microplastic waste + observing that newer clothes/fabrics wear out quickly.

New comment by trollbridge in "Floating point from scratch: Hard Mode"

trollbridge — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:40:38 +0000

I just wish there were a widespread decimal-based floating point standard & units.

New comment by trollbridge in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

trollbridge — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:07:18 +0000

Then it’s reasonable to expect ticket sellers to use modern technology to implement zero-knowledge, physical rfid token, etc measures that prevent scalping.

The technology does exist, but it might take more effort than a lazy smartphone app - that probably isn’t effective against scalping anyway. Can’t a phone app / QR code etc be forged?

New comment by trollbridge in "AI may be making us think and write more alike"

trollbridge — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:03:24 +0000

As a bonus, mistakes can be blamed on AI.

New comment by trollbridge in "Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed"

trollbridge — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:17:32 +0000

I like his tone too. It also is easier to identify that it isn’t LLM generated text.

(I have nothing against LLMs but have little interest in reading text generated from them.)

New comment by trollbridge in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

trollbridge — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:09:04 +0000

Does "get with the times" include giving up all of the privacy issues that go along with buying a stock phone?