Hacker News: twoWhlsGud

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight (2025)"

twoWhlsGud — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 16:34:19 +0000

Exactly! I worked with a couple ex Xanadu acolytes at Apple back in the day. What they took away from the experience were the many inspirations rather than the project as a model for organizations. One of them brought him in to speak and he spent the time exhorting us to think beyond WYSIWIG (be careful about how your metaphors limit what your avoidances can be) which at the time I found rather eye-opening.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board"

twoWhlsGud — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 16:09:05 +0000

It can certainly be seen as a simple prisoner's dilemma, but it's not in some very important dimensions. (E.g. given the core tech the most likely outcomes are not AGI but developed carelessly nonetheless capable of causing all sorts of societal damage.) Unfortunately our bitwit overlords love short term self serving frameworks like this one so it's easy to imagine them embracing a "what has the future ever done for me" strategy...

How hard is it to build orbital data centers, actually?

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:21:18 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/07/how-hard-is-it-to-build-orbital-data-centers-actually/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48923197

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Is This the Fastest Opinion Shift in American Politics?"

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:20:25 +0000

Seventy-one percent of Americans say they don’t want an A.I. data center built close to where they live. Why?

Is This the Fastest Opinion Shift in American Politics?

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:20:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/opinion/ai-data-center-politics.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48923184

Points: 3

# Comments: 7

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Too Old for Silicon Valley? Think Again. AI Is Changing the Math"

twoWhlsGud — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 19:06:13 +0000

As someone in industry who also teaches early career engineers once every two years, there seems to be a tailing off of enthusiasm in the latest cohort. Does anyone know of an actual data source from which one could draw actual conclusions about this sort of thing, by the way?

It makes sense to me that someone coming up today would be less enthusiastic about the effects of technological innovation given the experiences of the last decade. Growing up in Silicon Valley a generation or two ago it was an article of faith that innovation was going to bring great things to us. Taking that away ought to have an impact on enthusiasm.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "As downtown Seattle offices empty, city facing years of 'zombie' towers"

twoWhlsGud — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 07:11:04 +0000

If you are bad enough at building coalitions you can lose almost any election regardless of how evil or corrupt the opposition, is too : )

"FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?

REG: He's over there.

P.F.J.: Splitter!"

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Local Reasoning for Global Properties"

twoWhlsGud — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 17:32:55 +0000

Interesting. In the Rust world extensions like Verus, I think, are trying to enable exactly what the author is discussing. Perhaps worth a look:

https://github.com/verus-lang/verus

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries"

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:36:43 +0000

Indeed - I look forward to the spa version of this that runs around yelling "Exfoliate!, Exfoliate!" : )

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Reducing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada"

twoWhlsGud — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 16:43:03 +0000

And if you're wearing long sleeves and long pants, you can apply permethrin in a semi permanent way to your clothing to discourage ticks and mosquitoes: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/insect-repellent/is-p...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Big Tech is stoking unrest in the UK. Why?"

twoWhlsGud — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 17:20:34 +0000

"Everything means less than zero" (E. Costello)

Social media seems to basically be a way of running A/B testing on the population until you find enough folks vulnerable to some sort of powerful misconception that serves your purpose.

For the SM network "purpose" means engagement, but it turns out that (to our disadvantage) it also serves the purposes of an army of grifters, opportunists and power mad sociopaths who are taking over the world. Once again (think the 1930s) it turns out mastery of new media technologies in the hands of bad people has consequences.

As techies, building productive rather than destructive media (and AI is the next "media" of consequence) really ought to be top of agenda.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "The intracies of modern camera lens repair (2024)"

twoWhlsGud — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:36:57 +0000

That seems like a small thing that I as a users of lenses would see as a benefit (more folks who could fix my lenses) even if I don't have the inclination to do it myself. Wonder why manufacturers don't do this? (The majors seem pretty hostile to their user base, but smaller companies like Sigma you would think might care more?)

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

twoWhlsGud — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:04:51 +0000

I got my TS3 after it had been out awhile and it's been great for me, also. Wonder how the current (TB5) versions are. They generally seem to take a few (?) years to really get the firmware working properly.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

twoWhlsGud — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:01:24 +0000

They weren't exactly hopping, but having a local store where you could get hardware support was a big deal, for me at least. I stopped buying Surface devices and switched entirely back to Apple for anything mobile when they closed the MS store near me.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Last.fm is now independent"

twoWhlsGud — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:33:04 +0000

yes, I dropped it because simply favoriting a song seemed to require streamifying my entire personal library, which I didn't want to do.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "The Art of Money Getting"

twoWhlsGud — Sun, 24 May 2026 17:27:28 +0000

Look for companies with big fierce customers. This gives you an ally when you go to your boss to try to get the company to do the right thing. I moved from big tech to big manufacturing a couple decades ago, and it's the best move I've ever made, for exactly that reason.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Intro to TLA+ for the LLM Era: Prompt Your Way to Victory"

twoWhlsGud — Tue, 19 May 2026 20:47:56 +0000

Yes! Formal specs could be where the understanding of what exactly the system is supposed to do gets laid out - and ideally coupled into the verification process that the code produced actually does what it is supposed to (and nothing else...). That would be a big change!

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Apple unveils new accessibility features"

twoWhlsGud — Tue, 19 May 2026 16:57:43 +0000

I don't think things have improved much on that front since Colin Hughes gave a run down on Voice Control's problems several years ago

https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2023/08/16/those-who-rel...

Would be great if they could at least fix two major bugs:

* input simply fails (seemingly) randomly where it is supported and many apps from major vendors don't support dictation input at all (e.g. OneNote) (there should at least be a fallback (a la Dragon Dictate from decades ago) for those cases * capitalization is still random leaving you with many errors to correct

but Apple mostly seems to see accessibility as something to use to enable performative press releases not actual functionality...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:51:19 +0000

Princeton was that way in my lifetime (and I'm not that old : ) - corruption is not inevitable nor should honor be considered some sort of utopian dream.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:48:13 +0000

As someone who went there (albeit many decades ago) I can tell you FWIW when I was there folks took it seriously. I literally knew of no one who ever cheated on an exam. And I'm pretty sure that anyone I knew who observed cheating would have taken it seriously enough to bring it to the process. It was pretty much a fixture of how students thought about things. So it worked (near as I could tell) back then.

But institutions take awhile to adjust to new realities, and it while looks like Princeton may have been a bit behind the curve on this one, I can understand why they were reluctant to abandon this practice. Living in an honest community cuts a lot of extra effort out - crap that you don't even have to think about. Princeton will be a less productive place to learn going forward.