Hacker News: twoWhlsGud

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.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce"

twoWhlsGud — Mon, 11 May 2026 21:29:22 +0000

The point of today's megascale corporations is to make it impossible for challengers to arise at all. They aren't always successful, but the direction of travel is pretty clear.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "MacBook Neo and how the iPad should be"

twoWhlsGud — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 03:48:35 +0000

The surface pro argues otherwise. Using Lightroom classic on the Pro is largely best done from the keyboard, but there are certain workflows where using the touchscreen or a stylus is much better than a touchpad. The fact that it's limited doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world"

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:49:38 +0000

Is there a write up of this somewhere? Curious to read more...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver"

twoWhlsGud — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:28:22 +0000

And birds didn't invent jet engines, so obviously we don't need those either, right?

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code"

twoWhlsGud — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:41:21 +0000

Interesting! Is there a pointer to an issue where this feature is described by chance?

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "PRC elites voice AI-skepticism"

twoWhlsGud — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 18:56:53 +0000

A bit old, but still relevant (from Dan Wang's book Breakneck which I am very much enjoying):

In China, The Communist Party's Latest, Unlikely Target: Young Marxists https://www.npr.org/2018/11/21/669509554/in-china-the-commun...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "There Goes the American Muscle Car"

twoWhlsGud — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 22:02:15 +0000

This. If you are completely surrounded by light trucks as you grow up, then you are much less likely to ever think of actual cars (muscle or otherwise) at all. I grew up around 2000 lbs BMW 2002's (and the like) - a kind of vehicle that simply has vanished. So I could imagine lightweight sport sedans as a thing. If all you know are SUV's your concept of vehicle is going to be very different...

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "'Rocks as big as cars' are flying down the Dolomites"

twoWhlsGud — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 22:56:18 +0000

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150192/tracking-30-...

I don't see what's funny about 4 inches just in the last three decades. 8 inches over the last hundred plus years at seattle

https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station....

seems very much in line then (given the lower rates before 1992). "Further investigation" was perhaps motivated by the search for something besides truth?

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Budget Car Buyers Want Automakers to K.I.S.S"

twoWhlsGud — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 19:45:36 +0000

Budget car buyers aren't driving the market - especially not the market for new cars. In the US income inequality has gotten to the point where most new cars are bought by upper income customers. And they want fancy SUVs. Budget car buyers purchase their cars in the used market. For them it would in fact make sense to purchase less expensive more efficient vehicles. But they don't get a vote (in theory a lower depreciation for such vehicles should flow up, but I don't think that signal really gets anywhere now.)

New comment by twoWhlsGud in "Living with an Apple Lisa [video]"

twoWhlsGud — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 16:40:48 +0000

I was there starting in 86 and I can tell you that at least some of the Lisa folks were still upset about how the project was treated. I think there's an argument that preserving the Lisa as a high end product would have made sense. The workstation market remained a thing for some time (think Sun) and having a common application base spread across a consumer and workstation-ish product line could have been very lucrative, especially in the late 80's and early 90's when Apple really started to lose steam. Internal efforts to come up with a Mac OS that took advantage of memory protection hardware (available as an option starting with the 68020 and becoming built in starting with the 030, I seem to remember) ran into challenges and their failure limited Apple's ability to differentiate against Windows. (Heck MS ended up arguably beating Apple to a high/low strategy with 95/NT.) Also the Lisa folks I knew tended to be more principled designers than the hack-forward Mac team. Pushing forward with both sort of folks leading would have preserved an essential creative tension that the company kinda lost as a result of stomping on the Lisa team.