Hacker News: ursuscamp

New comment by ursuscamp in "We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility"

ursuscamp — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:28:25 +0000

Here's EPA data from as recent as 2018: https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

EPA estimates that hundreds of thousands of tons of books are landfilled or recycled every year. That's just the United States. It seems likely that the worldwide figure is in the millions of tons.

New comment by ursuscamp in "We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility"

ursuscamp — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:02:02 +0000

Rare as in your grandfather's John Deere manual from 1982, not rare as in a test print run of The Great Gatsby. The number of books ingested by these AI companies is a drop in the bucket compared to old books destroyed every year through normal means.

New comment by ursuscamp in "A 'bananas' order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion"

ursuscamp — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:13:41 +0000

Per the courts, it actually helps their "fair use" case if they destroy the book instead of re-selling it.

New comment by ursuscamp in "After the AI Crash"

ursuscamp — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:00:12 +0000

I don't necessarily buy that API prices represent "real" prices of the models.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Ah, the Codeberg Drama"

ursuscamp — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:55:04 +0000

I don't want to host my code on a platform that has activist goals beyond open source advocacy, but I'm glad it exists because it's a useful filter, like the X/Bluesky divide.

New comment by ursuscamp in "You only need the frontier model for one single edit"

ursuscamp — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:34:42 +0000

Can someone explain to me the difference between this approach and using planning with a larger model, then just switching to a small model for implementation without clearing the context? I understand that it specifically does the first edit as well either way the larger model. Is there some other difference I am missing here?

New comment by ursuscamp in "Ziggity – A terminal UI for Git, written in Zig"

ursuscamp — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:47:56 +0000

You're in for a great deal of pain in the coming years.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Should DayQuil Be Legal?"

ursuscamp — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:13:29 +0000

Nasal phenylephrine is a miracle when I am trying to sleep with a stopped up nose. A spray in each nostril and my nose is clearer than even normal within a few minutes.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Jamesob's guide to running SOTA LLMs locally"

ursuscamp — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 22:19:00 +0000

Bitcoin is so dead that jamesob is posting about AI.

New comment by ursuscamp in "CERN bids farewell to the LHC and enters Long Shutdown 3"

ursuscamp — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 22:05:01 +0000

Too late, damage is already done. We have been on the wrong timeline for years at this point.

New comment by ursuscamp in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"

ursuscamp — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:13:12 +0000

SpaceX is planning to do data centers in orbit. Engineering issues aside, that might dovetail with Cursor nicely if timings work out.

New comment by ursuscamp in "US and Iran announce deal to end military operations"

ursuscamp — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:52:51 +0000

It's a good question, but Iran has a new weapon now: The Strait of Hormuz. Maybe that's enough leverage that they retain that they will stop their nuclear program for a while.

New comment by ursuscamp in "US and Iran announce deal to end military operations"

ursuscamp — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:10:03 +0000

Iran gained international credibility by adhering strictly to the JCPOA, even long after the Trump admin broke it. I doubt they will squander that by not adhering to whatever deal they negotiate next.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Nordstjernen 1.0"

ursuscamp — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:11:23 +0000

The readme says it's 88,000 lines of "hand-written" C, and yet there's only 41 commits all from the last day, and they're all co-authored by Claude.

I have no problem with AI code, but it should not be advertised as hand-written.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait"

ursuscamp — Tue, 19 May 2026 01:15:02 +0000

All of those are within range of Iranian missiles and drones. The only ways out of this are total war or final settlement giving Iranian favorable terms.

New comment by ursuscamp in "QBE – Compiler Back End"

ursuscamp — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:15:26 +0000

Truly amazing times. Just doing things has never been easier, and it has really reinvigorated me.

New comment by ursuscamp in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

ursuscamp — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:32:39 +0000

Maybe Ghostty will follow Zig to Codeberg, but it doesn't seem like a fit to me.

New comment by ursuscamp in "BookStack Moves from GitHub to Codeberg"

ursuscamp — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:26:46 +0000

OSS is increasingly bisecting into two camps, and you can tell which camp they are in depending on whether their developers use X or Mastodon/Bluesky.

New comment by ursuscamp in "M 7.4 earthquake – 100 km ENE of Miyako, Japan"

ursuscamp — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:39:26 +0000

My brain is so cooked that I saw “M 7.4” and the first thing I thought was, “Which model is that?”

New comment by ursuscamp in "Layoffs at Block"

ursuscamp — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 00:34:46 +0000

They are heavily invested in Bitcoin and still offer and improve their Bitcoin services. It’s not really “blockchain.” They’re not a crypto company. They are ideologically dedicated to Bitcoin.