Hacker News: velcrovan

New comment by velcrovan in "Windows 1.0 and the WinAPI, 40 Years Later"

velcrovan — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:23:14 +0000

Ah but what about (dun dun dun) “innovation”

New comment by velcrovan in "Claude Fable 5"

velcrovan — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:26:33 +0000

I'm also on the $100 max plan. I let Fable rip on a complicated issue involving hot-reloading modules in a GUI app built with Racket, it's fixed a couple issues over the last hour, and I've used about 17% of my session (not weekly) limit.

New comment by velcrovan in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

velcrovan — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:11:50 +0000

But it doesn't, because none of those systems are presenting SQLite to the user as something they should be using; they don't even make SQLite available to the user at all. Those systems all use SQLite internally to manage data.

New comment by velcrovan in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

velcrovan — Sat, 30 May 2026 15:46:30 +0000

…and iOS, and Windows, and Mac OS, and Boeing, and Sony, and Firefox and Chrome and Safari…

We should count reliability 9s starting at the decimal

velcrovan — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:00:27 +0000

Article URL: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2026/05/28/nines/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324952

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by velcrovan in "Hold on for Dear Life"

velcrovan — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:16:11 +0000

> My technopolitics faction – the faction associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I've worked for a quarter-century – has an answer: the role of encryption is to provide a measure of privacy and security that is best used to organize political struggles to demand the rule of law and respect for human rights. Encryption isn't proof against rubber hoses, but it is effective against many other forms of state repression, and it can provide a technical edge for those engaged in a political struggle.

> Another faction – the faction most associated with bitcoin and subsequent cryptocurrency projects – rejects the role of the state altogether, and seeks to replace states (and state-regulated institutions like courts and banks) with mathematics. Rather than asking courts to interpret contracts, we can put our trust in self-executing "smart contracts," and rather than asking banks to safeguard our financial integrity, we can use cryptographic software to ensure that money only moves when the person it belongs to tells it to.

So he's saying there is a split between those who believe the state and the rule of law are essential tools of freedom, and those who believe technology can provide its own law and guarantees without any need for the state. None of that is incompatible with the EFF being a libertarian project.

And your confusion derives from…what? When he explains this, you feel the correct response is basically "nuh-uh"?

New comment by velcrovan in "Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)"

velcrovan — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:52:44 +0000

David Gelernter describes a theory of consciousness and creativity that explains why this works in his book “The Muse in the Machine”. I recommend it to everyone.

New comment by velcrovan in "Magnifica Humanitas"

velcrovan — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:23:38 +0000

This sounds like you don’t have much exposure to actual professional engineering disciplines. I’m sure civil, electrical, structural and mechanical PEs would be quite surprised to hear there are no guardrails on their professions.

New comment by velcrovan in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

velcrovan — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:12:59 +0000

It is definitely a thing in regulated industries like healthcare and finance.

New comment by velcrovan in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

velcrovan — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:08:36 +0000

OK, but we're talking about people who are "against AI". Are you saying that opposition to AI might help people lose interest in it? I'm not aware of an example of opposition to a useful application of math that caused people to lose interest. It didn't happen with public key encryption, for example. Can you explain further how you see "hating AI" (in the sense of TFA) will cause a loss of interest?

> Don't see the Mandelbrot set around much these days.

Was computing the mandlebrot set ever shown to be broadly and commercially useful in some way?

New comment by velcrovan in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

velcrovan — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:27:03 +0000

This is funny and a pretty clever move, but not actually the argument I'm making. I'm specifically saying you can't make people un-learn math once it turns out to have interesting uses.

New comment by velcrovan in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

velcrovan — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:20:18 +0000

There are business uses of on-prem agentic AI happening right now all over the place, it's not just a hobbyist space.

New comment by velcrovan in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

velcrovan — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:28:07 +0000

It doesn't require obscene compute though. I can run a model on my macbook with 48GB of RAM that is roughly comparable to Sonnet 4.6. A year from now the same machine will be able to run much more capable models.

I would agree there are sound regulations needed, but banning certain kinds of math is not it. (Your DRM example is particularly unfriendly to your point in this regard.)

New comment by velcrovan in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

velcrovan — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:15:36 +0000

To me this just muddies the waters further. If I run a model on my own hardware am I working with the "AI" political project?

I would agree that there is a political project happening in the AI space (and that it predates modern AI); I think it's worth giving that political project a distinct name, rather than conflating a term already widely used and understood very differently by normal people.

New comment by velcrovan in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

velcrovan — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:11:06 +0000

I think you read the analogy too narrowly. I too doubt whether micropayments are worth fighting for, but there are other outcomes for which we could and should work together. For example, data center effects on water and power usage are well-known negative externalities of AI industry that could be eliminated by requiring data centers to invest in mitigations. The government could buy large holdings of stock in AI companies and distribute dividends, just like the Alaska Permanent Fund. etc. etc. You can quibble with individual examples here, but the larger point is that there are productive ways of tackling this transition, old man yells at cloud is not one of them

New comment by velcrovan in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

velcrovan — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:05:17 +0000

I like the example of the actors' unions in the 1960s, where instead of "fighting" television in the sense of demanding people stop using it, they fought by organizing to get ongoing residual payments whenever their work was repurposed for the new medium. You don't have to stop fighting, you just need to recognize what the real problem is.

https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

New comment by velcrovan in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

velcrovan — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:01:10 +0000

Hating "AI" in the abstract is like hating public-key encryption. Ultimately it's just math. Once the math is out there, there's no going back.

Instead of futilely demanding technology to go away, it would be better to focus on organizing together for better outcomes. https://opcraft.co/writing/2026/04/getting-the-good-ai-futur...

New comment by velcrovan in "Magical Realism: “Northern Exposure” 25 Years Later (2015)"

velcrovan — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:02:37 +0000

The song is Ebudae by Enya!

New comment by velcrovan in "Haiku"

velcrovan — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:17:54 +0000

I would love to see if they can get boot times down to a couple seconds.

New comment by velcrovan in "Jonathan Swift's Last Joke"

velcrovan — Tue, 05 May 2026 02:07:21 +0000

Eternally until they moved one of them