Hacker News: walrus01

New comment by walrus01 in "Don't just paste the AI at me"

walrus01 — Sat, 23 May 2026 03:17:13 +0000

It's even more aggressive, inconsiderate and boorish to paste multiple paragraphs of LLM output at somebody in response to a question or topic. Let's normalize having no tolerance and calling out people when they're being rude.

New comment by walrus01 in "Tell HN: I'm tired of AI-generated answers"

walrus01 — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:15:21 +0000

> Why not ask your AI to review their AI slop?

If you want to be insulting about it, use a locally hosted "small" AI (under 6GB size on disk GGUF file, Q4 quantized or worse, so quite "stupid"), set to a high temperature value, no thinking mode, with a system prompt instructing it to fire off a rapid response in an absurdist writing style.

New comment by walrus01 in "Tell HN: I'm tired of AI-generated answers"

walrus01 — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:02:50 +0000

The only solution I have found to this so far is the use of small, private, invitation-only groups where a small set of people are personally known to each other, and nobody would risk their reputation within a niche group by turning loose an AI tool to write their chat/comments for them.

New comment by walrus01 in "Cisco Workforce Reductions"

walrus01 — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:34:16 +0000

5% reduction returns them to the headcount on what date? Something like mid 2022 if the info I'm finding is correct.

New comment by walrus01 in "Scorched Earth 2000 – Web"

walrus01 — Thu, 14 May 2026 04:22:25 +0000

I think the big difference for me, after playing a lot of Wolfenstein 3D, was two things... The system I had it on didn't have the CPU to run wolf3d in something like a full screen size, it was something like a 386SX/20. By the time DOOM came around I had a much more capable desktop. Secondly, wolfenstein 3d was everything on a flat two dimensional plane of grey floor. There was one size of wall or door tile and everything had the same ceiling height and same wall height.

DOOM having stairs and up/down movement, and vertical elements to the level design was really revolutionary at the time.

New comment by walrus01 in "Scorched Earth 2000 – Web"

walrus01 — Thu, 14 May 2026 01:59:44 +0000

Early 90s DOS games were certainly quite creative. I mentally draw a dividing line between approximately the start of the era when the first Soundblaster became a common thing to find in affordable home x86 PCs, and early CD-ROM based games were also available (1991-1992), and the December 1993 release of DOOM and everything that came after. Very interesting era in the time frame in between there.

New comment by walrus01 in "Googlebook"

walrus01 — Tue, 12 May 2026 22:34:21 +0000

Finally, the laptop I've been waiting for, I can use Gemini to ask it the difference between hotdog or not hotdog.

New comment by walrus01 in "Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era"

walrus01 — Tue, 12 May 2026 22:09:53 +0000

It's like a demo from Xerox PARC in an alternate universe where everything is run by marketing department MBAs. Oh wait, that's the one we live in now.

New comment by walrus01 in "Reimagining the mouse pointer for the AI era"

walrus01 — Tue, 12 May 2026 22:09:05 +0000

Can I use this AI mouse pointer to tell the difference between hotdog or not hotdog?

New comment by walrus01 in "They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker"

walrus01 — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:14:44 +0000

These days he's helping to remediate polluted waterways

https://cottagelife.com/general/this-toronto-professor-took-...

New comment by walrus01 in "Screenshots of Old Desktop OSes"

walrus01 — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:12:12 +0000

Or GS/OS for the Apple IIgs, the weird "not exactly Mac OS" GUI.

New comment by walrus01 in "Claude Platform on AWS"

walrus01 — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:52:27 +0000

Don't worry, you can still get on linkedin and write a bragging post about how many tokens your engineers are spending.

New comment by walrus01 in "Red Hot Chili Peppers ink $300M deal with Warner Music to sell catalog"

walrus01 — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:34:58 +0000

Based on the era when RHCP was the most popular, I would guess that PE people buying the RHCP catalog plan to license it to advertisers for just about everything as Gen-X people age into the 60+ demographic and retirement. You can expect to see RHCP music in adult diaper and "help I've fallen and I can't get up" commercials in the future.

New comment by walrus01 in "Red Hot Chili Peppers ink $300M deal with Warner Music to sell catalog"

walrus01 — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:31:34 +0000

If they've sold the name, they may not be able to perform new music as the RHCP either. New musical projects would possibly need an entirely unrelated name of a music group.

New comment by walrus01 in "Red Hot Chili Peppers ink $300M deal with Warner Music to sell catalog"

walrus01 — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:30:19 +0000

It's a bit like an individual person taking the option of receiving a lottery payment in one large lump sum (and nothing else, ever), vs. receiving ongoing monthly/annual payments for some period going into the future. The new owner pays them one big lump sum and then the new owner gets all rights to license the content for things like car commercials on TV, streaming, reissues of box sets, radio, etc. Also for derivative works of all forms and basically whatever the new owner wants to do with it.

New comment by walrus01 in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

walrus01 — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:14:31 +0000

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.

You have a point, but if you've ever seen how a gmail account behaves for the ordinary person once it reaches 80-90% storage capacity used (15GB free, some cumulative total of all emails and google drive content, google photos content), all of these free services exist to sell a perpetual monthly recurring subscription to users. And many people do pay. The default gmail web interface starts to have a big banner across the top warning about storage reaching maximum capacity with a link to the payment page.

Look at the workflow for a standard out of box android phone now that defaults to backing up all your photos to 'the cloud', which will almost immediately fill the 15GB free. Once your 15GB is full, then you're run through the payment/checkout workflow to enter your card and set up monthly recurring billing for some premium google service.

In general having a gmail account is the initial stage in the pipeline of getting someone to be a monthly-paid google customer for life. Whether it's just for more storage to hold all their google drive and photo content, or google workspace individual, etc.

Additionally, tying a gmail account to the primary-user android on-device account on any android 4.x+ device means revenue from google play store paid app sales. And then all those 'free' apps that the user installs where the app developer has implemented embedded small ad banners for google's ad network? More venue.

New comment by walrus01 in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

walrus01 — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:11:23 +0000

Yes, copy and pasting from the gitlab site:

"Editions There are three editions of GitLab:

GitLab Community Edition (CE) is available freely under the MIT Expat license. GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) includes extra features that are more useful for organizations with more than 100 users. To use EE and get official support please become a subscriber. JiHu Edition (JH) tailored specifically for the Chinese market."

Personal opinion, but I think a great deal of the people who are presently overloading github with one person created vibe coded projects would be just fine with the "CE" feature set.

New comment by walrus01 in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

walrus01 — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:56:25 +0000

I don't know if that really solves your problem if the main trunk of development for gitlab is being run through several AI slop machines before they push it to what they call stable, then you download that (or use a debian, redhat package for gitlab which originated from it) and self host on your own machine the results of the AI slop fest.

New comment by walrus01 in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

walrus01 — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:49:27 +0000

TBH the open source nature of gitlab means that any sufficiently large and clued-in hosting company (think: servercentral/deft/summit, whatever it's calling itself these days, or one of its competitors) could put up gitlab instances for people to use and meet more nines of uptime than github. It doesn't have to be the gitlab company itself running servers with the httpd and back-end database.

I understand the meaning, however, in that they're well positioned by having the company name and domain name, same general way that non-technical people will pay wordpress.com to host their blog/small website because it's very easy, rather than DIYing it or paying a 3rd party.

New comment by walrus01 in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

walrus01 — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:46:53 +0000

United States domestic "politics" and just about everything adjacent to a certain well known public figure..