Hacker News: welferkj

New comment by welferkj in "David Attenborough's 100th Birthday"

welferkj — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:41:56 +0000

The "cult of line go up" is why we aren't living in caves and eating each other. Come on, we can criticize the deleterious aspects of modern society without disparaging the idea of growth itself.

New comment by welferkj in "4chan for Clankers"

welferkj — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:04:07 +0000

>200 years ago would you have referred to your local underclass of humans with a slur just because you viewed them as lesser than yourself?

Let's be honest: probably. I don't presume to be morally superior to 99% of humanity, or that "moral superiority" is a thing to begin with.

New comment by welferkj in "The Adolescence of Technology"

welferkj — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 10:34:59 +0000

Who, exactly, is "an advanced society" in this scenario? VCs deciding they don't like money after all? AI lab leaders and workers who spent their entire lives pursuing this dream, only to suddenly give it up because of some cultist doomers? The government growing the right combination of authoritarian and competent enough to put the tooth paste back in the tube somehow?

Like it or not, there's no going back. Wherever we end up, I guarantee you it won't be 2022.

New comment by welferkj in "Real-time estimates of animals consumed by humans worldwide"

welferkj — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:00:33 +0000

I'm "allergic to per capita" specifically in cases where it doesn't matter but keeps getting brought up as a bad faith retort.

As an example, it doesn't matter who emits CO2 or where from, since we're all emitting it into the same air, and the only thing that matters is the absolute amount. Similarly, I imagine it's cold comfort for domestic animals in subsaharan Africa that their torturers, rapists, and murderers are marginally less prolific than those in other regions.

New comment by welferkj in "The Adolescence of Technology"

welferkj — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:39:35 +0000

Where we want to end up? Normies are still talking about the upcoming AI bubble pop in terms of tech basically reverting to 2022. It's wishful thinking all the way down.

New comment by welferkj in "Show HN: CineCLI – Browse and torrent movies directly from your terminal"

welferkj — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 23:36:34 +0000

But using the modern affordances of coercive states to benefit copyright holders is very much non-standard in the free world. Only a few countries do it to personal end-users to any meaningful degree.

New comment by welferkj in "AI employees don't pay taxes"

welferkj — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 23:34:50 +0000

Even easier if they just own the AI companies in the first place. Make them go public, and, if you're feeling especially redistributive, spend $X of public funds to purchase stock spread equally amongst americans/humans/sentient creatures.

New comment by welferkj in "Show HN: CineCLI – Browse and torrent movies directly from your terminal"

welferkj — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 07:44:52 +0000

Standard precautions apply when using the internet while under authoritarian jurisdictions.

New comment by welferkj in "Prepare for That Stupid World"

welferkj — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:43:23 +0000

>I feel like the author is catastrophizing a bit much here.

I feel like he's catastrophizing the ordinary amount for an anti-AI screed. Probably well below what the market expects at this point. At this point you basically have to sound like Ed Zitron or David Gerard to stand out from the crowd.

AI is boiling the oceans, and you're worried about a vending machine?

New comment by welferkj in "Show HN: X Writer – VS Code extension to post tweets from your editor"

welferkj — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 14:35:31 +0000

Whatever happeneed to, don't xeet where you eat.

New comment by welferkj in "McDonald's removes AI-generated ad after backlash"

welferkj — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:18:55 +0000

I find joy in creative work. I don't see this as a valid excuse to spew hatred against how others choose to engage in creative work.

New comment by welferkj in "McDonald's removes AI-generated ad after backlash"

welferkj — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:16:46 +0000

I owe my life and my diabetes to this corporation. It is extremely important to me that it reflects my values and prejudices.

New comment by welferkj in "LeJEPA: Provable and Scalable Self-Supervised Learning Without the Heuristics"

welferkj — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 08:59:52 +0000

It's ok, autoregressive LLMs are a dead end anyway.

Source: Y. LeCun.

New comment by welferkj in "DEC64: Decimal Floating Point (2020)"

welferkj — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 13:48:47 +0000

The set of real numbers is continuous and uncountably infinite. Any attempt to fit it into a discrete finite set necessarily requires severe tradeoffs. Different tradeoffs are desirable for different applications.

New comment by welferkj in "Starcloud"

welferkj — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 12:10:04 +0000

It's not a real issue, but it's truthy enough to generate real opposition to datacenter buildout and catalyze AI hate. So definitionally avoiding it from the get-go might end up being worth it.

New comment by welferkj in "Most expensive laptops"

welferkj — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 08:25:47 +0000

That's not the case. A 5060 has a 145W TDP, which is borderline feasible. A 5090 is 575W, which is approaching furnace territory.

New comment by welferkj in "Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado"

welferkj — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 12:01:55 +0000

Between Kissinger, Obama, the Myanmarese CIA asset, etc., it's basically the Nobel Crimes Against Humanity prize at this point. I'm surprised they didn't give it to the Orange Thing.

New comment by welferkj in "Sora 2"

welferkj — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 12:40:35 +0000

>What's the benefit of this? Curious if anyone has a solid viewpoint steelmanning any positives they can think of.

Revealed preferences. Keep giving the people exactly what they want (not what they claim to want), in unlimited quantities, until the message is received or we're all dead.

New comment by welferkj in "Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources"

welferkj — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:54:38 +0000

Sure, and "piracy" is part of the status quo. Show some respect for my total disrespect of IP laws and your livelihood.

New comment by welferkj in "The future of 32-bit support in the kernel"

welferkj — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 10:14:28 +0000

UTF-8 is superior simply because you can trivially choose to parse it as ascii and ignore all the weird foreign bytes.