Hacker News: wolvesechoes

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Simulacra and Simulation"

wolvesechoes — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 05:46:07 +0000

> How readable and accessible is this book?

As with most works of cultural theory you need to read it few times, and also check other works of his. Otherwise you may end up reducing concepts from this book to social media or AI slop.

Moreover, books like this usually are just phrases in a long dialectical process. For example, it is useful to read Debord first, and then move to Baudrillard.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Gemini becomes Google's fastest-growing product ever as it hits 1B users"

wolvesechoes — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:10:49 +0000

Well, maybe they lie, who knows. But "hearing people talking" is rather poor counterevidence.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Gemini becomes Google's fastest-growing product ever as it hits 1B users"

wolvesechoes — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:43:50 +0000

My god, do people really lost the ability to read such short article?

No, built-in Android and Chrome are not blowing these numbers.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Gemini becomes Google's fastest-growing product ever as it hits 1B users"

wolvesechoes — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:42:43 +0000

AI Overviews are not accounted for in that number.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Gemini becomes Google's fastest-growing product ever as it hits 1B users"

wolvesechoes — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:41:10 +0000

Read the article?

"These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that’s not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort"

AI Overviews are not accounted for.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Gemini becomes Google's fastest-growing product ever as it hits 1B users"

wolvesechoes — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:40:18 +0000

Somewhat tangential, but when Google doesn't participate in frontier churn, earns money and make heavy investment in infrastructure that they rent to those participating in the churn, while still they are "losing the AI race".

But when Apple doesn't participate in frontier churn, earns money, and needs to rely on Google for AI services, then this is "the Apple way", "do nothing and still win" uber-pragmatic 5D chess game.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's"

wolvesechoes — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 05:51:58 +0000

The same inflation caused to a large extent by constant increase in revenue to satisfy your insatiable shareholders?

New comment by wolvesechoes in "AI Fortunes Are Reviving an Old Debate About Private Power"

wolvesechoes — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 05:47:44 +0000

> If there's one place that's "worked-owned" it's a startup.

Sweetie, it is called cooperative, not startup.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Microsoft Is Quietly Deleting Mentions of 32 GB RAM Recommendation for Win 11"

wolvesechoes — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:58:19 +0000

> Why would a developer use Windows in 2026?

To have somewhat working desktop OS with access to one of the most powerful dev environments in a form of Visual Studio?

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees"

wolvesechoes — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:23:58 +0000

To a casual reader of this thread - look at comments, this is what ideology is.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "The End of an Era"

wolvesechoes — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:59:16 +0000

> You could ask a human to "do something with 1M dollars" and get garbage too

At least the human's brain requires about 20 Watts to operate.

Cheap garbage is better than garbage requiring whole power plants nad billions of capital investment.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights"

wolvesechoes — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:05:18 +0000

> Democracy is an engineering exercise, just like any other system.

God, tech people should have stayed in basements.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality"

wolvesechoes — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:08:49 +0000

Who?

But in all seriousness - you can even bring up Pope himself. Don't care. Show me data, show me the leaps our software made with all this 100x productivity boost. Show me a myriad of better LLVM projects, new usable kernels, and so on. Show me sharp decline in bugs and defects in existing projects.

Keep blog posts and HN comments.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality"

wolvesechoes — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:08:30 +0000

Uncle Bob was a dev celeb before there were dev celebs.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality"

wolvesechoes — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 05:37:22 +0000

> Remember there was a paper saying programmers were 20% slower with AI?

Key thing was not that they were X% slower, but that they were slower while being convinced they are faster. Of course, any analogies with the current hype cycle are completely unfounded.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality"

wolvesechoes — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 05:15:42 +0000

> How about DHH, Max, Nolan, Steve, Mitchell

Oh yes, dev celebs that rely on constant validation through social media. Very reliable source of data.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality"

wolvesechoes — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 05:12:19 +0000

> You should stop using social media as your yardstick.

Yes, don't believe people posting on HN.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey"

wolvesechoes — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:41:16 +0000

> Random allocation of citizens to seats might actually make for a better government.

Not only that, but that would be actually democratic concept. Greeks long ago found that elective systems are in the end oligarchies.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Memory safety absolutists"

wolvesechoes — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 06:26:36 +0000

> Combined with the ability to compile to a single native binary, having a solid package management solution, a fairly advanced type system, and a solid selection of nice language features

Good to see a praise for C#.

New comment by wolvesechoes in "Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects"

wolvesechoes — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 05:34:14 +0000

But the moment you step into social realm it becomes political, as Mr. Aristotle said.