Hacker News: wouterjanl

Le Baguette Index

wouterjanl — Mon, 25 May 2026 06:57:05 +0000

Article URL: https://lebaguetteindex.fr/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48264172

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by wouterjanl in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

wouterjanl — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:36:01 +0000

Interesting take. If AI indeed takes over the thinking, could the next scarce resource be, humanity? I’d argue that strength is already taken over by the machines, at least in societies where thinking is already the dominant competence. What can we not get from AI? Friendship, empathy, connection, affection, mutual understanding? Like being real. Being present. Maybe time has come to invest in getting really good at all of that

New comment by wouterjanl in "Old laptops in a colo as low cost servers"

wouterjanl — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:31:12 +0000

Funny, I had a similar idea this morning in the shower. I was thinking about how distributed digital infrastructure could be achieved in practice. Running some music streaming and photo server on an old laptop at home that I access via tailscale has proved surprisingly smooth. I feel there is some future in empowering users by giving them access to a cloud on hardware that is actually owned by the user. It would be a way to achieve absolute digital freedom, no lock-in and if done in a secure way privacy friendly. Hell it's the OG idea of the internet! The question is how to bring this to non-technical users. I know many people who are getting sick of paying each month both to Apple and Google for storing their ever growing pile of pictures. This solution of course does imply some sort of lock-in as your tied to a subscription and it's probably quite the hassle to get your laptop back. Also the fire hazard seems like a legit concern. I nevertheless do hear some music here.

New comment by wouterjanl in "“Your frustration is the product”"

wouterjanl — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 03:44:35 +0000

I believe one of the reasons I keep coming back to hackernews is the absence of ads and the near complete focus on content. Shout out to those who work in the background to keep it like this. It would be interesting to hear from dang or other insiders how evident it is that this website is adfree. At some point there must have been someone who probably raised the idea that money could be made by injecting an ad or a tracker here or there. The article uses the example of the print version of the New Yorker, as a way of how things can be. From interviews with David Remnick, the editor, I learned that it has been mostly his vision to decrease the ads in the print and making up the lost revenue by increasing the subscription fees. It’s these people we need to save the media landscape.

New comment by wouterjanl in "Show HN: JavaScript-first, open-source WYSIWYG DOCX editor"

wouterjanl — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 11:08:20 +0000

Thank you for sharing this and making it open source! I appreciate that when clicking the link you end up immediately in the tool. I saved it. This surely will be useful at some point.

New comment by wouterjanl in "Learning music with Strudel"

wouterjanl — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 18:14:23 +0000

Allow me to use this post to give big kudos to the maintainers of Strudel for having put together a brilliant set of official docs. I found them incredibly well put together and hence really useful to learn. I have played around with Strudel many evenings and I am always amazed about how intuitive Strudel is to create beats and sounds, to the point that I prefer to create music in Strudel over the established DAW software. I would love for there to be a good bridge between producing sounds and beats with Strudel code and structurering and mastering an entire track. This is missing in Strudel since it’s clearly build for a live coding environment. Any tips from users about ways or tools to make this bridge are always welcome!

New comment by wouterjanl in "Hiroshima (1946)"

wouterjanl — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 04:49:12 +0000

I do not think Hiroshima existed in isolation. I totally agree that the Japanese empire and the Third Reich committed horrible war crimes in WW2. If there's anything I lament, it's how it seems so hard to feel empathy for the traumas of the real people who die in war, whatever side they are on. The New Yorker piece we are commenting on describes mundane lives of normal people. These were not people who were beating someone or someone's children to death. Sure, many if not all Japanese were supporting a regime that was responsible for immense crulety, and sure, I do understand how that affects our ability to feel empathy for them (it's maybe similar to how I feel less empathy for a fan of a rival football team mourning a game's loss compared to a fan of the football team I happen to support). I understand this way of thinking, but I choose to rebel against it. Because we talk about losing real lives, real suffering - and what citizenship of which empire or nation state should be so crucial that it cancels out a person's humanity? As you write yourself, "war is terrible". It really is. Call me naive, but I dream of a world where that sentence is not followed by a 'but', but by a period.

New comment by wouterjanl in "Hiroshima (1946)"

wouterjanl — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 05:20:55 +0000

Here’s an extraordinary piece that focuses on the stories of the ordinary lives of the real people surviving 64 kilo enriched uranium exploding above their head yielding a blast of approximately 15 kiloton TNT which caused a fireball with a diameter of 370m that had the same surface temperature as the sun (source: Wikipedia). And here we are, the intellectually curious people of the internet, above all interested in offsetting these tragedies to some other suffering statistics. Why can’t we help but look away from human suffering inflicted by war, even if there’s a moving long read focusing on real people presented to us? And who does this thinking serve?

Towards the end of the piece, the author describes a science professor who, together with his son, lays buried under the rubble of his house after the blast. He ultimately survives but reflects about laying there, thinking: “It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.” How fascinating this is the spin you give to such a traumatising experience. Are we really nation state citizens first, human beings second? Could speaking about the fate of the people of Hiroshima in terms as ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ be a symptom of the same thinking? How do we get out of this?

New comment by wouterjanl in "‘No Other Land’ consultant Awdah Hathaleen killed by Israeli settler"

wouterjanl — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 13:21:33 +0000

As you ask why this is here. Copied from the guidelines of this site: “What to submit? On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. (…) anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.” So it’s fair to say that this site is about more than entrepreneurship and tech.

Can Sam Altman Be Trusted with the Future?

wouterjanl — Tue, 20 May 2025 11:41:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/can-sam-altman-be-trusted-with-the-future

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040397

Points: 19

# Comments: 13

New comment by wouterjanl in "No Instagram, no privacy"

wouterjanl — Tue, 06 May 2025 01:24:22 +0000

I don’t understand, what kind of marketing do you think this is? I’m OP. I setup the blog a while ago but only for the first time I thought of something that was actually worth writing about. Something needs to be the first post! I’m sorry you found it boring.

New comment by wouterjanl in "No Instagram, no privacy"

wouterjanl — Mon, 05 May 2025 16:42:42 +0000

Good points! Totally agree that people care less than you think, and it’s very healthy to live your life without thinking you have to please everyone all the time. The nuance I tried to make, but I was perhaps not really clear, is that when people talk with each other, people have the chance to make sure a message comes across so that it does not offend a person. That chance for nuance is lost when people post on social media. Not that people do it deliberately, it’s just that social media is designed to be focused on the poster rather than on how that message makes certain people in the audience feel. And I do believe people are bothered not to offend someone, and that they are less likely to do so when you actually talk.

No Instagram, no privacy

wouterjanl — Mon, 05 May 2025 15:37:26 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.wouterjanleys.com/blog/no-instagram-no-privacy/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43896228

Points: 128

# Comments: 112

New comment by wouterjanl in "Show HN: Lemon Slice Live – Have a video call with a transformer model"

wouterjanl — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 05:52:09 +0000

Really cool stuff. It felt strangely real. Impressive!

New comment by wouterjanl in "AI Horseless Carriages"

wouterjanl — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 10:59:45 +0000

Excellent essay. I loved the way you made it interactive.

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

wouterjanl — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:59:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57095/try-to-praise-the-mutilated-world-56d23a3f28187

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43264824

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by wouterjanl in "Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you"

wouterjanl — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 08:18:21 +0000

It's a pretty small, straight forward web app. Think: python backend and a vanilla html / JS frontend, served over flask. The frontend is mostly in one file, so maybe it's not the best test case for crossfile reading, but still very happy with the user experience!

New comment by wouterjanl in "Launch HN: Codebuff (YC F24) – CLI tool that writes code for you"

wouterjanl — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 05:48:58 +0000

I just tried it out in the context of a small but messy side project. It did exactly what I asked for. The easy of use is a bliss. Impressive!

New comment by wouterjanl in "It's not just obesity. Drugs like Ozempic will change the world"

wouterjanl — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 18:10:05 +0000

Living without appetite. I get it can help some people with losing weight. But doesn’t it sound a tad sad too? Isn’t desire one of the most complex, beautiful emotions?

New comment by wouterjanl in "What Does It Mean to Learn?"

wouterjanl — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 16:12:13 +0000

The ‘ability to learn’ idea may not be so novel, but I am not sure if I agree with calling it ill defined or it having an agenda for more inclusivity. Generally, in schools, at least from my experience, it will still mostly be abstract thinking and memory capacities that are measured. Curiosity, and the ability to turn that curiosity in new knowledge, also broadens the mind (in addition to abstract thinking and remembering things), which can be an enormous quality that is highly valued on the job market, arguably more than what is mostly measured at schools. I think that’s the point the author tries to make.