Hacker News: zelphirkalt

New comment by zelphirkalt in "AI has access to a vastly larger working memory than the human brain"

zelphirkalt — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 09:37:48 +0000

A great scientist once said, that the scientific method also includes stating, why what one "found out" could be wrong, and that one might need to retry experiments, whose results one relies upon. I think it was in "Cargo Cult Science" by Feynman.

In a way what they are doing, only publishing positive results is no longer good science.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "Every Fucking Website (2020)"

zelphirkalt — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 19:52:06 +0000

Any web dev reading these comments and understanding what the comments express, should know: If you have built any of these dark patterns and anti-features, the annoyance and loathing expressed here is what you are responsible for, and this is how you made people feel about the website you took part in building. By implementing such stuff, you are personally part of the responsible group of people for making this crap. You personally have managed to make this planet a worse place and make your website shit. Given that these days basically 95% or more of websites push this shit, it is safe to assume, that there are many of such web devs in our midst, who are responsible. Congratulations for ruining the web.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

zelphirkalt — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:50:16 +0000

I think it's all a huge make-believe. They have a big name and marketing falls for it. If push comes to shove, they can just simulate click through and views and such, to "convince" people that it all works. They have all the user agent details of a user from years of browser-rape.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook"

zelphirkalt — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:21:38 +0000

It could be made a question of legislation. If it was forbidden, and the "cost of business" too high for them to dare, then it can work. We would need to do more than touch them with the satin gloves we are using now though.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook"

zelphirkalt — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:16:06 +0000

Same here.

I will add though, that the freemium model does not necessarily have to cease existing. Some platform for written articles can have articles available at no cost, and then put a paywall in front of other articles. I don't see the problem with that. It will be a careful balancing act of content creators, how much is in the freemium section, so that they attract a sufficient number of readers/fans/supporters.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook"

zelphirkalt — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:07:05 +0000

This is probably a good decision, because it will free up time and resources to do more productive things than saving the lost souls, that are still on Facebook. Maybe this will contribute to the downfall of Facebook, due to more people seeing how toxic the place has become, when they can no longer block those ads.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

zelphirkalt — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:58:43 +0000

Until today I didn't consider, that countries can be compound/consist of countries. That countries can be recursive. I always thought, that any lower level would be called differently. TIL.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

zelphirkalt — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:26:22 +0000

OK, so now we have the following terms: State, nation, country, sovereign country.

For example in Germany one would say there are 16 states, but one wouldn't say that there are 16 countries. Never heard anyone claim that. So state seems to be different from country, at least here. Would people in the UK say that Scotland or Wales are "nations"? Or is at least that term very clearly only for units that could participate under a flag in lets say the olympics? (I assume here, that Scotland and Wales are not separately competing, but are under UK flag.)

New comment by zelphirkalt in "Chicken Scheme 6.0"

zelphirkalt — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:15:40 +0000

However, with Schemes the SRFI implementations usually (?) come with the standard library, so you don't actually "have to install" them. Still gotta know the usual suspects, like SRFI for tests, SRFI for vectors, hash tables, random numbers, etc. if you want your code to be mostly portable to other Schemes.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

zelphirkalt — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:35:37 +0000

Just to understand this: When someone says "country England", do they mean "country" like in "nation", considering England a separate nation, or is it a lapse and they mean UK? Is England usually referred to as a country, or just part of a country?

I usually think of a country as equal to a nation, and as far as I know, Wales and Scotland have not split off yet? Is the term "country" not actually that sharply defined?

EDIT: Thanks people, I just asked a question to better understand the terminology, you know ...

New comment by zelphirkalt in "Chicken Scheme 6.0"

zelphirkalt — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:11:46 +0000

I only used Chicken for a short time, because of a UTF-8 bug it had/has, but I always liked Chicken's docs. They seem to be written with care and often make things understandable. When I look up Scheme things and don't understand something, sometimes I specifically go for the Chicken Scheme docs, to see if I understand its explanation.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

zelphirkalt — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:54:16 +0000

To understand your comment correctly: What does "these islands" refer to? Walled gardens that we create ourselves using the open source frameworks?

New comment by zelphirkalt in "Squeak 6.1"

zelphirkalt — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:08:01 +0000

The more of them you explore, the more insight you get. The list does not have to be complete. It just needs to list some languages, that are truly different in how they work and what the ideas behind them are.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "I made tinnitus my friend, then it disappeared [video]"

zelphirkalt — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:30:52 +0000

I don't even know why I have tinnitus. It's not end of the world bad tinnitus, but sometimes does get a little annoying. It is louder in the evenings/nights than in the mornings. I have it since primary school 4th grade or so, when I realized I have it, because an old teacher described her own tinnitus. But as far as I can remember there was no very loud sound event before that causing the tinnitus. Maybe it comes from bad posture or so, already in primary school. Too heavy school bag with too many books? Who knows. Have had it ever since. Most effective masking method for me is sound of rain whitenoise like that rainymood website.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

zelphirkalt — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 09:33:57 +0000

I didn't check which model exactly you are using, but I think a complex LLM, that is capable of deciding to look online, will probably always be more expensive than most classical models. Maybe if someone invents a way that reliably strips every other ability than answering the one question one has and checking online sources, the LLM can reach an equal level.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

zelphirkalt — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 09:22:58 +0000

If your tool is deterministic, I would rather rely on it, than on LLMs for the task. So I don't think your work will have been pointless, when comparing against an LLM classifying things. Also there is value in something that is battle-tested compared to something just generated on the run, and there is value in something already existing and not needing to be generated or developed anew.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

zelphirkalt — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:21:14 +0000

It doesn't derail them, except for them not finding a new job and many being unfortunate enough to lose their old one. Instead many jobs are taken by "AI engineers", glorified prompters, who are not in tech because of the tech, but because they will do anything for that paycheck.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects"

zelphirkalt — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:26:26 +0000

The issue will be "out of sight, out of mind" (or rather knowingly ignored) until the issue appears at scales as small as the home village, which in terms of the US government means the front and back yard of the white house or similar.

These people are living in parallel societies, where they are completely detached from the reality for many people living in the country. And that is not merely a problem in the US.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "Taste Is All That's Left"

zelphirkalt — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:59:04 +0000

I have yet to see a good design falling out of people building flying castles in Figma, disconnected from the realities and basics of web development's languages HTML and CSS.

New comment by zelphirkalt in "What I love about Django"

zelphirkalt — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:43:44 +0000

Ninja is quite a heavyweight in terms of dependencies (depends on Pydantic, which is itself heavyweight). Not everyone wants that in their project.