Hacker News: zukzuk

New comment by zukzuk in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

zukzuk — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 12:46:33 +0000

If you found this interesting, you might want to check out The History of the English Language podcast.

I’m surprised how much I’m enjoying it. And I can’t believe I have 195 episodes left.

New comment by zukzuk in "The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ"

zukzuk — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:54:05 +0000

Apple Music has a totally separate app for classical music. It was specifically designed to address exactly this.

For each composer, it shows all their well known works, and then you can tap on each to see all the recordings of that particular piece.

Smart move on Apple’s part, if you ask me.

New comment by zukzuk in "How to talk to anyone and why you should"

zukzuk — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:47:09 +0000

NYC is very different in that regard from most anywhere else in the US. Random people tend to talk to each other. There’s a vague sense of “we’re all in this shit together”. Maybe it’s something to do with living on a cramped island, with no choice but to work together.

New comment by zukzuk in "Switch to Claude without starting over"

zukzuk — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 14:47:40 +0000

I find that Claude almost always ends its response with some sort of follow up question, despite my system prompt telling it not to.

I never really used ChatGPT much though so maybe Claude is just relatively less egregious?

New comment by zukzuk in "Magical Mushroom – Europe's first industrial-scale mycelium packaging producer"

zukzuk — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:59:37 +0000

Some mushrooms, like many oyster species, are saprotrophs and will grow on just about any waste organic material with enough cellulose.

New comment by zukzuk in "Attention Media ≠ Social Networks"

zukzuk — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 17:34:01 +0000

Or Pixelfed, for a decentralized fediverse option.

New comment by zukzuk in "Zulip.com Values"

zukzuk — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:11:42 +0000

We've been using Zulip for our company chat for 2 years now. It does what we need it to do — while letting us control where it's deployed and where the data is stored (!!). But the UI is dated and awkward. The general feeling I get is that everyone at our company is okay with Zulip, but no one loves it. It just has that air of mediocrity about it. It's "okay".

New comment by zukzuk in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

zukzuk — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 22:48:50 +0000

Glad to hear E2EE is coming soon, but it’s been “soon” for probably a year now. It’s a bit odd that encrypted notifications still don’t work, and I’d argue it’s a very big caveat with regard to privacy and security.

Our main reason for using Zulip is that we work in a highly regulated space (healthcare) and would like to be able to safely talk about things. I suspect this sort of situation is a major motivator for Zulip adoption, so it’s weird that transit encryption was left as an afterthought.

New comment by zukzuk in "MaliciousCorgi: AI Extensions send your code to China"

zukzuk — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 13:35:33 +0000

Yes, exactly. The lack of any sort of permission controls for extensions in VS Code gives me the creeps

New comment by zukzuk in "Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?"

zukzuk — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 14:18:19 +0000

Not a lie, a potential misinterpretation if anything. Google has never factually countered the allegation, and now it’s before the courts in California. I’m going to wait and see how Thele v. Google plays out before turning this back on, and looking for alternatives in the meantime.

New comment by zukzuk in "Ask HN: Gmail spam filtering suddenly marking everything as spam?"

zukzuk — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 17:55:27 +0000

This has been “down” for me for a few months now, ever since Google tied this functionality to the same toggle that opts you in for using your email data for AI training. So now you can’t filter this stuff without also agreeing to a whole swath of unrelated and opt-ins.

Ive since gone on an unsubscribe campaign, and things seem bearable now.

New comment by zukzuk in "Mattermost restricted access to old messages after 10000 limit is reached"

zukzuk — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 15:27:03 +0000

It’s a bit odd though that Zulip charge $ for mobile notifications but still don’t have basic end-to-end encryption for those push notifications .

New comment by zukzuk in "2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web"

zukzuk — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 23:31:33 +0000

Maybe because what.cd picked up the torch and carried on for another few years? For me there was some sense of continuity between the two.

New comment by zukzuk in "Jack Ma's family shifted wealth to UK after years-long 'disappearance'"

zukzuk — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 11:46:15 +0000

I don’t get why people ask questions like this nowadays when the Wikipedia article or an LLM will give you a much better answer than what someone could type in a reply.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

also take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

New comment by zukzuk in "Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication"

zukzuk — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 12:18:43 +0000

Judging by the murderous sounds you hear all night here in the summer, I would not want to be cornered in a dark alley by a gang of adolescent raccoons.

New comment by zukzuk in "Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication"

zukzuk — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 12:14:23 +0000

Toronto, Canada is hands down the raccoon capital of the world. Something like 100k raccoons live in the city.

I can’t get my head around how such big animals manage to live all around us in such densely populated place. I suppose it helps that they are cartoonishly adorable.

But they are increasingly getting really, really big. It’s just a matter of time before the chonker living in my neighbour’s shed bullies me out of my house.

New comment by zukzuk in "I Am Mark Zuckerberg"

zukzuk — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 12:21:34 +0000

I have a relatively rare name — I’ve actually never met anyone with my last name, never mind someone with my full name — and this happens to me regularly. Last week I got a job rejection from New Zealand post, for a while I was getting someone’s pay stub notifications from the US, etc.

I suspect it’s because I was the first to register the first.last@gmail.com address for my name. I guess it’s a bit like owning a simple noun .com domain.

New comment by zukzuk in "Ask HN: How to deal with long vibe-coded PRs?"

zukzuk — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 02:20:46 +0000

That’s a great way to discourage anyone ever doing any large scale refactoring, or any other heavy lifting.

New comment by zukzuk in "HyperRogue – A non-Euclidean roguelike"

zukzuk — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 13:20:56 +0000

AppStore says it’s not available in Canada for some reason.

New comment by zukzuk in "Some Smalltalk about Ruby Loops"

zukzuk — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 12:33:16 +0000

I don’t want OOP. I just want the language to include a system for imposing constraints that prevent entire categories of bugs and make it easier to safely do large scale refactoring.

It’s really hard to go back to living without this once you’re used to it.