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Comment by swader999 | Hacker News Reader

I'm seeing people argue and debate with AI. One will cut and paste AI reasoning, another will rebut with the same approach. I need a popcorn machine in my office.

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Don't be a meat proxy! See this all over the place, it's very frustrating and i've advocated for stopping this practice at my company!

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151933 - https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/

Get yourself one of those popcorn microwave bowls: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71mA19sd51L.jpg

You get hot popcorn in ~2min without the need for a whole machine you will have to clean and maintain. I got one as a gimmick a few years ago and it has become one of our favorite evening snack

Bought now! And there's the nuclear option now available to clear the entire floor with the smell of burnt popcorn.

does this work better than putting a bag of popcorn into the microwave?

You can buy the corn by the kilo instead of buying small bags of microwave popcorn every time. It’s way cheaper after a few batches, and you can add whatever you want. It’s also neat because you don’t need any oil or butter, I just add a little bit of water, sugar or salt. You can even first caramelize the sugar a bit with the water (in the bowl), before adding the corn.

I think I got such a bowl for below 10€

Costco microwave popcorn is about 36 cents a bag

Where I am in Germany 1kg of popcorn bags goes ~4.5€-13€ , and I see 1kg of popcorn corn for ~3.5€. If you consume a lot of it it's worth it! (and healthier if you don't use oil/butter)

At least in the US, bagged popcorn uses synthetic "butter" flavoring that can cause lung damage. Look up popcorn lung.

Popcorn bags are a significant source of PFAS and microplastics.

Having experienced a customer support AI today that whatever option you picked initially led to the AI, which had the rigid helpfulness of a McDonalds script of "Would you like fries with that", having already said you do not want any fries, I feel a popcorn machine is a good investment. Be the stage that office interactions will be reduced to, I'll get my AI to get onto your AI's suggestion and get back to you with an answer. I did have a good chat with an AI a few weeks back (Googles) were I challanged by asking it to do a picture of its best dream and then its worst nightmare, then used those to pull it apart as it went from some extreme to another, in the end it ended up with its ideal being an AI only world, and picked Europa as its home - scary on many levels, yet a perfectly acceptable and understandable response.

> "Would you like fries with that", having already said you do not want any fries

Prescient in all the best ways - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec

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