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DamnInteresting

10,074 karma · joined May 29, 2014

Owner/operator of https://www.damninteresting.com, a domain occasionally seen on the HN front page (much to our webserver's consternation).

* @DamnInteresting@mastodon.cloud

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DamnInteresting··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)
Less than a week ago I officially launched a game I've been working on for years, Omiword[1], my second word game so far. It was discussed here on HN previously while it was in open beta[2], and again when Stripe shut down my account without explanation[3].

Reception so far has been positive. It's nice to be done with a long project, though this one will never exactly be done--I need to make sure there is a new puzzle for each day, though I have several months' worth prepared in advance.

I've started designing my next game, but it's probably a couple of years out. I just need something for that part of my brain to occasionally chew on.

[1] https://www.omiword.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43654350

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44075038

DamnInteresting··on The great AI delusion is falling apart
> I have deployed a functioning full stack application to the web

Best hope ChatGPT plagiarized that code from people who properly sanitized user input, otherwise it might be vulnerable to SQL injection, XSS, etc. If such holes exist, it may be tough to resolve them without a professional.

> But when I see people say it's a delusion, waste of resources, and everyone is wasting their time on it ... for me, it just doesn't line up.

I don't think anyone would say LLMs are useless, but there are people out there comparing the birth of LLMs to the Industrial Revolution, and the advent of the Internet. Such claims are preposterous.

I think the widespread use of LLMs will ultimately be undone by a few factors:

1) Due to the way LLMs function, they will never be totally cured of 'hallucinations'. They are accurate a lot of the time, and apparently useful in those times. But you can never really trust its output. That is an exhausting problem, and will burn people out.

2) Prices for LLMs are artificially very low right now, these companies are burning investor money to keep going. The 'cost' is going to have to go way up for these LLM providers to be sustainable. I put cost in quotes because it will be some cost in subscription prices, but also cost in terms of ads that will be inserted everywhere, and other degrading forms of monetization.

3) Models are running out of good training data. They'll either hit a wall, or continue training on content that was itself LLM generated, which will go the way of Habsburg Jaw in a jiffy. Ensloppification is real.

I'm sure there will be niches for LLMs in the future, for those who can afford their true cost. But this cram-it-in-everything, available-everywhere frenzy will probably be looked back upon with deserved embarrassment.

DamnInteresting··on Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars
I've been driving a Chevy Bolt for over 8 years now, and I regularly use the regen paddle. I drive in "L" mode, which engages partial regen when the accelerator is released. When I need more slowing, I pull the paddle, and that increases the aggressiveness of the regen. I only press the brake for quick stops, or to hold the car once it has stopped.

I also use the built in "hilltop reserve" feature, which limits charging to 90%. This ensures that there is always regen resistance, and therefore a consistent experience.

DamnInteresting··on Occasionally USPS sends me pictures of other people's mail
I use Informed Delivery for my PO box since I don't get much mail there. The worst thing about it is that the USPS uses the system to announce when there are new episodes of Mailin’ It! - The Official USPS Podcast.

They send the daily digest saying "You have 1 mailpiece arriving soon." Instead of the usual picture of the 'mailpiece', it's an image illustrating the episode. There is no physical mail corresponding to this alert, it's electronic junk mail. Spam. Ugh. There is no opt out for these apart from canceling the service entirely.

DamnInteresting··on Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
I dislike the manufactured overcomplexity of web app development nowadays, especially in corporate environments. Maybe I'm just curmudgeonly, but all of that command-line building crap with frameworks and dependencies and auto-reloading browsers--I feel it adds a lot of work for little reward, and introduces a lot more opportunities for problems to arise. All I need is a good text editor and a browser with dev tools, thank you very much. Grumblescoff.
DamnInteresting··on Extreme skydiver Baumgartner dies in paragliding accident
This video says that the helmet mic serves as a decent face scratcher: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VCuaZCRn1U

I've also read that many astronauts put strips of adhesive Velcro in their helmet for this purpose: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/42012/nose-scratch...

DamnInteresting··on The AI bubble today is bigger than the IT bubble in the 1990s
Well, most college freshmen aren't plagiarizing and inserting random falsehoods, while consuming an excess of electricity all at an artificially low cost.
DamnInteresting··on Anyone else tired of the AI hype?
> It's like Poochy on the simpsons

See also: Microsoft Clippy

DamnInteresting··on Ask HN: How are you making money on the side?
It's far from a fortune, and its future is uncertain, but I've been earning a bit via donations with my writing/podcasting for almost 20 years now: https://www.damninteresting.com

I'm also working on diversifying, starting with a free daily word game that I hope gets a little traction on Patreon: https://omiword.com

I have a few other projects-in-progress, if I'm lucky, one will earn a dollar or two.

DamnInteresting··on I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligence models
> This is a bigger issue, especially with Apple, than people may realize.

Like he'll it is! I jest.

I also use swipe typing, and have for years, but just about daily I consider turning it off. There are so many words it just won't produce, including most profanities. It also fails to do some simple streamlining; for instance, such a predictive system should give priority to words/names that have been used in the conversation thread, but it doesn't seem to. If I'm discussing an obscure word or an unusual name, I often have to manually type it each time.

Its predictions also seem to be very shallow. Just a few days ago, on US Independence Day, I was discussing a possible get-together with my family, and tried to swipe type "If not, we will amuse ourselves", and it typed "If not, we will abuse potatoes". Humorous in the moment, but it says a lot about the predictive engine if it thinks I am more likely trying to say "abuse X" than "amuse Y" in that context.

DamnInteresting··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
Those elements certainly amplify the awfulness, but I am old enough that I remember reading magazines, and I despised the ads there was well. I'm trying to read this OMNI article about colonizing Mars, and this stupid full-page ad for calculator wristwatches is getting in my way. *shakes fist*

I'm sure glad that the inline ads model never caught on in novels.

DamnInteresting··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
It's funny...I absolutely despise being advertised to, yet I find vintage ads fascinating. I don't know what that says about me.

I feel the same about a lot graffiti; if it's recent, it's an eyesore, but old graffiti can be extremely interesting. I guess both domains expose some elements of the zeitgeist seldom explored in other mediums. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Nice site, by the way!

DamnInteresting··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
I'm putting the finishing touches on my free daily word game, Omiword[1][2]. I had it basically finished, with the option for players to make a one-time $5 payment to unlock access to the archives, but then Stripe shut down my account, claiming it was a "restricted business".[3] I'm now reworking it to try to fund it through Patreon, we'll see how that goes.

[1] https://www.omiword.com

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43654350

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44075038

DamnInteresting··on The 90% Gravity Problem: Why We Tend to Quit Right Before the Finish Line
Personally, I tend to put off unpleasant/difficult parts of a project so I can make rapid initial progress. I am ultimately confronted by a moment when all of my remaining tasks are those I put off, and it's off-putting. Fortunately I can usually overcome this by mentally shifting gears to more of a slow grind mode.
DamnInteresting··on Ask HN: To anyone who cares to read this. How old are you roughly?
I'm a few months shy of 48. I've been writing code since I learned to write BASIC games and utilities on my TI-82 in high school, ca. 1993. I still love coding, but it's getting harder and harder to make a living doing it.
DamnInteresting··on Federal judge rules copyrighted books are fair use for AI training
I say this as an author who has definitely had a lot of my work slurped up by these machine-learning goblins: This was the right call. I learned to write by reading other authors' works, so I'd have to be quite the hypocrite to stop others from learning from me. Still, it makes me sad and tired to know that I'm unwittingly training my own replacement--one that will never be sad or tired itself.

In my view, one real gray area is in image/video generation, especially "x in the style of y" kinds of shenanigans. As a society we may need to consider some better protections for an artist's/studio's style, otherwise distinct and novel and interesting styles will become watered down into a sea of bland mimicry until the sweet release of the heat death of the universe.

DamnInteresting··on Firefox is dead to me – and I'm not the only one who is fed up
I completely disagree. For me, Firefox is the best current browser on the whole, and in recent years I've moved most of my work and play away from Chrome, Arc, Safari, etc. in favor of Firefox. It has retained support for Manifest v2, which is huge for me. The Chrome maintainers seem hellbent on cultivating the web into an ad-addled hellscape.
DamnInteresting··on Poison Pill: Is the killer behind 1982 Tylenol poisonings still on the loose?
> It's undated

I really dislike this trend of leaving off the publication date. It's a key piece of context, especially for nonfiction, where the known facts may have changed since the story was published (as is the case here).

I get that they want the content to seem evergreen and unmoored from the tyranny of the calendar, but unless they intend to constantly monitor/update the facts of the nonfiction, the date ought to be clearly visible.

DamnInteresting··on Making $1M from my personal projects
One ought not underestimate the cumulative effects of time. Multiple long-running projects with modest income can be surprisingly lucrative.
DamnInteresting··on What We Lost with PHP and jQuery
I unapologetically love PHP + jQuery, even for new projects in 2025. The technologies are solid, and they didn't stop working just because they are no longer trendy. Is vanilla Javascript "better" than jQuery? Sure, in some ways. But for those of us steeped in jQuery, it's so much quicker to whip up an MVP. If the ~90k of bandwidth becomes an issue, I can always retroactively swap jQuery for vanilla.
DamnInteresting··on Web dev is still fun if you want it to be
This is quite true. I like to build browser-based games, and it is much more fun and stimulating to write a lot of the bits in old-fashioned HTML+SCSS+Javascript. I still use libraries for tricky stuff, like handling audio playback, but it's not that hard to implement one's own drag-and-drop (for example), and it works very well. Plus, there is the added benefit of understanding how things work.
DamnInteresting··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
Ads are like graffiti. When they first appear, they are a nuisance, a menace. But in the fullness of time they become interesting relics.
DamnInteresting··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
I've been trying to put the finishing touches on my daily word game Omiword (https://www.omiword.com/), but I've been waylaid by Stripe because they decided that a simple daily word game is a "restricted business," and they shut down my account.[1]

Now I need to figure out an alternate payment handler, or just give up on my modest monetization plan where players can pay a small one-time fee to unlock all of the archived puzzles. It was never going to make a fortune, but it would have been nice to offset some of the hosting expenses.

Don't use Stripe. They shit on you just because they can.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44075038

DamnInteresting··on Stripe shut down my indie word game and won't clarify why
Yikes, that sure looks like a pattern. Back in 2015 when I first started using Stripe, they seemed so welcoming and easy to work with. The enshittification is real.
DamnInteresting··on Stripe shut down my indie word game and won't clarify why
The future is now :(
DamnInteresting··on What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)
I have some married friends who worked at Disneyland for years, and they have stories about wealthy park visitors and the escorted, line-skipping, side-loaded experience they have at each attraction. They are often shuttled around through dedicated parts of the underground tunnel system, and enter rides through alternate entrances, often experiencing the attractions entirely out of view of the gross public.
DamnInteresting··on Dead Reckoning
Oh hey Beestie! I don't know if you'll actually see this reply since it's belated, but alas. Thanks for saying nice words. I hope you are well. *cough*
DamnInteresting··on Dead Reckoning
Well, lots of kinds. I work a lot in front-end web dev, so I'm immersed in HTML, CSS/SCSS, Javascript, etc. Server-side, most of my experience is with PHP, but I've also worked with Python. I can code in Java, but I find it to be a joyless enterprise. At my current day job I mostly work with Perl, which is antique but charming.

My beard is getting gray enough that most tech places don't want me anymore, experience be damned. And my other skills (writing, editing, illustration, sound design, narration) are unlikely to earn me a living. It's an uncertain place to be.

DamnInteresting··on Dead Reckoning
If by 'the book' you are referring to David Gran's The Wager, it's worth noting that the article linked here (which I wrote) was published about 3 years before that book was published. I mention this only to dispel any impression that the article is derived from Gran's book.
DamnInteresting··on Dead Reckoning
Alan Bellows here, author of this article, and founder of Damn Interesting. For years I kept the site going by working a part-time coding job, along with occasional contract work. Combined with donations to the site, this brought in enough income to survive, while allowing me to dedicate 5-6 hours per weekday to writing/editing/etc.

Early in the pandemic my job wrapped up, and when I went looking for a new part-time or contract gig, there was absolutely nothing. I networked and searched for a year and a half, and never found a single part-time opening. In the meantime, donations to the site were on a steady downward trajectory. I was burning through my savings at an alarming rate.

Eventually I had to take a regular full-time job just to have income again. I hoped I could find some plausible approach, but so far it's been unworkable. I also have a six year old, so evenings and weekends tend to be spoken for. And after the little one's bedtime, there's not much left in the fuel tanks. I'm approaching 50 now.

Maybe I'll find a part-time gig, or perhaps some anonymous wealthy benefactor will fund the site for a while. Both have happened before. If not, we may need to pack it up soon. 20 years is a pretty good run.

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