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customguy

711 karma · joined March 6, 2026

this is the way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t992ul_IKtc
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customguy··on CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back
Then more power to you! It's interesting that what I read as "downplaying it" was just your genuine frustration based on actually caring, I assumed too much.

And you're right, and of course scapegoating a guy isn't the solution, or a really great way forward. At first I wanted to add "it can't hurt", but it actually can, when it's really just projecting all the frustration that should be aimed at making bigger changes at the person we happen to know by name.

But it's of course hard to tell when that is the case, when the anger at an individual case takes away from the other, I mean. I don't think it can be generally assumed, maybe by really hating the guts of this particular person, a few people end up getting introduced to (more of) politics and economics in that otherwise wouldn't have? Different people have different learning styles ^^

customguy··on Show HN: Silent Shark – tactical map-based WWII submarine sim
> They say idiotic things like, "is the whole game hallucinated?"

You say this as if you can't even faithfully reproduce text that is at the top of your context window, which would explain the rest, such as hallucinating anyone saying anything about play testing.

> angry [..] bitter [..] mediocre

I detect no trace of that in the comment that sent you, and all the more in yours. Probably a coincidence.

customguy··on CEO who fired 900 people on Zoom just before Christmas wants his job back
Is someone remembered only for being shitty "new"?

> It's the whole goddam system that allows this.

It allows me and others the same things and yet we don't do them. This idea that you have to talk about everything at once first is just absolving individual doers of specific deeds, not to mention the idea that anyone would have stolen from a blind beggar, we need to heal blindness first etc.

It sounds more cultured when you talk about "incentives" and even "incentive structures", but sometimes it really isn't more than "why was she wearing a short skirt in the bad part of town?"

customguy··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
Frankly, I need to apologise because I must have totally skipped the "i suspect one of these teams has more bots than the other".

And agree that manual downvotes (or comments) are not always in good faith either (though I'd argue they're intrinsically still better than bot votes, but not as if you claimed differently :)

customguy··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
anti-ai-bots? people who dislike LLM et al use LLM to repeat what is public opinion anyway? like, where?
customguy··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
That probably should be "meaningfully weigh in" or something. I don't even remember most of the things I "weighed in on" on the web, but everybody'll tell ya, they'll say, he had the least amount of clue possible in any of these things, they actually didn't think it's possible but it's true. But then they realised that even a coin toss gets it right more often than that so they said, wait a minute, this is real, this is happening, this is actually what's going on and they were all amazed because it had never been seen before. So now I'm wired to this flock of ducks that goes into the opposite direction of where I want to go to find out the scientifically best spot to be in at any given moment.
customguy··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
For me, it just shits the bed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49292924

Reading the google blog and these discussions makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills, seriously. Side-by-side comparisons with the exact same inputs or it didn't happen, that's my rule going forward. Test all the things, believe nothing.

customguy··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
Was excited to try it, since I've been use 3.6 Flash in the last few days to make simply experiments/prototypes. My loop is writing a prompt, maybe adding a screenshot of the closest to what I want I have so far, then based on the result I modify/extend the prompt, maybe use another screenshot.

Well, I think I'll stick to 3.6 for now. Based in a very scientific sample size of exactly one attempt each: https://imgur.com/a/fDOkBDm

Both got the same prompt and example screenshot. I mean, they both suck but that's normal this early in, but the 3.6 version (first screenshot) actually changes the displayed threads depending on selected categories, and the messages of whatever selected thread, as obviously described in the prompt. You might say it more or less does what it should. Both versions have an ugly flash/jerk in the category pane when selecting/deselecting a category, so that's a wash.

The 3.7 version doesn't work at all, i.e. it always shows all threads, and no messages for any of them. I can post new messages in threads but they don't show up, and it doesn't even increase the message counter for the thread. I guess it's a matter of taste but I don't like the look either, while 3.6 actually is in the spirit of the screenshot I added the prompt, using 11k of CSS versus 3.7's 16k. The code is also less, and the backend split into 3 files (instead of just 2 as 3.7 did it), so assuming it sucks in either case, it'll be easier to read and massage.

edit: geez, 3.6 even properly fades/disables the "new message" button when no thread is selected, 3.7 didn't bother which is smart since everything else is broken anyway. Maybe it's better at really complex things, but for simple things, what I'm experimenting with, I already saw enough.

customguy··on Mushroom behind 'tiny people' hallucinations identified
I tried to find the psilocybin ones with friends once, just kids (well we were 15) with a few books about mushrooms from the library haha. We grabbed anything that "kinda looked like them", then put them all on the kitchen counter, tried to divide them into piles of the same things and find out what is what... but things just became less clear instead of obvious.

So I decided to look up mushroom poisoning (in the dictionary) and some stuff about potential asphyxiation ~18 (IIRC, it's been a while) hours later made decide no, the risk of dying in my sleep next night is NOT worth it, into the trash it goes.

customguy··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
> we'll have to build it explicitly for resisting corruption

Says who though? The current front runners? Who can't even not let them hack into into other companies over the weekend unsupervised already?

customguy··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
> For example my mum and I could watch the exact same movie and showing at the cinema and still come away with a completely different opinion of it.

yeah because there is a shared reality in which you can both see the same movie. enjoy it while it lasts.

customguy··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
> But as with any "beginning" of a long, diffuse process, people might quibble about the specifics.

Yeah, absolutely. But for the web, at least for my daily use of it, this was the first big "shift". Learning how something was spelled by someone googling it and quoting the number of results to the others.. good times. And you can no longer find out what the page with highest page rank says about "pizza" regardless of where YOU happen to be.

customguy··on Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
oh, and bought ingredients are excempt from that? growing them yourself is?

of course it's easy to just mindlessly say something, but you already showed that :P

customguy··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
I called it 2001/2002 or whenever they appeared when I tried to explain why personalized search results are the beginning of the end of a shared reality and therefore the ability to reason and act in public, and with others. I bet some still consider it hyperbole. It's just taking in trends and seeing where the glacier moves to, how the cookie will crumble so to speak.
customguy··on Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
What in my comment is that "because" supposed to connect to?

> if we enjoy the fruits of economics of scale for sooo many production processes, why can't we with mass produced food?

Nope, doesn't work.

> There's tasty, and theres healthy, and there's inexpensive (time or money); pick two.

You could say this about anything, you can either have cheap, good, and, say, extremely light-weight office-chars: pick two. That's absolutely orthogonal to what I said, and still applies to making your own vs. buying one that was made a lot cheaper be economics of scale. That trade-off applies in either case, so your comment is a complete no-op.

Why are so many things cheaper and get ever cheaper, while things like food, housing, education, medicine don't? Why does productivity rise so much faster than wages? Because there are no adults you can even discuss this with without their uneasiness forcing them to blurt out something, anything. Because people in golden cages can't even sit with what is. That's a provocative claim, an invitation for me to be proven wrong, but at least it actually relates to proceeding and surrounding comments and isn't just something out of a farmer's calendar.

customguy··on Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
Of course there's also eating of bad, expensive food. But being pressed for time is a real thing for some people. And IMO more importantly, if we enjoy the fruits of economics of scale for sooo many production processes, why can't we with mass produced food?

Nobody says "if you want a really good office chair you have to build it yourself". Same for shoes, cars, bikes, a million things. You can do that, make your own bike for example, but to get up to par you need to spend vastly more time and money, it's basically using more resources to be quirky or make an experiment etc.

IMO the default expectation, demand, the thing we should organise to achieve, should be that what's available, what the market competes over, is good and gets better, regardless of the market. Not that it gets worse because the buyers get fleeced. Doubly so not food.

customguy··on Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
What about the rationalisations of those who cut corners and wine to make even more profit when they're already so rich it's become a health issue for them? How is it the sole responsibility of your friends to work around that?

The idea is basically that it's "just the way it is" that the food we can buy in supermarkets, that is made in factories, that GIGANTIC amounts of real estate and logistics and energy are devoted to, that is made cheaper than it would be otherwise (and that is true even if it was awesome quality and mega healthy -- it would be more expensive, but less expensive than doing it yourself, economics of scale etc.) sucks, is unhealthy, you "shouldn't eat that".

Just buy some veggies and do it yourself. It's not so hard to plant some tomatoes, either! Nevermind people in private jets doing airshows... I just can't with how lazy my friends are. It would take them 30 minutes max.

It's not that you're wrong, of course. Both "sides" matter, and you always should mostly focus on what you control. But at the same time, it's better to punch up than kick down or sideways.

customguy··on Mars Bar from 1991 found – and it's 20g bigger than today's
Less and less people have time and money for that, for the same reason this stuff happens in the first place (i.e. greed and wealth consolidation). Put differently, if more people had time and money to do what you do, you wouldn't bother to do it, either.
customguy··on 'Pervert glasses': Backlash against Meta's smart glasses grows
Startup idea: customers give you their Meta glasses, you smash the camera and microphone (with a tiny sledge hammer), and wrap most of the glasses and particularly where mic/camera would have been in a special casing with a very unique and patented design you also make a huge fuss on social media about, so everybody knows it.

The wrapper is hard/impossible to remove, only the company can trigger the self-release mechanism, and customers have to sign that they owe you a lot of money when they remove or damage it (which is risky, so they have to be careful or it's their problem). You basically just rent it to them, for lots of money per month, so they can show off their Good Guy Glasses (hey that's actually a name! can I have 10% please if anyone does this, I'll also help out if you want, maybe with the tiny sledge hammer. thanks!).

"Oh, you can afford Meta glasses to be a perv? Well, I can't afford the equivalent of a bunch of them every year, but I still do it because I'm a good person."

The ad could be some street kid in the rain with some guy (Morgan Freeman maybe) offering to sell it these glasses, saying "you can pay in tiny rates" and whatnot, and the kid just sadly shakes its head.. so the guy goes down on one knee, eye to eye with the kid and says... "When I was your age, I thought everything is about money, too. But some things are about being a good person. If you had a mommy, surely she would want you to be a good person, right?" The kid nods, still hesitates, but by the way the music swells as the ad fades you just know it's gonna be alright.

customguy··on Tl;dv: Over 180k meetings left wide open
Software never had that status. I was disgusted by the decline I could see in the 90s even, and I was a teenager, I had no clue and still don't. I cannot imagine how it must be for people who do have a clue. They're probably all drinking.
customguy··on Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models
And the cops just shake them a bit, waiting for the case to fall out naturally.
customguy··on Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2
And intellectually honest people don't engage in circular reasoning and then rather than acknowledging it just repeat it, yet here we are.
customguy··on The German Mittelstand
> it wasn’t superfluous; it literally was what happened.

Yeah, so I gave that sentence to ChatGPT in a new context and asked it to make it longer without saying anything additional, several times, and it still reads fine, more than. The truth is the truth no matter how you put it.

https://pastebin.com/gKhCbmNQ

https://pastebin.com/9HpkN4tc

https://pastebin.com/J6znwxZf

https://pastebin.com/wXs84csy

https://pastebin.com/LrjVm4JT

The last one really speaks to me. I wanted to go on but it raised all sorts of questions in me that I think I should investigate instead.

It was, in that sense, a change that changed the thing that was being called something without changing the thing that was being called.

and

Everything that was not the name remained the same.

Everything that was the name was no longer the same.

Really makes you think.

customguy··on Why MySpace fans want it back as relaunch hinted
it was a show HN once:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245740

I'm not a regular user atm, when I used it my experience was great, and the owner is a really nice guy. I vaguely remember him scrambling to update on Twitter when the servers where down while he was at uni etc. For a free service that was exploding in users when he was swamped with other stuff, he always did his utmost to fix things ASAP. So yeah, sign up today and buy merch! You may not end up using the site much but it's for a good cause that sparks joy. And while of course there's also spammers or jerks, there are also lots of nice people to be found there.

customguy··on Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength
Nonsense. The "weights" in "models" refer to probabilities.

Even the implicit claim that they could deterministically produce "the" correct answer with 100% certainty doesn't withstand any scrutiny.

Nevermind problems posed in English prose, complicated or philosophical questions. Is the correct answer to 2+2 four, or is it 1+3? When you you have 2 apples and give me one apple, how many apples do you have now; one, or half as many as before? What is the correct answer? Without a spaghetti of arbitrary axioms in the system prompt? Even if you come up with something clever about apples, it even fails at "when is your birthday". When it is today, should I say "today" or say the date? Not even God could decide that.

Arguably, the specifications for a compiler is also such a mess of axioms, and you can split hairs and say "it's all random anyway", but you'll still use a seatbelt instead of silly string, so what gives?

For compilers, give or take, there is a correct output for a given input (under which I'll include config, options, the targeted architecture, whatever). With LLM there is no such thing even if you do infinite mental backflips, and there won't be, because there can't be. Even if you could perfect the compilers that are needed to make the software that trains and drives LLM deterministic, you cannot make LLM fully deterministic without making them not an LLM.

If you can find a way to encode what a compiler would do to programs into the weights of a model so that produces the output of a compiler that would be a cool and completely useless feat, because it would probably be bigger, slower and impossible to reason about. But it would still be cool and I would still try it out.

customguy··on New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
> Which creates some bizarre incentives, minors get rewarded for signing up for the platforms that are harming them in the first place.

Oh please. Was the whole "calculation" just to make this seem like a well considered argument, or what?

If the payout was to an entity other than the harmed one, you could say now that entity has incentive to have those minors harmed, instead. "Bizarre", heh.

customguy··on What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
Labour is having to eat and clip your fingernails, having to sleep and repair the roof every year. All animals have to do it, humans always will have to do at least a bit of that, producing things just for them to be consumed. But work is building a world, and of course it does have to have meaning. An animal that won't breed in captivity doesn't want to survive under all circumstances. Sometimes even "nature" just says you know what, if I can only live as someone else's furniture, why live? Burnout is probably a similar mechanism.

"the remaining time"

Doing what is intrinsically valuable to you hinges on you still having access to the person you are. Don't take that for granted. A lifetime of settling can easily drive that out of someone, but planning to settle before it even started, as the only option, surely will. How could it not?

Old men [0] living it up because they never did while they lived is the worst. You can't regain a sense of justice, curiosity and innocence once you let it go and out of sight. You cannot have either without the other two, and none of them come back once you misplaced them as something you don't need "for now", but something very cringe and sad can takes their place, and it comes with this conspiracy of not mocking one another, of pretending to be fully featured people, as they stumble and babble into the sunset.

[0] And I say "men" because this is very much a male issue. You don't hear many women talking like that, at least I can't even remember one.

customguy··on U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative
That sums up nothing, and parroting it some more doesn't make it more true, it just shows us the mindset and intellectual horizon of detractors. Brexit, Thiel's drooling over "balkanization" to Epstein, this constant stream of trash comments, all the same stupid cloth, it all gets the same "no".
customguy··on 2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out
> anybody who was okay with the original cameras

Who cares about those people? I would argue even they themselves hardly do. And sure, they'll be even more okay with even worse stuff, and that even worse stuff will be even more hated by even more people, whatever the people who are "okay with" (that can mean ignorance, obedience, or evil intent, but it's not justification). If they can be okay with mass surveillance they can be okay with other things, so they're basically a wash, they're just okay with stuff.

> At least one third of the country is still okay with them

Then they can be okay with the majority saying you know what, we're sick of you, you can either stop having your toys or you will be segregated from us and live under your own surveillance. "Being okay with something" isn't some magical wand or a fortress, it's just a limp shrug. It means "pass".

> In sum, we don't have as much control over these things as you seem to believe.

I don't see the connection with the sentence before that, which is a minority being "okay with" something and a majority willing to fight and out there doing it. It's not about controlling what a minority of people are okay with, it's about changing what is done. The people who are okay with stuff can go read a comic book until it's over, how does that not solve anything you raised about them? Or are you saying their being okay with stuff should be respected or even heeded? Couldn't they just make that claim themselves, if they wanted to?

Imagine a raging house fire, people stumbling over each other trying to help, and some guy steps up and goes "WAIT!" they all look at him, sure he has a major contribution for interrupting something like this, a good idea, a plan perhaps; and he goes "... I'm actually okay with this."

customguy··on Taste Is All That's Left
well yes, you can't help but have your own taste, and like the taste of others according to your taste of taste(s?).

And I think taste is subjective by definition, it doesn't compete with "objective taste" because that makes no sense.

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