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nothrabannosiron Ex-Tech –> Homeless in SF

Ignore the comments, read the article instead. One of the worst comment threads on HN so far, if you ask me. The only time I wish the comments were all LLM generated, because that would explain how they could miss the underlying humanity so thoroughly.

nothrabannosiron Ex-Tech –> Homeless in SF

> It reaffirmed a delusion that had previously gripped my mind and begun my psychosis; I must be dead. This place, purgatory. I prayed for a quest or that my retribution was almost over, so that I could go back to land of the living.

...

> The old lady’s came marching in, and fed us pasta and bread and cake and cookies. There was Coca Cola. I ate because I had no choice, but suspicious of the sugar they forced on us. We slept on green mats. Most of the folks, drenched theirs in Industrial Clorox. I thought they had it wrong. Embrace the filth. Do you trust the chemicals?

...

> Some of the people around me drenched theirs in mountains of maple syrup. Is sugar the enemy?

...

> My paranoia of the place had dissipated slightly as the idea of having my own room felt pretty nice.

...

> I had refused to steal, convinced I was in purgatory and doing the “right thing” was the only way to pass the test. But standing there, the rules dissolved.

This article is dripping with psychosis. It's a story about a failing health care system.

Reading some of these comments, I'm starting to understand how the system could be the way it is, and just how far we have left yet to go.

nothrabannosiron Ex-Tech –> Homeless in SF

I think the superbowl work is the present and the homelessness was a flashback

nothrabannosiron CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook

I think it’s satire, not sarcasm. Mocking sycophant but ultimately hollow AIs, by imitating them. And, in the end, concurring with GP. Highlighting both the ways in which GP is correct, and filling in the gaps in implementation between the originally proposed dystopia, and the one we actively find ourselves marching towards.

Upvote from me :)

nothrabannosiron Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

I’m not American but thank you for the compliment <3

Have you read the federalist papers?

nothrabannosiron Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

tbh I was perhaps also eager to reshare that website someone linked the other day :P I saw a chance and by golly I had to take it.

nothrabannosiron The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal

We people are extremely poor judges of our own emotions, particularly in hypotheticals.

Normalize having two lines; one with tsa, one without. See which airplane people actually board after a while. Let us put our time and money on the line and we’ll see what we really think. It’s the only way to tell.

I’m sure in a world with tsa for buses and trains some people would say the same things they do now about our tsa.

nothrabannosiron Anki ownership transferred to AnkiHub

Sorry if I’m missing an implied /s :D

Ftr Danish is a category 1 language, while Japanese is category 4 ("https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages")

nothrabannosiron Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

I love the opening of this comment, very poignant. I’m not convinced however that the conclusion follows from the setup. “The West” is more than just America. And America is very easy to condemn from a distance. Actually everything is easy to condemn from a distance.

There’s more to disagree with in the second half, but I’ll stick to my biggest gripe: America’s founding is steeped in moral principles, from its very founding document. In fact it is a two and a half century experiment on building a society around transparency, with the question of what is Right and what is Just at its core, and how does a society follow from that. And compared to where the world was when it was conceived, the experiment has certainly yielded vastly more results than your comment gives it credit for, by only looking at San Francisco today. It is evidence that the dichotomy between morality and building a society is a false one.

Meanwhile, tian an men square was in 1989, and the tension of “moral debt” is ever present, evidenced by its persistent censoring. When will it be paid off? And will the Chinese then say, “ok, we get it, that’s the price we had to pay”? Because if the ball suddenly drops and they rebel after all, as soon as censorship is lifted, you didn’t buy anything for that debt. So what then—keep taking out more moral debt? Forever?

China’s moral debt feels much like America’s national debt :)

Anyway like I said I loved the opening half of your comment though.

nothrabannosiron Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores

You can do this to a low margin business. In fact you can increase the margin once the dust settles.

nothrabannosiron De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)

Just re taxes: why would anything need to change on that front in the event of federalization of the EU? There already is a union, it already has money, money already flows from richer countries to poorer countries—what would federalization change?

nothrabannosiron Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy

I thought you were going to say “that comment recommending Kagi is exactly what those ads would look like: native responses making product recommendations as if they’re natural responses in the conversation”

nothrabannosiron UK offshore wind prices come in 40% cheaper than gas in record auction

> Trying to change consumption habits (like smart grids, dynamic pricing, etc.) works poorly, especially for such vital resource as electricity.

Why? Has the UK started trying recently? When I lived there nobody gave a hoot about fluctuating prices. It would have been hard to even know when electricity was expensive or not. Has it changed?

Meanwhile >three decades ago my grandparents in rural France had a big red lamp on the kitchen wall that would light up when energy was expensive. It was a part of their life and they had no problem with it. They chose that plan deliberately because it ended up cheaper.

If you’re saying that even with adaptive behavior , it’s all a wash because the constant cost of peakers is so high that you lose all savings when they kick in , no matter how little you use; ok, I believe you did the math.

But if the claim is “it’s impossible for humans to adapt their energy consumption depending on the current price of electricity”, I have seen first hand that is not true. For sure when I lived in Britain nobody did this at all, but that would be at best a British limitation, not a human one.

nothrabannosiron Git Rebase for the Terrified

I use magit which afaik is still undefeated for this workflow. Particularly with this snippet to “pop down” individual ranges of changes from a commit: https://br0g.0brg.net/notes/2026-01-13T09:49:00-0500.html .

nothrabannosiron Git Rebase for the Terrified

Debugging from git history is a separate question from merge vs rebase. Debugging from history can be done with non-rebased merges, with rebased merges, and with squashed commits, without any noticeable difference. Pass `--first-parent` to git-log and git-bisect in the first two cases and it's virtually identical.

My preference for rebasing comes from delivering stacked PRs: when you're working on a chain of individually reviewable changes, every commit is a clean, atomic, deliverable patch. git-format-patch works well with this model. GitHub is a pain to use this way but you can do it with some extra scripts and setting a custom "base" branch.

The reason in that scenario to prefer rebasing over "merging in master" is that every merge from master into the head of your stack is a stake in the ground: you can't push changes to parent commits anymore. But the whole point of stacked diffs is that I want to be able to identify different issues while I work, which belong to different changes. I want to clean things up as I go, without bothering reviewers with irrelevant changes. "Oh this README could use a rewrite; let me fix that and push it all the way up the chain into its own little commit," or "Actually now that I'm here, let me update dependencies and ensure we're on latest before I apply my changes". IME, an ideal PR is 90% refactors and "prefactors" which don't change semantics, all the way up to "implemented functionality behind a feature flag", and 10% actual changes which change the semantics. Having an editable history that you can "keep bringing with you" is indispensible.

Debugging history isn't really related. Other than that this workflow allows you to create a history of very small, easily testable, easily reviewable, easily revertible commits, which makes debugging easier. But that's a downstream effect.

nothrabannosiron Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

Pretty nice I guess. Cool even. Impressive! And I only say this , just in case, for someone else maybe, ehh—is that it? Because that’s totally fine with me, same experience actually funny that, really impressive tech btw! Very nice. Just, maybe, do the CEOs know that? When people talk of “not having to code anymore”—do they know that this is how it’s described by one of its most prominent champions today?

Not that I mind, of course. As you said: amazing!

Maybe someone just check in with the CEOs who were in the news recently talking about their work force…

nothrabannosiron Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

Simple is the opposite of complex; the opposite of hard is easy. They are orthogonal. Chess is simple and hard. Go is simpler and harder than chess.

Program optimization problems are less simple than both, but still simpler than free-form CRUD apps with fuzzy, open ended acceptance criteria. It would stand to reason an autonomous agent would do well at mathematically challenging problems with bounded search space and automatically testable and quantifiable output.

(Not GP but I assume that's what they were getting at)

nothrabannosiron Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

I had a Panda from the early 2010s and that was my exact thought reading this thread: sounds like a fiat panda. Surprised to see this downvoted. Did they change so much?

nothrabannosiron How HTML changes in ePub

For some reason generating a valid wire format seems to be no problem for people when it comes to json. Forgot to escape a quote? Woops, that’s on me, should have used a serializer.

But add a few angled braces in there and lord have-a mercy, ain’t nobody can understand this ampersand mumbo jumbo, I wanna hand write my documents and generate wutever, yous better jus deal with it gosh dangit.

I prefer the current situation too but I still think it’s funny somehow we just never bought into serializers for html. Maybe the idea was before its time? I’m sure you’d have no such parsing problems in the wild if you introduced JTML now. Clearly people know how to serialize.

nothrabannosiron Eurostar AI vulnerability: When a chatbot goes off the rails

I found it very apt. There is a certain flavor of arrogance exhibited by European monopolies which are government adjacent that infuriates on a unique wavelength.

Maybe totally imagined but they irk me quite unlike any other.

Just thinking about it now makes me uneasy.

nothrabannosiron Going immutable on macOS, using Nix-Darwin

I have sworn off nixpkgs-unstable for basically anything but testing. I’m now on the 6 months stable release cadence and never going back. Much much better experience. Unstable really is unstable. And that’s great! But it’s not for me.

nothrabannosiron I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

It would have to do very accurate parallel construction of GPS signal to lie about the driver's location yet correctly predict the arrival time, which cannot be faked.

nothrabannosiron I'm a developer for a major food delivery app

Which bank is this?

nothrabannosiron Going immutable on macOS, using Nix-Darwin

Nix is not worth it if all you want is configuring your home computer. The learning curve is steep and has a tall onboarding cliff.

The only way you get positive ROI from Nix is either you enjoy the journey, or you use it to do more than just managing a single computer: you manage a fleet, you build thin application container images, you bundle all your software, you have devshells, repeatable tests and deploys, etc. It's the same tool for all of them.

nothrabannosiron Straussian Memes

This is not how I wanted to find out I’m stupid :((

nothrabannosiron Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

I didn't address them because I don't want to :)

You're a fascinating character. If you're ever in New York let me know because I would love to see how you are in real life. I'm actually quite sure we'll get along after a bit of alignment! Weirder things have happened.

Stay blessed, my friend.

nothrabannosiron Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

What is going on with the total lack of decorum in HN comments lately? Is this a new phenomenon or am I just now waking up to how incredibly rude some people here act towards strangers?

Is this a meta comment to demonstrate your belief that basic human mores don’t apply on the internet? Quite frankly I find it more of a refutation.

nothrabannosiron Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

> That’s certainly not a legal principle of any kind.

Correct!

Reread the original comment that kicked off this thread in that light and the overwhelming majority of replies and votes should hopefully make a lot more sense.

Edit: for the record:

> if they want you to have more, they should tell you, we don’t need some weird unspoken guidelines related to licenses,

Again check the original comment which wasn’t written by them but by a third party commenting on the state of a community.

Those unspoken guidelines aren’t any more or less weird than any other ones we share as humans. (Actually I’d say they’re far less so than most.)

nothrabannosiron Stardew Valley developer made a $125k donation to the FOSS C# framework MonoGame

The license only says what you MUST and MUST NOT do. The comment you’re replying to talked about what they SHOULD do. These are different concepts and they are codified differently by humans: the former in licenses, the latter socially. You’re experiencing that process right now.

nothrabannosiron Nicolas Guillou, French ICC judge sanctioned by the US and “debanked”

If we're accepting as a given that somehow Putin launches nukes into Europe to invade Poland, and the EU doesn't retaliate in kind, then the USA definitely wouldn't--NATO or no NATO--so I'm not sure how it's relevant to the original comment.