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smcl

14,209 karma · joined May 22, 2010

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smcl··on Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
Another signal that prominent mentions of "AI" in your marketing sends is "this product is going to shoe-horn AI into this somehow". Plenty of products that people use every day at home or in work - Google search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Jira, and more - have had some kind of AI-first redesign. In each case some AI functionality has been placed prominently either somewhere that you accidentally press it or in place of something that previously worked. Even my iPhone brings up this brightly coloured keyboard expecting me to do something with AI, and I don't actually know what causes it.

So I think it's much simpler than solidarity with creators, artists or even workers more generally. It's that "AI" as a brand stinks, people are connecting it with annoying, low quality experiences and shitty low-effort art.

smcl··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
Just adding another "this is fucking stupid" comment for when this all burns down
smcl··on Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votes
Hold on, you're doing a little gymnastics here. People are very deliberately talking about Israel being in favour of the genocide, and quite understandably saying that their government should not be supporting Israel - with "not supporting" meaning anything from BDS to simply not handing billions of dollars to them. Some of the most vocal and strident supporters of this are Jewish. The groups attempting to connect the genocide to Judaism are the US, British and Israeli governments & news media - who are all broadly pro-Israel.

Additionally the anti-Muslim hate was not "ah let's very justifiably cut ties with some mad country" it involved widespread and open islamophobia, calls for mass deaths and indeed invasions of muslim-majority countries.

The two situations are not remotely alike

smcl··on Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become most valuable AI startup
This is all dumb, it's like picking your fave cryptocurrency
smcl··on GTA 6 Developers Unionize
Hell yeah
smcl··on Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection
This entire story started because the corporation took control of the franchise though
smcl··on Antigravity 2.0 Tops the OpenSCAD Architectural 3D LLM Benchmark
Google are infamously ruthless with their products, see https://killedbygoogle.com/
smcl··on Dogma 25 – Vow of Chastity (2025)
Deliberately imposing constraints on yourself is actually a very well-established way to spur creativity and innovation. For example this movement was inspired by something similar from back in the 1990s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogme_95
smcl··on Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
> A general lack of ideological “mind viruses”

Yeah when Poland banned abortion and declared a number of "LGBT free zones" a lot of Poles I know came here to Czech Republic

smcl··on I am worried about Bun
> Before the acquisition, Bun had to figure out how to monetize at some point.

I think it is insane that people got into a situation where they had committed to a javascript runtime that had to "figure out how to monetize at some point". It is also bizarre that some people are still hopeful despite it being acquired by one of the most enormously unprofitable companies in the most enormously unprofitable sectors of our industry.

smcl··on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all
fuck off: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47796830
smcl··on €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs
It's incredible that in 2026 your best bet for getting support from Google is still posting to HN and hoping a Product Owner at Google takes pity on you (or feels shamed...)
smcl··on Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?
Absolutely not
smcl··on Python 3.15's JIT is now back on track
I am saying that 2-to-3 has not affected Python becoming the most popular programming language whatsoever. So I guess in a way you're right to say the two things are "unrelated" but you're not exactly disagreeing with me - it'd be like if I said "water is a liquid" and you said "nuh-uh, it's wet"
smcl··on Python 3.15's JIT is now back on track
> The switch had nothing to do with Python's rise in popularity though

You don't realise it but you have actually made my point. People are acting like was a suicidal, harmful move that fucked over Python and ... it didn't matter because Python went on to become insanely popular. Particularly hilarious is that some people have tried to argue that Perl somehow did it better.

In the end your Python 2 project was either worth porting and you did it, or it wasn't worth it and you didn't. Python has gone on to be an undeniable success and it is nearly unthinkable that anyone would use Python 2 for anything. It is absolutely fucking insane for people to still be whining about this in this day and age

smcl··on Python 3.15's JIT is now back on track
I cannot believe people are still acting like Python 2->3 was a huge fuck-up and an enormous missed opportunity. When in reality Python is by most measures the most popular language and became so AFTER that switch.

Since the switch we have seen enormous companies being built from scratch. There is no reason for anyone to be complaining about it being too hard to upgrade in 2026

smcl··on Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition
You’re on the right track here but I don’t think it should be hand-waved away as “the least of your problems” - it’s yet another weapon that police in the USA can use against the population with impunity. They’re going to have to reckon with all of this in the coming years - cops having guns and armored cars, “qualified immunity”, the “stop resisting” workaround for brutality and now this AI
smcl··on The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran
You realise you are doing the “Thanks Obama” thing
smcl··on WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
Come on man, you're a "founder" and you can't even write your own comments on a forum?
smcl··on The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in USA
Your argument is no clearer. Someone's claiming US is beginning to resemble China in that they hide criticism of the ruling parties - they have not mentioned Europe once and you're saying ... something about censorship in Europe?

This reminds me of my Dutch friend who is prone to exaggeration to make things sound dramatic and scary to outsiders, and frequently claims the Netherlands is a "narco state" - big "Nederlandse hiphop: Ik kom van de straat" energy going on here.

smcl··on The world heard JD Vance being booed at the Olympics. Except for viewers in USA
Europe doesn’t bill itself as “the land of the free” and doesn’t proudly tout itself as having free speech above all else no matter the cost. So famously fascist symbols - like the swastika/hakenkreuz among other things - are banned a few places, it may be controversial but it’s not a dirty little secret or anything like that
smcl··on The Waymo World Model
The Waymo driving model: hire some guys in Philippines: https://futurism.com/advanced-transport/waymos-controlled-wo...
smcl··on I stopped following the news
I think if it's stressing you out then it's fair to step back from reading the news for a bit. It's still worth at least trying to form an understanding and an opinion on various issues - whether local, regional or international - if you're going to be voting or even just talking about them with friends and family.
smcl··on I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
Yeah so I know it's meant to be an estimate, but my experience of it is kinda fucky. I would really love to swap watches with an Olympic athlete (idk if they'd bother with an Apple Watch but bear with me!) and run 10k to see what the VO2 max reading for that exercise was. As I said, I think to me it's some estimate that heavily involves some "average of last N readings from the Apple VO2 max calc" function so even if you time travelled and gave it to Eilish McColgan or Mo Farah they'd be like "ehhh you had quite a good run, fatty - you jumped from 44.3 to 45"

I'm not that bothered of course. For me it's just a fun metric I can attempt to optimise when training.

smcl··on I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
Apple Watch is pretty poor at estimating VO2 max and it seems to be more correlated with how often you record exercises with said watch than with your actual health. For example I watched mine climb slowly as I prepared for my football season (beyond 50), then after the season started I I ended up playing and training just as frequently but without wearing the watch. After a few weeks (of me training and playing hard) during my next run it recorded me having a sharp decline in VO2 max (43-44ish iirc). When I started wearing it during training - you're not permitted during matches - it recorded me having a slow return to condition, without any changes to my routine.

That said if it's showing someone as having 30 I don't imagine they're going to be in spectacular condition

smcl··on Heathrow scraps liquid container limit
This was my experience too - they're visibly angry at you for following the rules
smcl··on Heathrow scraps liquid container limit
Heathrow is a fucking miserable place with spiteful staff and it would not surprise me one bit if someone decided to fuck with a traveller this way. I saw a girl running to catch a bus to another terminal for a connecting flight, and the guy controller her made an enormous stink about her "breathing on me". She was polite and apologetic but she got pulled aside and made to wait for everyone else to get through, got sternly chastised before being allowed to continue (whereupon she missed the connecting bus and presumably her flight). Same trip I saw them them shouting and swearing at disabled travellers who needed wheelchairs. Every other member of staff in the airport was stood around fucking with their phones and seemed furious whenever they had to do their job.

Horrible airport, avoid at all costs.

smcl··on Spanish track was fractured before high-speed train disaster, report finds
The "fracture" being referred to is a weld that somehow failed. The gap you are seeing is because an enormous, heavy train travelling at 200km/h hit that fracture and the rear half of the train derailed, tearing up sleepers and kicking all manner of debris around including ballast and, in this case, parts of newly-fractured (and therefore weakened) track.
smcl··on Spanish track was fractured before high-speed train disaster, report finds
The mention of FSB is downvoted is because it was near-immediately clear that this was not the cause. It's total amateurs doing wild speculation for who knows what reason - some stupid upvotes on a website or because it makes their life more exciting to feel like they're whistle-blowing some international conspiracy?

This is roughly on par with every celebrity death over the last 4-5 years being followed by idiots commenting "vaxxed?!"

smcl··on High-speed train collision in Spain kills at least 39
Anyone serious about rail engineering or safety isn't excitedly dashing off comments pointing fingers before the dust has even settled. Those who are doing that - such as the comment I am replying to - should be ignored
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