HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wraptile

2,685 karma · joined August 3, 2020

Hello, I'm Bernard, mostly working with web scraping and reverse engineering. FOSS user on nixos and kde. Currently, based in tropical, beautiful Thailand. Opinions are my own.

wraptile.at.hn

submissionscomments
wraptile··on Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices
> it has Fediverse interop.

It has been completely abandoned AFAIK. As expected, the good ol' classic EEE attempt, but it just didn't work due to decentralized architecture and just lack of actual capability from Meta.

wraptile··on Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
Koh Tao is definitely not doing great compared to 2009 though there is some bounce back lately. I just moved from there to Koh Chang which despite poor visibility still has a lot of absolutely stunning untouched corals though unlike Koh Tao it takes an hour-long boat ride to get out there. Koh Phangan recently made news on massive natural recovery, so there's a lot of hope in the Gulf of Thailand still!
wraptile··on Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
> But I am trying to understand if the government is still largely to blame or not?

all blast fishing is a failure of governance so I'd say yes but the fishing cultures here in SEA are so different from anywhere else in the world so it's very hard to govern without strong central body. Lots of cultural, religious, poverty and spiritual stuff mixed into all of that which really complicates things.

IMO Thailand has a much stronger centralized government and just better geography to make enforcement easier. It's mostly mainland with coastlines while Indonesia is mostly islands which are notoriously difficult to govern. So to answer your question, it's probably just that incentives in Thailand go much further due to all of these variables.

wraptile··on Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
I agree though we had very mid results here in the Gulf of Thailand while the Andaman Sea side has had more luck. The issue with Gulf of Thailand is that it's just so shallow with avg depth of only 50m and too calm making new coral growth very hard with existing techniques. There's some new promising research on alternative methods of raising coral larva in labs, but I'm not up to speed with that yet and it seems quite complex.
wraptile··on Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs
I'm a scuba diver here in Thailand and you can still see blast fishing damage from decades ago that never fully recovered. It's truly as terrible as the article makes it out to be.

What is interesting is that both Indonesia and Thailand have strong and similar anti blast fishing laws since early 00s that charge 5+ years of prison time.

However, Thailand has been much more successful with taming blast fishing which is practically gone now and the story here is very insightful.

Some of it is due to Thailand's geography and high demand for marine tourism but the biggest push here was EU and US regulation that gave Thailand opportunity to shape up. In 2015 (same year when Thai anti blast laws were codified more strictly) US TIP (trafficking in persons) report down-graded Thailand to tier 3 mostly due to fishing slave workers while at the same time EU's IUU (illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing) issued a yellow card. All of which lead to the biggest fishery reform in Thai history which mostly eliminated blast fishing.

Since then Thailand is back to tier 2 of TIP and got lost the yellow card from EU's IUU. Indonesia never got tier 3 of TIP despite many arguing it should have and never got a card from IUU. Stories like this turn me into a globalization believer - I know it's not perfect but the system is kinda working?

wraptile··on US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
> Datacenters should be required by law to pay to build adequate power generation and infrastructure to pay for their consumption

I think we can all agree on this one yet this is not what's being argued in most discussions. What hangs up the discussion is the complexity of development e.g.: to build a datacenter it takes 1 year but to build energy infra it takes 5. So this complexity needs equally complex policy and people just don't have time for that when there's free range raging served right to your palm screen.

wraptile··on US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
calling it "actual food" is clearly misleading when majority of meat is used purely for entertainment not for survival sustenance. By that logic compute is "actual medicine" because some of compute is used for medicine?
wraptile··on US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
> Well the thing with the livestock is that you have to give a cow water.

you don't _need_ a cow though

wraptile··on US data centers tripled annual water consumption to 17B gallons
> Livestock: ~730 billion gal

This is a good illustration how cursed the datacenter topic has become when people go out of their minds on computer cooling while continuing to eat meat which lets be perfectly clear - is mostly for entertainment purposes. I had someone berate me for defending datacenter water use and their last post was literally a cheese burger.

wraptile··on Cursor launches Origin, GitHub alternative
You could argue that you don't care what Claude does after work hours as long as it works your hours as you expect it to. Grok clearly failed the latter.
wraptile··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
This complaint should be aimed at operating system developers who should have never allow such infringement to begin with.
wraptile··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
This is why pocket computers are still so unserious. My programs should not be aware let alone respond to my administrative actions like screenshots.
wraptile··on Gemini 3.7 Flash
> it still poisoned my cucumber bed

I also had really poor results with all major models from plant identification to plant treatment which is weird considering how much training material is out there.

Reminds me of recent headline: Chinese farmer kills 25 acres of crops due to LLM pesticide recipe: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

wraptile··on Pixel Watch 5
One obvious app I tried to build here is a calendar with a daily message and I've tried to include a little graphic emoji with each day. You can't do that because you can only fit around 100 emoji graphics and the font on Pebble Time 2 only has 50 emojis. So at best you can get 150 icons which is not enough for unique icon for each day. This is kinda sad in 2026 ngl.
wraptile··on Pixel Watch 5
I've been really enjoying the reboot of Pebble with their new Time 2 for a few months now. I'm using ForecastWatch 2 watch face which crams calendar, watch and weather data into one screen and it's perfect. Lasts weeks on charge too. For apps their built-in workout apps etc are perfectly fine and I built some of my own apps quite easily.

My only complaint is that app limitation are apollo moon lander level of bad, like 128KB code and 256kb resources. I'm not particularly versed in optimizations patterns in here, but building fun stuff is really hard with these limitations. So what you have to do is roll a "companion app" android app that does all compute on the phone and streams it to the watch but that sucks.

wraptile··on Mushroom behind 'tiny people' hallucinations identified
your eyes are usually closed during DMT trip so I don't think your hypothesis stands.
wraptile··on Mushroom behind 'tiny people' hallucinations identified
Barry Marshall's story is so iconic that I read it every time despite knowing it very well.

That being said one claim here would be that allowing self-experimentation would pressure people into self experimenting due to how our academia and labs are structured these days i.e. a junior scientists could be pressured into self experimentation by their superiors. So this is definitely not as clear-cut as one might think.

wraptile··on Delta
I feel like I have to call out Zed for still having completely broken LLM support in almost entire continent of Asia for over a year now with no official response¹ just because they can't route http requests. Bad look for their LLM workflow push.

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues/29962

wraptile··on Grok Bot
I used to think if all else fails I'd take the path of a Cynic and retire in a giant vase. I'm not quite sure anymore. If you're done with society and the world you might as well prompt inject from a beach somewhere, and we're so not ready for this.
wraptile··on Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code
Just yesterday it lost my git stash (I had recovered it from a backup). I think for code operations it's ok but as soon as file removal is involved (like git) the auto mode is destined to make a mistake and you only need to learn this once.
wraptile··on New Orleans is testing Carbyne’s AI-powered Emergency Call Triage software
I think you answered the problem in the 2nd paragraph yourself - then why are we breaking LLMs and not the owners? We are capable of organizing our society more like a scalpel than a hammer. We can keep LLMs and have them work for all of us and anyone who's saying otherwise is either too afraid or too stupid.

This Luddite AI prohibitionist movement appears to directly harm all of us. It's much better to steer than to destroy.

wraptile··on My server is a phone now
I just bought a refurbished Lenovo k14 with 32gb of ram and Corei7-1165G7 with 500gb for 350$ which I'll use as my 2nd home server.

My first home server is a 2nd hand gaming PC that I bought for 500$ with 32gb and 7700rx video card that I use for GPU based tasks but it's quite audible when it's working so wife and I agreed it has no place in the living room anymore and is being deported to the corner of my office.

You can still find really good bargains for home servers from refurbished good computers, and given how well solved tech reliability is now, it's really not worth buying new.

wraptile··on New Orleans is testing Carbyne’s AI-powered Emergency Call Triage software
> Skilled weavers were up in arms and smashed the machines.

And how did that work out of them? People conveniently ignore that part of history which seems to clearly indicate that outright destruction rarely leads to progress. With AI, I'd argue that we have much more opportunity to steer than to destroy, and the latter is not even a viable option so - why even entertain it at all? It's just raging for raging sake.

wraptile··on New Orleans is testing Carbyne’s AI-powered Emergency Call Triage software
> So how best to develop a kick with good form?

Same way you learn anything well - with balance and diversity. You kick, go for a walk, rest, watch youtube, get kicked by other people, talk about kicking on a kicking fans forum.

The point is that you can learn faster and be better with AI tools as you can choose when to kick and when you have space for all of those other activities that will still train your kick.

Not only that, but this clearly seems like superior human condition where we get to choose our actions rather than be pigeon-held into kicking 8 hours a day. I'm a better programmer now that I can choose not to refactor python for 3 days even though after that I'd surely learn all library APIs by heart. Instead, I can spend 1 day working on initial refactor somewhat learning the APIs and have LLMs take over the rest while I spend other 2 days on other new tasks.

I think the confusion here is people assuming that if option of not doing thing exists then people will stop doing it and regress which is a real danger but it's one that can be solved for rather easily. I'd be willing to wager that in 5–20 years we'll have more domain experts than fewer.

wraptile··on New Orleans is testing Carbyne’s AI-powered Emergency Call Triage software
> If you hire a personal chef, have you gotten better at cooking

Likely yes, as you learn cooking now only by repeatedly cutting carrots the same way you always did but expanding your horizons to new cooking techniques and socializing in the niche will yield much bigger growth.

This Bruce Lee level misconception of "practice the same kick for a thousand times" is extremely outdated perspective on how people actually progress effectively.

wraptile··on New Orleans is testing Carbyne’s AI-powered Emergency Call Triage software
You're missing my point entirely. To counter you music example - grinding the same chord over and over does not make you a better musician more than watching youtube videos of other people playing. Skill growth is not as simple as it is in video games - you need variety and rest to actually grow your skill rather than mindless task repetition. This is where AI tools, when used correctly, can result to great growth.
wraptile··on New Orleans is testing Carbyne’s AI-powered Emergency Call Triage software
> all it needs is a prerecorded message asking that question and if the caller presses a button it continues.

This actually seems better with very little overhead. I'd very much prefer hearing a human recording than AI bot.

wraptile··on New Orleans is testing Carbyne’s AI-powered Emergency Call Triage software
This is not necessarily true if you spend more than 2 seconds thinking about it.

If I'm raking leaves all day I eventually reach diminishing returns. My arms might even start to get tired and actually make me lose skill. Now I got a leaf raking robot which is not perfect but does 50% of the job and gives me free time to recover my hands and research new leaf raking techniques, maybe even invest into a leaf blower. Did I not become better at raking leaves?

People are not calculators - all these simplistic takes are frankly insulting to human capability.

wraptile··on New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
It's sad we view social media so negatively these days when it should be incredible tool for both personal and social growth. I grew up with irc and reddit, and it was incredibly useful for me not only find like-minded people but to learn that there's more to life than my small town, there are a variety of different people, ideas and careers out there.

Sadly the new generation of networks grew in a different direction but all of this still exists, and it's incredibly disingenuous to say that "there are no benefits for kids". There's still a community for any subject on both Facebook and Instagram except it's all buried under spam and bad intentions.

wraptile··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
This seems like a very bad and dangerous direction for our society.
← PreviousPage 2 of 28Next →