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digitalsushi

Re:AI is destroying my CS degree on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @11:21AM (#50353971)
Wesley Crusher was kidnapped away to a planet with no children. Their bodies were decaying but their technology was superior to the Federation's so they needed to steal other people's kids.

They gave Wesley a laser scalpel, to teach him to chisel wood, with whatever his mind could picture.

Wesley complained, he said, "dood, this isn't art! i'm not even chiseling!"

And the mentor-kidnapper said, "No, Wesley, you are doing art. The art is in your mind. The tool is just doing the work."

And so then Wesley threw the perfect wooden dolphin at the wall, infuriated that all the pleasure had been removed from the art. But he lived the rest of his life on that planet, making perfect wooden laser sculpted dolphins, cause that was his job and his boss told him too bad.

For a little while Wesley made popsicle stick art during his free time at night to try and feel the sensation of choice and control, but eventually just gave up and played mariokart until he was an old man.

Re:Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:39AM (#50351286)
Starship Mine is not a great episode but it's my favorite - it is just outside the envelope of standard TNG.

The Enterprise is getting a deep space scrub down, so everyone has to get off the ship - except Picard, who had to grab his horse saddle for his week off on the vacation planet below. Dressed up in his fancy horse riding clothes, he quickly becomes an action star, punching out bad guys stealing the Enterprise, sprinting around hallways and having epic action hero conclusions.

Those episodes you mention above are the gold standard for classic Picard, especially The Drumhead to see Picard as a leader, and Inner Light, to see Picard grow outwards as much as Best of Both Worlds grows him inwards into lifelong PTSD. But Starship mine is a fun, almost Die Hard (Bruce Willis) homage, unlikely almost any other episode.

Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Thursday October 29, 2026 @04:23PM (#50295324)
a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts
Then old things shall become new again. And people may get the first taste of a world they have sought all of their young lives, and rejoice in a world recorded in media they may not understand: before default-irony, before default-sarcasm; many will not care for it, but perhaps some will delight that there is many lifetimes of media hiding there, on the bookshelf of humanity, covered in dust and ready to consume
My mom sure can hydrate a pizza. My grandma, rest her soul, said mom has no artistry in it. I heard stories that my grandmother worked the dough with her bare hands (ew); it always came out slightly different; more ridiculous, I heard her generation would devote a portion of an entire day (if you can even humor that ridiculous notion) to pizzacraft.

Grandma was always a broken record with that stuff. The family would sit around that table, apparently, gabbing about nothing, and everything, just staring into a raw pizza, pulling and stretching it, starting over, living with their hunger, for a flawed process to bake slowly.

These days, fresh pizza is 10 seconds away, it's always identical and we never have to share. It's hydrated, eaten, and in the trash by the time I am onto my next attention, always perfect, always on time, always identical. I don't think about this much, but I sometimes really feel pity for what the old timers suffered through, all those ridiculous, pointless wasted interactions and delays, sitting there for what felt like ages, for a random pizza shaped thing.

I dont get it.

Re:Vibe Coding is the new Internet Dating on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @06:52PM (#49719953)
i dont know how this works, but i am super interested that if there's this wall where so much software is ai written, that ai becomes the only thing making its future training data, could the 'engine' 'stall'?

or same thing, if the kids stop making art, will the only art be ai art and will that do the same thing?

again - i dont have any credentials to have a worry about this, i'm pretty much just the dude in front of you at the supermarket line

2003, I was still young in 2003. Kinda.

In 2003, Network Address Translation (NAT) was becoming the default LAN IP management scheme, for two reasons: (1) IPv4 space was at the beginnings of its inevitable resource restrictions, and (2) the perceived security of the NAT had effectively become what people believed a firewall performed.

In those old days of the middle Internet and early web, it was still fairly common to visit an IP address (IPv4 - IPv6 was ratified but still being interoperability tested, barely a toy yet), you could visit an IP address directly without using the DNS.

Peer distribution was often a derivative of the sneakernet (carrying media around on your person), emailing long lists of popular but undiscoverable media content.

The concept of the home gateway device was young but functional. You could go to Best Buy and get a router to pair with your CPE; integration of CPEs and routers had already happened but it was still common to see them as separate devices.

Back then, traffic was a sliver of what it is now; a systems operator might have personally seen anomalous traffic, ingress and maybe even more unlikely, egress, and had the notion "that ain't right". These days we rely on incredible solutions that have existed for a long, long time to alert us, and self manage, these types of events.

While experimenting with codex this past week (old guy trying to participate but I gotta stretch out first, old), I tossed a pair of 8.8x3 inch monitors on a pi4 and told codex to 'go wild' making me a poor man's ATC kit, with a pile of html real-time gauges of everything I could think of - outer space, space station, planes, weather, home assistant temperatures, all of it.

And then at the outset I asked codex, hey, how often are you hitting these endpoints? How often do you ask the web what time sunrise is? Ah, every 900 seconds.

And so my Abe Simpson clincher, is, it's very easy for me to see how the ballast of the data on the internet is just bots, talking to bots, and how a 10 second NTP selection 2 decades ago was just the same move, before the immense scaling and false resource abundance we have today, allowed it to continue unchallenged.

Re:Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h? on Thursday September 10, 2026 @08:29PM (#49652009)
yeah but its statistical luck, a few photons keep winning the roulette wheel and pop out very quickly; and a few unlucky ones are still rattling around in there from year 1! it's more like winning a raffle than waiting in a queue
Re:We Are Still Living in the Broken World Sept. 11 Created on Thursday September 10, 2026 @08:16PM (#49651878)
I think it's awesome you were right and your teacher was wrong.

But I also am glad teachers try to teach kids about slippery slope as a logical fallacy. To convince others, we must use fact; when beliefs are chained as facts, well, you form a slippery slope.

And I'm just saying, plainly: I'm glad teachers are still teaching that stuff. Nothing against your win.

i'd say 'with' instead of 'from', the cloud provider rents you the hardware, what you run on it, is whatever you show up with
Re:Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @12:55PM (#49437103)
i did a 24x36, with a loft. 2015, 32,000 bucks from lavalley's in newport nh, installed 80 miles away in another random town. poured slab. 6 windows, 2 garage doors. i realized, all i did was build a garage, not a work from home office.

but over the next few years i learned so many hobby art projects: insulation, electrical, sheetrock. a few inspections, a few consults. a few surprises that people in this state can just go buy the stuff at a box store!

and then eventually, my 12x6 foot office appeared, the same width as a 1960s metal tanker desk. finally!

and ... i instantly hated working out there. i didnt make it 6 weeks. it's just an office for storing crap, now: i work out of the house, where the kitchen, dogs, bathroom, are. but the journey was worth it, even if the destination was not.

Re:Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @12:41PM (#49436893)
one thing about discount DIY mini splits: they're sometimes/often the same model, with a hodge podge of similar but not identical components. it can be very difficult to get a repair person to work on these - they stand a lot to lose if they try to operate on it and make it worse. they really prefer consistency, and - they also seem to harbor a bit of a distaste for diy systems. Actually, I was educated by one serviceperson's opinion and by the end of their complaints, the experience cost more than the cash, injury wise. But I think relaying this, has some value, because I suspect it's common.
Re:How I Find Problems to Solve as a Staff Engineer on Monday August 24, 2026 @09:40AM (#49419647)
this is going to turn into a world psychosis eventually, smelling AI on people's breath. the damned thing is plagiarizing the 5% of us that write new text, the AI is in the middle, not the beginning
Remember that simpsons episode where they extrapolate Lisa's overbite
Re:Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why? on Monday August 17, 2026 @12:20PM (#49333507)
there's this attack on youtube where people who dont want their real names known will autoblock comments with their real names; bots will spam comments with every word and note the ones that were not visible.

kinda reminds me of it. not my most valuable contribution to forensics, admittedly.

Re:GitHub Actions Is Down on Thursday August 06, 2026 @08:30PM (#49204502)
i'm not carrying anyone's water

but i always guessed that maybe half of us seeing how many tokens we can spend for a year straight maybe stressed tested their platform for a year straight

Re:GitHub Actions Is Down on Thursday August 06, 2026 @08:27PM (#49204486)
i can make a snickers bar at home in 30 minutes right now. what's stopping me from taking over mars inc
Makes sense. Retired people already pay a surcharge because they're home all day so why not work from home people too?
i dont know anything about music but i listened to some music in JI last year and I just sat there in my car in a parking lot listening to the same piano for half an hour on a loop, dumfounded; it was like how you feel after your wisdom teeth are removed
Re:Ask HN: Semi lucrative careers after tech? on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @07:45PM (#49091539)
46, I'm a senior infradev somewhere, and this year I built a 48 foot (half length) greenhouse to start learning how to grow stuff. Not as a plan b career per se but I think plan b overall is to have a few things going that can each chip away at the mortgage.

I do know that when I'm in that thing, I feel like I'm on a vacation. My corporate ego can't fit through the door and I'm just some happy dude in there breathing fresh air with fresh oxygen. If I can figure out how to live off the food and sell some of it (or at least give it away) then that's 8% of my way to transitioning out of tech.

We're all largely in the same boat. Every company's trying to save cash, run lean, reign in the R&D, scale the automation, use the AI to drop the headcount. Humans are cost centers. We don't feel good, we're all looking to get onto the same single elevator out of here and the logs they're a' jamming. Everyone goes home after work, looks for meaning on amazon, waits for someone else to say 'lets hang out, lets connect, lets be', and we dont, we just have this fantasy about feeling control, feeling together, feeling alive. Unreal engine 6 better make me remember what high school friends felt like.

We're all there with you. Alone.

I dont keep up with my astronomy, is this an explanation for why Betelgeuse (alpha) dims now and then?
Could the GPS provide a correct carrier wave for every electrical system to synchronize with?
Re:My two-part desk setup on Saturday May 23, 2026 @08:14PM (#48252952)
in the 1980s we had the McDLT, a styrofoam container to keep the hot side of a hamburger hot, and the cold side cold. This desk kinda reminds me of that.
Re:We let AIs run radio stations on Tuesday May 19, 2026 @11:10AM (#48194403)
> The fact that the one AI with a French first name went full French is hilarious.

we could just not use the old cliches, French people are just as hard working as the rest of us

Re:The Beginning of Scarcity in AI on Thursday April 16, 2026 @08:33PM (#47801228)
A car caught by a dog has no purpose. The activity concludes with no output.
ii'd suppose there's an equilibrium where people will not or can not any longer tolerate the system and breaking it is superior to enduring it

but what if people managing society are using software to pre-empt trends and keep us perfectly balanced and docile

then, perhaps yes, PE will eventually own everything and we'll pay per view and rent it all back, as long as it's comfortable enough not to bother changing

Re:Sopwith on Saturday April 04, 2026 @06:32PM (#47644217)
I got sopwith.exe from my uncle's "big blue disks" subscription. plus a lot of other racy games an 8 year old shouldn't have played.

I tried playing a copy on a modern computer and the game started and finished on its own in about 1/4 of a second! i'm not that fast anymore!

I got very good at dropping the bomb while upside down and then flipping and getting outta there. i was also obsessed with disney's tale spin and imagined it was the seaduck.

If the majority of mail stops are junk mail only, I would love to see some napkin math of the effect of all those diesel/gasoline accelerations per mailbox, dropped across the daily fleet of drop offs.
Re:OpenAI set to discontinue Sora video platform on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @09:26AM (#47517068)
They paid for an opportunity. Sometimes paying for a chance nets you nothing.

If you end up with nothing in aggregate for the chances you pay for, you're a loser. Not in a pejorative sense, just as a fact, you lost.

If you come out with more than nothing, in aggregate, you're a winner, in the same objective sense.

Probably controversial. Eh.

Re:Nvidia's Huang pitches AI tokens on top of salary on Friday March 20, 2026 @09:49AM (#47454449)
that's weird cause if i am paid in tokens, how do i use those tokens on my employer's workflows?

shouldnt the tokens belong to the employer?

i understand the concept of an engineering having tools they own but if they're gonna shove tokens-as-utility down our throats, no boss, i'm not hooking you into my well water.

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