jcalx

Classic case of "simple != easy". Things can be simple, yet hard, and that's an underrated measure of difficulty in my experience.

No mention of Ronald and runk (Ronalds Universal Number Kounter), which handles all math for every machine on earth [0]?

[0] https://x.com/6thgrade4ever/status/1433519577892327424

We do! https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/02/venus-computer-chip/

> with smoke from wildfires in neighbouring Indonesia blamed for the unhealthy conditions

Title is a little misleading (at least how I read it) — they were briefly 1st and 3rd due to wildfire smoke. These rankings are very volatile as well — it's only 5 hours after this article was published and the IQAir rankings [0] now have Kuala Lumpur in 4th and Singapore in 14th.

[0] https://www.iqair.com/world-air-quality-ranking

I predict there's always going to be a Wirth's law or Peter principle of slopcoding — it will always be easier to tack on a new feature than to understand a whole system and clean it up.

Alternatively stated: codebases will expand to the limit of an organization's ability to manage them, so the equilibrium will remain at the point of near, but not total, incomprehensibility.

I have formative (to my interest in programming) memories of going to Barnes & Noble and cracking open those huge Graphics Gems and Game Programming Gems books. Just an amazing wealth of topics and tricks and I learned something new on every page. Red Blob Games [0] is the closest thing in spirit these days but I do miss those books.

[0] https://www.redblobgames.com/

> 230 GB of RAM

"I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which my memory is too small to contain..."

This is good! Taste still remains a differentiator so far in our tokenmaxxing era.

Note that's a US definition — Europe is stricter and draws the line at non-public information [0], aside from certain carveouts and safe harbors. Matt Levine describes this as "theft" (misappropriating nonpublic information) vs. "fairness" (using nonpublic information at all) — iirc if you're on a flight and overhear a passenger in business class talking about an upcoming merger they're working on, that's legal to trade on in the US but illegal in Europe. At least that's what I generally remember about "parity-of-information" theory.

[0] https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/oblb/blog-post/2024/01/insider-de...

Going to plug her Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Admiral_Cloudberg) here because her articles are extensively researched and consistently well-written, and I enjoy reading them, and hope to continue reading new ones in the future!

Despite my other comment in this thread I strongly agree with this! I have "stupid" schemes and do "useless" side projects purely for their own sake and for my own enjoyment, and I am very happy with them. Those things are expressed freely, and never came from a cave.

But I think this article is for people who may not be introspective and self-aware enough to know the difference between private, self-satisfied enjoyment and private, self-inflicted suffering. Some people fool themselves into thinking they do something for the joy of it, and remain unsatisfied, because they harbor higher hopes they never admit to themselves.

For Rimworld: some people like making hyperoptimized minmax colonies for their own satisfaction (haven't played it myself, but I do play Factorio so I get it). But you can imagine that some people who _think_ they play for fun, but also really want the validation of posting their killbox on Reddit and having people acknowledge how good it is, and if they don't get that then they retreat to their cave and work on an even "better" colony, and maybe this one will be the one that people will praise [0, maybe? looked for an example]. And so they get wrapped up in a whole meta-argument about their playstyle and how they choose to enjoy the game and can't just simply... enjoy it?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/1v0nwg4/alright_y...

Reminds me of a couple things: Nils van der Poel (Olympic speed skater record holder) and his How to Skate a 10k [0]:

> It is not the one who suffers the most during preseason who prospers when the winter comes, but he who gets the most aerobically fit.

and Tyler Cowen on Nervous Nellies [1]:

> Yes. Because ultimately the nervous Nellies, they're not philosophically sophisticated, they're overindulging in their own neuroticism when you get right down to it. So it's not like there's some brute 'let's be a builder' view and then in contrast there's some deeper wisdom that the real philosophers pursue. It's: you be a builder or you're a nervous Nelly. Take your pick. I say be a builder.

and the classic Teddy Roosevelt speech [2]:

> It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

The Cave is fine, but at some point you need to test the thing you're in there for. At some point, refusing to test an untested belief is just protecting a fantasy.

[0] https://www.howtoskate.se/

[1] https://x.com/JosephNWalker/status/1452772819792642054

[2] https://www.worldfuturefund.org/Documents/maninarena.htm

Thank you for making it! This is an incredible project so I hope to see (and contribute!) more scans. Also just a really well-crafted website in general, functionally and aesthetically. You mentioned looking at "standard design conventions used for other web archives and for designing public signage for ADA compliant restrooms" in another comment — any interesting design decisions from that research?

Any recommendations on a good path to learn this — curious if you have any personal, opinionated thoughts on this.

Excellent work with the tiny cafe! I'm enamored of miniatures like these. Very different vibe but Alan Wolfson [0] makes gritty, grimy urban environments that I have a soft spot for, being from NYC.

[0] https://www.alanwolfsonart.com/

Not the only known trebuchet casualty in history, unfortunately: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2005/oct/31/highereduc...

Read [0] and wonder no longer — with the very important caveat that I too have not read Infinite Jest, so I cannot vouch for its accuracy. (I plan on reading it someday, and this has made me more interested in doing so.)

[0] https://mattlakeman.org/2026/03/26/infinite-jest-extraction/

Cloned horses are becoming really common in polo — the best polo player in the world won the Argentine Open back in 2016 with six clones of his favorite horse [0][1]!

[0] https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/technology/2026...

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/cloning-came-to-polo-things-got-...

These are all genre fiction books from the 1960s-80s and I imagine they are very stylistically different from the majority of AI-generated text today, in an easily distinguishable way. I'm curious if Pangram would flag LLMs explicitly emulating, or even trained on, genre fiction from that era, given that its primary uses are detecting contemporary AI-generated content (essays, prose, code, assignments).

Combining this article and discovery of an unwinnable seed in the original Slay the Spire [0] — I've always pondered the existence of some kind of "RNG hell", where a game uses the time as its random seed and, due to some quirk of the hashing function and the game mechanics, the game is rendered completely unwinnable for (say) four days straight. (Sometimes it feels like I'm in it!)

[0] https://oohbleh.github.io/losing-seed/

Maybe turn-based roguelike deckbuilders aren't the best for this, but I actually like some correlated randomness in some games, as it adds a new hidden mechanic to explore. In Hades 1 there are some (presumably unintentional) RNG manipulations that open up high-level techs for seeded speedruns:

- Hades 1 is a series of "chambers", or enemy encounters, where some layouts are faster than others [0]

- chambers (and other things like enemy spawns, boons, etc.) are "randomly" picked by an RNG with its seed normally unknown to the player (well that, and other factors [1])

- you can see the per-chamber RNG seed using mods [2], and manipulate it with seemingly meaningless actions [3] — e.g. breaking a pot (a mundane, cosmetic environmental item) increments the RNG seed by 1

- this leads to the existence of "routed runs" [4] — very fast speedruns enabled by very deliberate actions that can be replicated by a skilled player [5].

- anecdotally, with enough practice, skilled players can also recognize chamber patterns in unseeded speedruns and give themselves better odds at more favorable chambers by manipulating the RNG (although tbh the ability to recognize this on the fly is a little dubious)

So the invisible correlated RNG seeding adds in a higher skill ceiling for experienced players, while not really taking anything away from casual players.

Another game with this kind of RNG mechanic is Super Mario Bros. 3 — there's an excellent (86-minute, fyi) Summoning Salt video about the history of speedrunning this game and dealing with the "random" Hammer Bros movement (@27:15 to skip to that part).

[0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vR6NaU9v1-raeibk...

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSl9RGGyPbNqCnTL...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHdt35TDvNY

[3] https://www.speedrun.com/hades/guides/jxpkj

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBRTQkoOZ4k

[5] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fNlBhBOsCz6092GUnsIt...

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EsFyogVvkw

To be very clear — I was specifically responding to "social engineering won't work on a human security expert". It can, and has. People are not infallible, and a "that would never happen to me" mindset (1) gets people phished when they think they're too smart for it and (2) is a pet peeve of mine and so sometimes I can't resist pointing that out.

Largely agree with you otherwise, not sure why you read my comment as mental gymnastics to justify LLMs. I don't think that they have an internal emotional state that can feel rushed, panicked, so on. They do — superficially — "respond" to such cues in language, which is why they can be "threatened" [0] and "flattered" [1]. But without an internal theory of mind, LLMs do this sycophantically without any internal model of the world (hence the quotes above, to avoid fully anthropomorphizing their behavior).

The only parallel I'm drawing is that both humans and LLMs can be coerced into unintended behavior via language ("social engineering" and "prompt jailbreaking" respectively), and those attacks are more effective if an attacker is allowed to control more "context", even if the underlying mechanism of why those attacks work is completely different.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.21133

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/09/these-psychological-...

> Social engineering won't work on a human security expert who knows and understands the implications of the information they are giving away

Social engineering, like prompt injection, is a context attack — easy to spot if you're ready for it, but harder in different circumstances (rushed, panicked, tired, having a bad day, etc.).

Troy Hunt (security consultant, creator of HaveIBeenPwned) and Cory Doctorow have both been successfully phished [0][1]. They're both tech- and security-savvy people who "should have known better" but it happened to them anyway. But maybe you're different... you'd never fall for an online scam, right? [2]

[0] https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mail...

[1] https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-04-05...

[2] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/09/youd-never-fa...

Someone responded to a previous comment of mine [0] positing a Peter principle [1] of slopcoding — it will always be easier to tack on a new feature than to understand a whole system and clean it up. The equilibrium will remain at the point of near, but not total, codebase incomprehensibility.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48037128#48038639

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

I wish cultural norms around documentation would shift to "pull" rather than "push" — generating "views" of organized knowledge on the fly instead of making endless rearrangements of the same information. It's become too cheap in terms of proof of (mental) work to spray endless pages of notes, reports, memos, decks, etc. but the "documentation is good" paradigm hasn't caught up yet.

Ideally AI would minimize excessive documentation. "Core knowledge" (first principles, human intent, tribal knowledge, data illegible to AI systems) would be documented by humans, while AI would be used to derive everything downstream (e.g. weekly progress updates, changelogs). But the temptation to use AI to pad that core knowledge is too pervasive, like all the meaningless LLM-generated fluff all too common in emails these days.

There is definitely going to be some Wirth's law-like [0] effect about the asymmetry of software complexity outpacing LLMs' abilities to untangle said software. Claude 9.2 Optimus Prime might be able to wrangle 1M LoC, but somehow YC 2035 will have some Series A startup with 1B+ LoC in prod — we'll always have software companies teetering on the very edge of unmaintainability.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

> This would be like an NFL team drafting a quarterback based on how many instagram followers they have rather than a relevant metric like pass completion, or god forbid, doing some work and actually scouting candidates. Maybe the Cleveland Browns would do that

Not quite the same, but the New York Jets (one of the few NFL teams that can match the dysfunction of the Browns — they have the longest active playoff drought in big 4 North American sports) passed on a few successful players because the owner, Woody Johnson, reportedly didn't like their Madden (video game) ratings [0]:

> A few weeks later, Douglas and his Broncos counterpart, George Paton, were deep in negotiations for a trade that would have sent Jeudy to the Jets and given future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers another potential playmaker. The Broncos felt a deal was near. Then, abruptly, it all fell apart. In Denver’s executive offices, they couldn’t believe the reason why.

> Douglas told the Broncos that Johnson didn’t want to make the trade because the owner felt Jeudy’s player rating in “Madden NFL,” the popular video game, wasn’t high enough, according to multiple league sources. The Broncos ultimately traded the receiver to the Cleveland Browns. Last Sunday, Jeudy crossed the 1,000-yard receiving mark for the first time in his career.

...

> Johnson’s reference to Jeudy’s “Madden” rating was, to some in the Jets’ organization, a sign of Brick and Jack’s influence. Another example came when Johnson pushed back on signing free-agent guard John Simpson due to a lackluster “awareness” rating in Madden. The Jets signed Simpson anyway, and he has had a solid season: Pro Football Focus currently has him graded as the eighth-best guard in the NFL.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6005172/2024/12/19/woody-jo...

If you like space toilets you may be interested in this [0] HN submission where you can track how full the ISS urine tank is from the comfort of your menu bar.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42505454

Quite good, per Bellingcat [0] — Google Lens and ChatGPT could localize the majority of their test photos pretty specifically.

[0] https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2025/08/14/llms-vs-geol...