151
Someone on Torrent Sites Kept Fucking with My Sonarr
PLEASE stop putting skid malware on torrent sites as South Park episodes
Topics /
Life, Learning & Writing
The most popular blog posts about life, learning & writing on Hacker News. 613 posts.
152
Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?
For my piece on Catholic miracle apologetics , I read (correction: skimmed) a 25,000-word post by rationalist blogger Scott Alexander. My piece, which cited (but does not focus on) his, ended up being a cool 2,700 words. I don't think it would benefit from being longer, and it was the result of me cutting around 70%…
153
I saw your HN comment
I used to love getting emails from people in response to things I’ve written online, blog posts or Hacker News comments, but in the last 2 years it’s changed from mostly signal to mostly noise. I’ve …
154
Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
Status update, three years later
155
The Art of Money Getting
P.T. Barnum was 70 years old when he turned his most popular lecture into this book in 1880. By then, he’d already built America’s most famous museum in New York, introduced General Tom Thumb to audiences, served as mayor of Bridgeport, gone broke from a disastrous investment in a Connecticut clock company, and clawed…
156
The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows
Without permission, a marketing agency republished the entirety of John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows book, replacing its art with AI slop and adding new AI words. Their unauthorized site now ranks higher than the real one everywhere.
157
I think I have LLM burnout
I didn't expect to get so tired of reading LLM output.
158
You can just say it
There is a weird collection of arguments for appraising the value of humans and their creative artifacts. It usually goes something like this: In the age of AI, we should still prefer humans in certain roles because AI could never perform the tasks required for that role. Or, a human can at least do it better. Or…
159
How to Exist
Here’s an experiment for a true daredevil. Sit there for a three minutes, following two rules:
160
U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth
One year ago, on 28 February 2025, Wikipedia user Moyogo updated the page for Angzarr with a citation to the type foundry H. Berthold AG’s 1950 symbol catalogue listing ⍼ as Azimut, Richtungswinkel , or “azimuth”, “direction angle”. Mystery solved!
161
Why vampires live forever
The modern longevity movement's obsession with blood transfusions makes perfect sense — if you accept that Peter Thiel and Bryan Johnson are vampires.
162
2025 Letter
Corgis, compute, Cold War; Ecclesiastes; ties; Stendhal; humor; Pascal's Wager; deep infrastructure; Germanic obedience; Texas State Fair
163
Damn fine tiny cafe
I love them miniatures. It started off with Rolife series, where the first hit had come from a [[https://sandyuraz.com/blogs/mini-libra...
164
Em dashes are amazing
An ode to a punctuation mark
165
The other Sean Byrne doesn't exist
A fictitious Sean Byrne ended up on a U.S. government restricted-party list. Sixteen years later, Apple, Nasdaq and others have mistaken me for him.
166
Raising money fucked me up
My reflections on raising money for Skald Labs
167
The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein
Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents. This is despite the fact that I met Jeffrey Epstein a grand total of zero times, and …
168
The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription
Except for the SaaS, almost none of this is useful and I don't want to maintain any of it. I accidentally run a news outlet which is surely a liability. Sure, it has helped me "learn AI tooling" and I use many of these tools, but I didn't need them. I can't afford to maintain any of them, not in terms of time…
169
A4 Paper Stories
I sometimes resort to a rather common measuring technique that is neither fast, nor accurate, nor recommended by any standards body and yet it hasn't failed me whenever I have had to use it. I will describe it here, though calling it a technique might be overselling it. Please do not use it for installing kitchen…
170
I am happier writing code by hand
I felt the familiar feeling of depression and lethargy creep in while my eyes darted from watching claude-code work and my phone. “What’s the point of it all?” I thought, LLMs can generate decent-ish and correct-ish looking code while I have more time to do what? doomscroll? This was the third time I gave claude-code…
171
Seven books I keep close because I love them
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
172
The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated
Some skepticism of vitamin D skepticism
173
My MacBook keyboard is broken and it's insanely expensive to fix
The right arrow key on my Macbook Pro keyboard stopped working the other day. I say “stopped working”, but technically it works too well now, it is being pressed constantly, which makes the laptop pretty unusable.
174
You are not your job
On automation, identity, and why warmth and presence — not technical skill — are the parts of a person that can never be replaced by a model.
175
How to sequence your own DNA at home
I have now sequenced my own genome 5 times with an Oxford Nanopore Technologies MinION. This means collecting them from a swab, prepping them for sequencing, running them through a sequencer, then doing analysis over them.
176
Hello, me. It's been a while
Wow. It’s been over fourteen years since the last time I wrote a post on this blog. In those fourteen years, the world has changed, and so have I. So this isn't going to be a technical post, it's going to be personal. One of those subtle changes that quietly crept into my life over
177
Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
That’s What Biological (Epigenetic) Aging Clocks Are Measuring
178
15-year search for a band that charted once and vanished
15 years ago, a band called Salvage dropped an epic song, and then vanished without a trace. Until now.
179
A nicer voltmeter clock
Sometimes, electronic circuit design is mostly about wood
180
Three constraints before I build anything
['Programmer', 'Computer nerd', 'Unix enthusiast'];