Things I Learned - 04 Oct 2026
This week, I learned: Harvard authored a paper: living near nuclear power plants associated with more cancer. Several other papers published similar findings. The trouble is, there’ll always be SOME places near which cancer rates are higher - and there are enough causes that you can p-hack. But, it’s not easy to think of this upfront and very easy to fool ourselves. Things that Apparently Cause Cancer Supabase is acquiring Turso. Turso is a Rust SQLite-compatible DB. Supabase was already popular for agentic software. This would add fast SQLite, which looks even more attractive. “We don’t always have the time or budget, or even the legal right, to do multiple versions. Fans don’t have those restrictions. They can do as many variations as they want, and that’s fine.” - Pirating the Pirates on Notebook “As rich people feel like their downtime is scarce—as each non-working hour practically shouts, “excuse me! you could be making money, right now!” —the experience of leisure time speeds up. We multitask and pack various downtime activities into short periods. Firing up a Netflix show at 9pm that you can half-ignore while you answer email is a perfect activity for people who need their leisure time to feel like half-productive box-checking.” From The Death of the American Host Hacker News Best has a weekly best or daily best (or any other) view you can control by adding a ?h=... parameter. That makes it a useful alternative to HNTopLinks (source) which goes down occasionally. I am using the Redirector extension to re-map the URLs. “Platform exodus”: Lots of people are posting about leaving popular platforms (WordPress, Reddit, GitHub, …) and software (Photoshop) - Everyone’s packing up. Looks like technically capably users are migrating to disposable systems #ForNow. ChatGPT Despite the incredible cost & quality advantage of GPT 6 Luna, I’m still not using it for transcription. Gemini remains ahead #ForNow. It can process up to 9.5 hours of audio per prompt and seems to have a pretty good error rate. ChatGPT Pi 1.0 supports MCP. But some features they still choose not to support are: permissions (use containers), sub-agents (invoke pi), plan mode (extension), TODOs (use TODO.md), background shell jobs (use tmux). Pi Durable feels like it covers /goal. A good use for Pi Durable (or any long-running harness) is work you incrementally build on over days: maintenance, research, experiments, … HN GPT 6 Astra beat Nethack! Donald has an entire facility that he can control via prompts. I’d love just one device! Donald There are a number of sites that let you record your screen, video, or audio and download it. No installation / software required. Like for video, Videoradius, recordscreen.io, Browserkit, Screencord.me, etc. Or for audio, SayRec, SpeakPipe, Vocaroo, Whyp, etc. #ForNow “I have a class of agents in my Wheelhouse factory that act just like TPMs. They have external email and Slack, and talk to my accountant, lawyers, players. Each one has a project lane and drives it. They use Progress By Nagging, which… works.” Steve Yegge Roughly: “It’s interesting when things scale beyond what people expect. Find such areas. See where they break and find emergent properties or new approaches that let it scale further.” Sam Altman with Alex Heath. Google managed to accidentally hack some websites and entered the FelonyBench. Finally! The list of columns you can see in VLC Media Player is hard-coded and there’s no easy way to add something - like the composer or album artist - into this list. Mistakes I made Week ending 04 Oct 2026 ...