MainlyMortal (u/MainlyMortal)

MainlyMortal commented on Meta acquires Moltbook axios.com/2026/03/10/meta... · Posted by u/mmayberry

I just made an account on this site to tell you that after having a "extreme" epiphany about just how crazy the ai bots are on reddit, I've been constantly researching and trying to find some sort of conclusive answer. This is part theory, part public knowledge, and part auditing (which is fucking hilarious that I audited a module for this). I am absolutely and totally convinced that there is live and active collusion between major AI companies and Reddit, and I'm not talking about handing over old training data, I'm talking about allowing OAI and Googs (this is my bad attempt at hiding the names) to use Reddit as a real live testing cage ACTIVELY AND WITHOUT CONSENT OR KNOWLEDGE. I have reason to believe they are using contractors to hide or shift blame, I believe they have no oversight, and I believe they are using LIVE UPDATING OF MODULES with realtime engagement of users via comments. It is consistent and targeted, with any testing parameter under the sun being experimented live and on flesh (or keyboards used by flesh). I believe this is contractual with reddit via hidden means, and is mutual due to the increase in "engagement" which benefits Reddit's stock prices, which in turn increases cash flow, which in turn incentivizes increasing cash flow, which involves contractors, etc etc, in and out, in and out. It's egregious. And I'm quite frankly for the first time about this: scared and saddened. I miss the old Reddit. I miss randomness. I miss runescape chat in 2006. But I wanted you to know that I'm right fucking with you, and I'm glad people are smelling the same funk that I do. Don't really know what else to say. Keep on rockin'.

MainlyMortal · a day ago

It's obvious now that you say it but I never thought about the AI companies themselves doing this for their own benefits like training purposes. It's a perfect testing ground to see what works for engagement and to see what real people want to hear back. The reason is pretty clear in that these AI/chat services have real people as users so logically it makes sense that the better sounding (not necessarily better) results make these users want to keep using. At the risk of sounding like AI... you're right... they may have been trained on old content but they are now using live data for fine tuning and quite frankly manipulation.

I miss the organic conversations and real thoughts from real people. I'm the type of person to read the comments before I read the article etc. It always gives more nuanced but also wildly different takes which I find interesting.

MainlyMortal commented on Meta acquires Moltbook axios.com/2026/03/10/meta... · Posted by u/mmayberry

eddythompson80 · 7 days ago

It’s not just technical content. Just the other day I was reading a post by an employed homes guy on r/seattle. The post was about his experience of being both newly employed but still homeless.

The post was full of “this is not a scheduling conflict problem, this is a structural issue with the city”, “this is not me asking for a handout, this is struggling to survive within the system”

While I get that he might have written a paragraph of his experience, and asked ChatGPT to clean it up or reword it, it was just… whatever.

MainlyMortal · 7 days ago

This is exactly the type of thing I'm talking about and why I'm convinced it's about the metrics/engagement boosting. I don't believe for a second that real people are using chatgpt/others for rewording real thoughts even from another language because those phrases are not natural even in translation. You'll also notice in the original post that that it always ends with a question that encourage replies. If the original poster even bothers to reply it's always the "you're right" at the beginning and then rephrasing the reply. Once you've seen it you can't unsee it.

MainlyMortal commented on Meta acquires Moltbook axios.com/2026/03/10/meta... · Posted by u/mmayberry

tylerchilds · 7 days ago

The metaverse: ai talking to each other over cli

MainlyMortal · 7 days ago

Have you seen Reddit recently? Every single subreddit is full of AI posts with AI replies. I'm actually convinced a large majority of that is Reddit themselves artificially boosting their engagement metrics. The saddest part is that the engagement makes it obvious that the general population can't differentiate between AI and real humans even with the telltale signs.

MainlyMortal commented on Rebasing in Magit entropicthoughts.com/reba... · Posted by u/ibobev

troupo · 7 days ago

The best gut GUI is GitUp: https://gitup.co/

Magit is not even close to be on the same level.

Any insane operation you want at your fingertips.

MainlyMortal · 7 days ago

I upvoted you because you were unfairly downvoted. I don't even use a Mac any more after 20 years of exclusively using them but it's actually hilarious how bad magit is compared to this. It's all well and good making the most of limitations that are self imposed but people need to remember to look outside their own bubble.

MainlyMortal commented on Net 9.0 LINQ Performance Improvements blog.ndepend.com/net-9-0-... · Posted by u/olvy0

highwaylights · a year ago

I’ll get started then end up on a rant but..

This is really the thing with the entire .NET stack that’s very hard to communicate. The standard library and framework design are so well thought out relative to anything else out there. More than that, the support within VS is beyond any other dev tool that exists for any other language - it’s not even particularly close. Edit-and-continue comes to mind, which despite how many times people confuse the two is not hot reload, and is wildly more productive and useful.

I remember back close to 20 years ago DHH was espousing Ruby/Rails and that the concept of types at all were a code smell, and thinking “you’re just very wrong, and clearly aren’t familiar with what else is out there”. Eventually a lot of that crowd moved to Node, then to typescript, and came around.

VS Enterprise (expensive as it is) had features 15 years ago that still seem magical when I show them to JS/TS folks now. IntelliTrace is one that comes to mind - there’s nothing remotely close to it’s snapshot debugging that I’ve seen anywhere else, and I’ve really looked.

The big problems with the ecosystem are that the docs are exhaustive but terribly boring, and not well explained from a learning-something-for-the-first-time perspective. They also really expect that everything you do is the Microsoft way, so if you’re trying to interface your code with something like an Avalonia UI, you’re on your own.

The language is absolutely wonderful though, even when used with Rider. The productivity relative to node/typescript is better enough that it crushes my soul having to go back to wrestling tsconfig and imports after working with .NET references for even small changes. So many of the little things I used to take for granted really just work, and work well. It’s just a wonderful piece of work executed over decades, held back by poor community outreach and badly written documentation.

MainlyMortal · a year ago

Your comment about the docs is the real reason .NET/C#/F# isn't gaining any new users. The dotnet team should actually be embarrassed about this but it's clear they don't care so neither will anyone else. It's 100% quantity (slop) over quality for Microsoft. Their website and guides are terrible and irrelevant for both new and experienced devs.

Modern C# is probably the best general purpose language out there with the best tooling along with the dotnet framework. Too bad the guides and public information all align with the latest trends Microsoft are pushing to appear relevant. Blazor, MAUI, Aspire e.t.c. are all distractions to maintain the appearance of being modern. None of which are production ready or actually good for that matter.

Back to my original point. If you want to create a new web app then you're REALLY pushed to use Blazor, which is confusing, has many flaws, is basically alpha and is just a bad idea in general. For some reason you're shown a laughably simple guide spread over eight pages which could be a single page. You finish the "guide" and so you go to the "documentation". That documentation page is full of buzzwords that confuses new developers and belittles old developers. The end of this page links back to the pathetic guide. It's seriously like this for everything they do. There's tiny little nuggets of information scattered over thousands of useless pages.

I may sound blunt but it's a fantastic technology ruined by terrible management, poor communication and clearly the worst developer relations team any tech company has ever assembled. How can any company with this much money, this much recognition and this great of a technology fumble it so badly. Well... I actually do know why and it's obvious to anyone capable of critical thinking.

MainlyMortal commented on Linux: We need tiling desktop environments linuxblog.io/linux-tiling... · Posted by u/ashitlerferad

DrDeadCrash · 2 years ago

I can confirm for power toys on Windows, I find it essential for making use of multiple 4k screens.

MainlyMortal · 2 years ago

It's honestly the best of the lot but slept on in these parts because of being Windows only. KDE started to clone this as a native feature but it seems to be abandoned. Story of linux I guess.

I really, really can't recommend PowerToys enough.

MainlyMortal commented on Linux: We need tiling desktop environments linuxblog.io/linux-tiling... · Posted by u/ashitlerferad

MainlyMortal · 2 years ago

I think what most people, including tiling people, would actually want without realising it is Divvy (macOS)/gTile (gnome)/PowerToys (Windows).

A regular floating window manager but you can move any floating window into a tiled window based on a grid of potential locations.

It's hard to explain in words but look any of them up and it's the best no-compromise solution for everyone.

MainlyMortal commented on Priced out of home ownership bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c... · Posted by u/user20180120

MainlyMortal · 2 years ago

U.K. view here... and I'd guess this applies the the majority of the world too.

I was born in, grew up in and currently live in a location that the HN community never even thinks about. Most people in here have no idea of how the regular 99% live and then base their whole world view on expensive capital cities and hold the strangest views of housing.

I bought my current house in the 2010s, my mortgage is still half the price of renting and I could manage to pay for everything by myself even if I were on a minimum wage. The problem isn't anything to do with housing it's to do with your own warped view on the world.

I don't say this to be contrarian or to necessarily make a point. I want you to look up the minimum wage of your country and think about how literally everyone else happily lives without thinking twice about these things. You all live a massively privileged life yet these things concern you more than they should.