OkayPhysicist (u/OkayPhysicist)

OkayPhysicist commented on Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft theverge.com/tech/865689/... · Posted by u/Anon84

pezezin · 6 days ago

To be fair, only Sony follows a consistent naming convention. Nintendo's console names also defy any logic, as did Sega back in the day.

OkayPhysicist · 5 days ago

Nintendo's strategy isn't the absolute worst. They mostly just give new names to new console designs, with modifiers to specify next-gen-without-major-changes. So the SNES was a next-gen NES, the N64 was its own thing, the GameCube was its own thing, the Gameboy, Gameboy Color, and Gameboy Advanced were iterations on the same thing, DS, DSi, 3DS were all generation steps. WiiU was a next-gen Wii, Switch 2 is a next-gen Switch.

They probably should have called the WiiU the Super Wii or Wii 2 or something, but on the whole they've got a mostly coherent naming convention.

OkayPhysicist commented on The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal frommers.com/tips/airfare... · Posted by u/donohoe

Izikiel43 · 5 days ago

> Yes, because the federal government can't assume that everyone has an ID, since they don't issue a universal ID.

I'm from a 3rd world country and we have a national id, the usa is weird in the strangest things.

OkayPhysicist · 5 days ago

It's a deep-seated cultural paranoia that the federal government is out to get us. Initially, the US tried to be a confederation like the EU or Canada, but it turned out that we needed slightly more federal power than that to stay as a unified country. But the tension between "loose coalition of independent states" and "unified government that grants some powers to the states" is a pretty fundamental theme throughout US politics.

OkayPhysicist commented on The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal frommers.com/tips/airfare... · Posted by u/donohoe

khazhoux · 6 days ago

So when TSA asked for your ID, what did you do and what did they then do?

OkayPhysicist · 5 days ago

You just tell them "Don't have one". Then they (most likely a second TSA agent so you don't hold up the line) run a quick interview to try and establish who the heck you are, and if you can be trusted to be let onto a plane.

OkayPhysicist commented on The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal frommers.com/tips/airfare... · Posted by u/donohoe

aboardRat4 · 6 days ago

In the USA it is possible to fly without an ID?

OkayPhysicist · 6 days ago

Yes, because the federal government can't assume that everyone has an ID, since they don't issue a universal ID. Any attempt to fix the fact that Americans don't have universal federal identification has met stiff resistance from a variety of angles, from privacy proponents to religious nuts who think universal identification is the mark of the beast.

It ties into why we still have to register for the draft (despite not having a draft since the 70s, and being no closer to instituting one than any other western country), and why our best form of universal identification (the Social Security card) is a scrap of cardstock with the words "not to be used for identification" written on it.

So, there's no universal ID, it's illegal to mandate people have ID, and freedom of movement within the United States has been routinely upheld as a core freedom. Thus, no ID required for domestic flights.

OkayPhysicist commented on The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal frommers.com/tips/airfare... · Posted by u/donohoe

umeshunni · 6 days ago

> How many of the “working poor” can afford to fly and don’t have a drivers license?

What he really means is illegals who have fake ids who now can't get RealIDs.

OkayPhysicist · 6 days ago

Undocumented immigrants can have authentic, non-"RealID" ids, as things such as drivers licenses are the purview of the states, and infringement there upon is an attack on their constitutional sovereignty. California, for example, is perfectly happy to give out drivers licenses to anybody who can establish residency and pass the test, since there's no sense in creating a double jeopardy situation wherein because someone has committed one crime (illegally immigrating to California), they are forced to commit an additional crime (driving without a license). It's the same reason the IRS gives you a spot to declare your bribes and other illegal income.

OkayPhysicist commented on EasyClaw – lightweight GUI installer for OpenClaw easyclaw.com... · Posted by u/svemyh

svemyh · 6 days ago

We like OpenClaw, but setup was too hard for our non-technical friends. EasyClaw is a small, lightweight Rust-based desktop app that installs and configures OpenClaw, Clawdbot, and Moltbot without manual setup.

A short wizard lets you pick an AI model provider and connect chat channels like WhatsApp or iMessage. After that, you just start the gateway from the app and your agent is live.

It’s designed to be friendly for non-technical users, but fast and pleasant for developers too: clean dashboard, predictable integrations, keyboard shortcuts, and minimal overhead. No CLI or config files needed for the common case.

Built because the tools are powerful, but the setup friction was too high.

OkayPhysicist · 6 days ago

Your domain seems to point at a "this domain is for sale" page. Might have jumped the gun a bit with posting to HN.

OkayPhysicist commented on Oregon gave homeless youth $1k/month with no strings oregonlive.com/politics/2... · Posted by u/xqcgrek2

anon291 · 6 days ago

50k is a pittance compared to the amount of suffering the average criminal causes. I'd pay $1 million /year to incarcerate more people so long as we got the right people. I'd pay any amount. The cost of being a victim is monstrously high it doesn't matter

OkayPhysicist · 6 days ago

That depends on the crime, now doesn't it. When I got my car stolen the first time, the kid who stole it went on a joy ride, dumped the car, got caught. I got my car back, and the whole experience was largely an inconvenience. Most painful part was paying the impound lot. Dude ended up spending over a year behind bars.

Now, what did society gain from locking that kid up? Not $50,000 worth, that's for sure. Definitely not a million dollars' worth. No, it just fucked up some dude's life, and made some jackass at the tow yard $600 richer. If anybody had asked me, my idea of justice would be a few weekends community service, maybe a small fine, and a molotov through the tow-yard office's window.

Don't get me wrong, there are crimes worth the societal cost to punish. Violent crimes, crimes that cause serious emotional or financial damages. Abuses of power. But that isn't most criminals. In my book, if a victim wouldn't seriously consider killing the perpetrator, we probably shouldn't be in the business of incarcerating them.

Because incarceration basically carries the message of "We the people want to fuck your life up, but don't have the stomach to kill you".

OkayPhysicist commented on Kernighan on Programming · Posted by u/chrisjj

jodrellblank · 6 days ago

If debugging is not a separate skill then there is either:

- the author wrote it (including 'debugging') until it worked properly. Therefore they were clever enough to write it that way.

- the author can't make it work (including 'debugging') and therefore they aren't clever enough to write it that way.

And there cannot be a state where they (are clever enough to write it but it doesn't work properly) and they (are not clever enough to debug it), because the fact that it doesn't work properly and they can't make it work properly refutes the claim that they were clever enough to write it that way, and it becomes the second state above. Which puts you on the side of what I'm saying?

OkayPhysicist · 6 days ago

"Works" is a less absolute term than you treat it as. If I'm hacking together a little automation script, if the pretty path gives the correct answer, then it "works" to some degree. If that script graduates to part of a company workflow, I'd probably need to fix up some of the corner cases. Like if I wrote it to take in tab-delimited CSV files, but it breaks horribly when encountering a comma-delimited CSV file, I should probably realize that and either guard against it, or add a fix to handle it appropriately.

OkayPhysicist commented on Is the RAM shortage killing small VPS hosts? fourplex.net/2026/01/29/i... · Posted by u/neelc

MagicMoonlight · 10 days ago

Small VPS hosts shouldn’t really exist. They’re either resellers or just half-assing it.

How can you trust Gary from GaryHosting not to just steal all your data? How can you trust him to have redundant networks? You just can’t.

OkayPhysicist · 9 days ago

On the contrary, it's impossible to trust Amazon not to be evil, because eventually some suit with an MBA is going to go "we can make 0.001% more money this year by having orphans hand-deliver packets across the freeway, frogger style. What are people going to do, leave? Where else will they host their application built around our proprietary FireHouse LightWave Message Comorbidifier?"

On the other hand, I can trust Gary. Gary's personally responsible for GaryHosting, and he obviously takes that role seriously, given he slapped his name on the front. And if Gary fails, I can just switch to a different provider. Gary doesn't have a moat, he sells a commodity. His only advantage in this world is treating his customers well enough that they don't leave.

OkayPhysicist commented on Students Are Finding New Ways to Cheat on the SAT nytimes.com/2026/01/28/us... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

leothetechguy · 10 days ago

Not from America, but can I ask... Is the SAT that difficult?

OkayPhysicist · 10 days ago

The SAT, by design, covers the entire difficulty range. Parts are easy, parts are hard, such that about half of students get less than half of it right, and 0.1% of students ace it. It's not merely pass-fail, they're trying to give a pretty granular rank to each student.

Thus, if the test is worth taking for a student (because they want to go to college), it's probably worth cheating on. Students outside the top 0.1% can appear better than their peers to improve their odds of getting into better universities, and students in the top 0.1% tend to be there due to intense extrinsic pressure, which may drive them to cheat to increase their certainty of acing it.

For a competent student, it's not hard to get an acceptable grade. For every student, it's difficult to achieve an exceptional grade.