Hacker News: Balooga

New comment by Balooga in "Making"

Balooga — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 23:09:07 +0000

When you create a work using a tool, you own the copyright.

When you create a work using an LLM, there is no copyright.

So then isn't an LLM less than a tool?

New comment by Balooga in "Making"

Balooga — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:00:06 +0000

In my head "make" implies copyright. If you make it then copyright belongs to you unless you sign that away.

You prompted, the LLM made. The output of the LLM is not eligible for copyright.

You can perhaps copyright the prompt. That you did make.

New comment by Balooga in "“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”"

Balooga — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:45:39 +0000

Not to be an arse, but didn't you have access to Stack Overflow with all questions/answers prior to LLMs?

New comment by Balooga in "Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks"

Balooga — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:20:43 +0000

FYI; In South Africa, the 5 1/4 inch is a "floppy". The 3 1/2 inch is a "stiffy". I don't understand why this isn't so everywhere.

New comment by Balooga in "The AirPods Effect"

Balooga — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 23:45:43 +0000

Uh oh. You could be genetically predisposed to have to listen to everyone's problems.

New comment by Balooga in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

Balooga — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:25:44 +0000

They know, because in their personal capacity, they hate interacting with AI customer service agents from other companies.

But their bonus depends on driving down costs in their company.

New comment by Balooga in "Programmers will document for Claude, but not for each other"

Balooga — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:19:08 +0000

In aerospace related industries there is a culture of writing and reading of requirements.

I system engineered for a major US satellite TV provider, and just the specification that defined the protocol for transmitting guide data over the satellite was about 640 US letter pages when printed.

New comment by Balooga in "Netherlands blocks US takeover of vital digital supplier"

Balooga — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:25:56 +0000

I used to work in Burbank and lived approximately 34 miles away, across Los Angeles. It could take almost three hours for me to drive home on a Friday afternoon on the freeway. This was before Covid, and traffic has only gotten worse.

New comment by Balooga in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

Balooga — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:13:38 +0000

Costco?

[Edit] -- And I've frequented several independent coffee shops that are cashless.

New comment by Balooga in "AI chatbots could be making you stupider"

Balooga — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:14:34 +0000

I like to think back on this scene from Galaxy Quest, when the team sits around the conference table[1].

"I have one job on this lousy ship, it's stupid, but I'm gonna do it! Okay?" -- Sigourney Weaver

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4CgQMJCpZI

New comment by Balooga in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

Balooga — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:33:35 +0000

That way of teaching got us to the moon, created transistors, produced the internet, smartphones, quantum computers, the very AI that everyone is talking about, vaccines, sent probes into space, cured diseases, fed millions, jumbo jets, basically every single thing that society has come to depend on.

New comment by Balooga in "Ask HN: Easiest UX for Seniors"

Balooga — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 04:27:24 +0000

> It might be borderline exploitative, but I have noticed that elderly individuals want a "solution" rather than a lesson.

Or they may have just aged out of fucks[1]

[1] - https://www.blog.lifebranches.com/p/aging-out-of-fucks-the-n...

New comment by Balooga in "Ask HN: Easiest UX for Seniors"

Balooga — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 04:24:59 +0000

My Dad could never build the metal model to understand that common concepts like copy/paste would work almost identically across different native Windows applications; "How do I copy/paste in an email?", "How do I copy/paste in a Word document?", "How do I open a file in Excel?", "How do I open a file in Word?".

The lightbulb just never went on in his head. And this was in the 90s and early 2000s when developers at least used MFC - probably the period of peak UX design.

Things have now gotten so much worse since then. Now, I struggle to remember how to add an attachment in MS Teams, which I use every day.

New comment by Balooga in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

Balooga — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:17:30 +0000

And is "model collapse" a thing when LLMs are trained on 100% LLM-generated code? Fun times ahead.

New comment by Balooga in "Langjam Gamejam: Build a programming language then make a game with it"

Balooga — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:38:33 +0000

There is OpenGOAL[1]. A re-implementation of the language that Naughty Dog used to created Jak and Daxter.

[1] https://opengoal.dev/

New comment by Balooga in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

Balooga — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 19:13:10 +0000

Keep in mind that Fielding used his "REST" principles to drive work on the release of HTTP 1.1 in 1999. He subsequently codified these RESTful principles in his dissertation in 2000. The first JSON message was sent in 2001. The reason RESTful is perfectly suited to the WWW is because REST drove HTTP 1.1, not the other way around.

Now days there are just so many use cases where an architecture is more suited to RPC (and POST). And trying to bend the architecture to be "more RESTful" just serves to complicate.

New comment by Balooga in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

Balooga — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 17:05:11 +0000

> You describe how web pages work, web pages are intended for human interactions

Exactly, yes! The first few sentences from Wikipedia...

"REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of a distributed, Internet-scale hypermedia system, such as the Web, should behave." -- [1]

If you are desiging a system for the Web, use REST. If you are designing a system where a native app (that you create) talks to a set of services on a back end (that you also create), then why conform to REST principles?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST

New comment by Balooga in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

Balooga — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:03:21 +0000

Then that does not conform to the HTTP spec. GET endpoints must be safe, idempotent, cachable. Opening up a site to cases were web crawlers/scrapers may wreak havoc.

New comment by Balooga in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

Balooga — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:46:10 +0000

There is one reason. The DELETE absolutely must be idempotent. If it's not, then use POST.

New comment by Balooga in "Most RESTful APIs aren't really RESTful"

Balooga — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:43:52 +0000

> Fielding's paper doesn't provide a complete recipe for building self-discoverable APIs.

But it does though. A HTTP server returns a HTTP response to a request from a browser. The request is a HTML webpage that is rendered to the user with all discoverable APIs visible as clickable links. Welcome to the World Wide Web.