Hacker News: CJefferson

New comment by CJefferson in "An update on leaving Gmail for Fastmail"

CJefferson — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:52:00 +0000

My big problem with leaving Google is I’ve clicked on far too many ‘login with google’ boxes. In retrospect this was a mistake as it now ties my own domain to google basically forever, but lots of sites don’t even have the option to undo it.

New comment by CJefferson in "AI agent hacks gym to get its user a spot in pilates class"

CJefferson — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:05:53 +0000

I'm a software developer. This is clearly bad, and we can decide what it should be called. It might not be 'hacking', but you are clearly abusing the computer to steal a space in a class you shouldn't have.

New comment by CJefferson in "AI agent hacks gym to get its user a spot in pilates class"

CJefferson — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:04:30 +0000

My gym class operates on 'write on a piece of paper, cross off your name if you want to cancel'. I could cross someone else's name off and write mine in. They would have trouble figuring out it was me who did the malicious cross-off.

That wouldn't make it remotely acceptable of course.

New comment by CJefferson in "Study links GLP-1 drugs to bigger jump in women's employment than a degree"

CJefferson — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:33:38 +0000

I find it amazing people don’t believe this. I lost about 50kg and people treated me better. They didn’t randomly shout ‘fat fuck’ in the street for a start.

New comment by CJefferson in "Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals"

CJefferson — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:15:26 +0000

P.P.S.

Assuming you are replying to me, you seem to be projecting very powerfully. Rust isn't my favorite language, and I just asked about how much of your code was safe vs unsafe.

New comment by CJefferson in "Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals"

CJefferson — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:26:20 +0000

Do you find most of your rust code is unsafe? Because I also find I do some unsafe stuff, because of the algorithms I work on I often end up with some unchecked array accesses and a couple of raw pointers into those arrays I pass around. But 98% of the code is safe and I find this makes it easier to reason about.

New comment by CJefferson in "Our position on open-weights models"

CJefferson — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:27:58 +0000

Except it's 1,000x worse with the American models, because Trump might just decide that everyone in Europe get their access cut off, or gets a 5,000% tarriff. Or the companies just all agree to hike prices 10x one day. With open Chinese models, we can, in principle, run them ourselves.

New comment by CJefferson in "Our position on open-weights models"

CJefferson — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:26:32 +0000

The problem is you can't ban open models.

All you can do is say that Americans have to pay whatever stupid prices OpenAI / anthropic / Google / Grok wants to charge you, while China uses, and attacks with, open models.

New comment by CJefferson in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

CJefferson — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:56:33 +0000

I'd much prefer NFC if I could see how much I was paying and had to always confirm it -- I understand this wouldn't have worked with physical cards but I wish it was an option on my phone.

New comment by CJefferson in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

CJefferson — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:33:47 +0000

This type of thing (scan QR code) is how basically all payments were done when I was recently in China, via wechat or alipay (either you show your QR code for big shops, or scan their QR code for small shops / vendors. They can just print them out if they want and hang a copy).

I found it superior to other systems I've used in basically every way. Particularly for small market stalls -- I scan their QR code, I enter how much I want to send them. They never get my details, I don't have to trust they didn't fat-finger the price. It also makes it amazingly easy to send money to friends, just scan their code and send them their share of dinner.

New comment by CJefferson in "US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search"

CJefferson — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 06:45:10 +0000

This is where 'reasonable doubt' comes in from a jury. Would I believe that someone set up a 'wipe my phone' code, something that would be catastrophic, it was one digit different, and they accidentally typed it, or would I think they were trying to wipe their phone.

Honestly, given what I know here (a full case might be different), I would believe they did it on purpose.

New comment by CJefferson in "Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T"

CJefferson — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:22:02 +0000

From the article there's this. If this isn't proof, well, I don't know what would be:

A 97-page internal presentation, “Teen Fundamentals,” in May 2020, described its goal as to “look … to biological factors that are relatively consistent across adolescent development and gain valuable unchanging insights to inform product strategy….”

That presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on our app.”

New comment by CJefferson in "Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T"

CJefferson — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:18:23 +0000

Because most people can't set up a DNS blocker. There are lots of things we, as a society, decide we want to ban. I think social media is closer to illegal drugs.

We don't need to let multi-billion dollar companies maximise profits while ruining people's lives. We can just decide to ban them, as a society.

New comment by CJefferson in "Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new"

CJefferson — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:47:10 +0000

No, not at all. Students all have different voices. Yes there are similarities but if I read two pieces of work that sound in the same voice I assume there has been cheating — except this year everything is in the same voice.

New comment by CJefferson in "Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new"

CJefferson — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 13:37:55 +0000

This is my biggest concern. Speaking as someone who recently had to read 60 AI generated reports (the whole issue of how much students are using AI is one discussion), it was genuinely soul-destroying reading the same phrases, seem sentence structures, same arguments over and over. Depressed me the whole of the next day.

New comment by CJefferson in "Stroustrup's Rule (2024)"

CJefferson — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 09:04:08 +0000

I feel this is on of those examples of where humanities and the softer sciences can teach us things. This is exactly how 'normal' languages work. New things are introduced and people (particularly older people) hate them. Over time common words (or even sounds) become shorter, in some cases disappearing entirely when they are 'understood from context'.

New comment by CJefferson in "There is minimal downside to switching to open models"

CJefferson — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 05:40:13 +0000

Has writing secure C really changed that much? Lots of the world still writes in C99, 27 years old at this point. I think they can use a 9 month old AI model is they want.

New comment by CJefferson in "Pystd, similar-ish functionality with a fraction of the compile time"

CJefferson — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 05:33:38 +0000

Wow, that might be the worst name for a project I’ve ever seen. I think every programmer who sees this is going to assume it’s a Python thing.

With regards the library itself —- I think it’s generally known the c++ standard library is a poorly designed mess in places but if you make an entirely new one you lose all the software already written, at which point why use C++ nowadays?

New comment by CJefferson in "Claude Science"

CJefferson — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:04:29 +0000

They are going to make it a thousands times worse.

It wasn't perfect before, but it at least took some time to fake a paper. The problem is now people can produce a very plausible looking completely fake paper in minutes. Peer review is in the process of completely collapsing, in fact I think it's already basically done.

The only way this might fix things is if we require all papers are completely reproducable (that doesn't help in subjects like biology of course. They can still provide all the experimental data in the rawest format possible which doesn't break any laws).

New comment by CJefferson in "Sony erases digital content from libraries"

CJefferson — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:06:26 +0000

I think what upsets me the most isn't that companies do this, it's that no government seems to have any interest in stopping them.

To me, it should be a fairly easy, short, and extremely popular law that if you say you are 'selling' someone something, with a time-frame extremely clearly specified in a simple way, at least the same size as the price (say), you can't take it back later without giving a full refund. If they want to offer a multi-year rent, call it rent.