Hacker News: ChiMan

New comment by ChiMan in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

ChiMan — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 09:23:31 +0000

I wouldn’t count on reduced drudgery. The assembly line automated many movements needed for manufacturing. But which work involved more drudgery—-craftsman-style car production or standing on an assembly line at Ford?

With any new technology, subsequent drudgery depends on the technology, its concomitant economics, and the imagination of the people using it.

New comment by ChiMan in "Microsoft execs worry AI will eat entry level coding jobs"

ChiMan — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:57:50 +0000

It also seems possible that clever, young outsiders will, by creatively employing AI, displace senior devs. Because unlike with law and accounting, novices in software development can generate a lot of their own reps at low cost (mostly just their time, which will be cheap compared to senior devs).

Another possibility could be using junior devs (with AI) to come up with enormous numbers of fresh ideas and minimally working programs, with the promising ones then worked on with senior devs.

Most fundamentally, because AI lowers the cost of testing out ideas and potential software products, it seems like a tool to test notions of what you should build or continue to offer customers in the first place.

New comment by ChiMan in "Pink noise reduces REM sleep and may harm sleep quality"

ChiMan — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 02:44:20 +0000

Common sense and experience inform my theory of good sleep: Pitch black, stone quiet, with noise limited to pre-sleep audial approximations of the dream-like mental noise that precipitates sleep.

New comment by ChiMan in "Start your meetings at 5 minutes past"

ChiMan — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 14:11:11 +0000

Yep. In general, when you see social solutions emerge in the wild from the free choices of participants, there is an underlying logic that’s doing important work. It’s easy to think you can improve over these natural solutions, but usually you can’t.

I recall working at this place that prided itself on starting meetings a minute early, as if trying to prove a point. The early starts did prove that, yes, you could get people to scramble, but not much else.

New comment by ChiMan in "Start your meetings at 5 minutes past"

ChiMan — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 13:46:20 +0000

A norm of scheduling the “start” on the hour or half hour while really starting the meeting five minutes later also works. That way, attendees have an opportunity to arrive “on time” and chat if they like, building relationships in the process. The freedom to arrive at any point during the first five minutes also helps to create the kind of ease that’s conducive to serious discussion. This second part is particularly important when power dynamics might otherwise derail real discussion.

Because five minutes of pure chitchat can feel excessive to some folks, though, a three-minute norm probably works better—-especially because the off-centeredness has the informal aesthetic that, again, forms a better backdrop for serious discussion.

New comment by ChiMan in "The decline of deviance"

ChiMan — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 09:54:02 +0000

You can’t afford to risk being weird anymore. Housing is too expensive. Too many weird steps in non-pecuniary directions and you’ll end up on the street or your mom’s couch.

New comment by ChiMan in "New York Times, AP, Newsmax and others say they won't sign new Pentagon rules"

ChiMan — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 05:08:52 +0000

You know the weakness of man from a mile away by the verbosity and volume of his "toughness."

New comment by ChiMan in "Things managers do that leaders never would"

ChiMan — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 05:36:47 +0000

Of course, everyone in the room has already read the same leadership tips, likely earning you plenty of eye rolls and detracting from the straightforward, honest cooperation and on-task communication that are the backbone of all successful teams and companies.

New comment by ChiMan in "No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search"

ChiMan — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 21:32:12 +0000

This gets to the heart of why we have copyrights. They’re not to make writers rich. They’re to make us all rich with the content they produce.

The modern abuse of copyrights by the likes of Disney does not negate this otherwise wonderful institution.

New comment by ChiMan in "I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file"

ChiMan — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 23:46:18 +0000

Half the value of a todo app lies in the act of writing tasks down in the first place, and the other half lies in reading, revisiting, and revising them. In this, a .txt file works as well as anything, and is much cheaper. For me, a proud skinflint, the low cost has of a .txt file a side effect: I’m tickled to use it, reinforcing the memory that any todo app is meant to create.

New comment by ChiMan in "Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity"

ChiMan — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 16:28:32 +0000

Seems like a market has emerged for a LinkedIn-like service that does everything LinkedIn does, minus the public posts. Resumes and direct messages only.

New comment by ChiMan in "Goodbye, Six-Figure Tech Jobs. Young Coders Seek Work at Fast-Food Joints"

ChiMan — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 21:35:01 +0000

The point is not to delegate. It’s to augment.

New comment by ChiMan in "Goodbye, Six-Figure Tech Jobs. Young Coders Seek Work at Fast-Food Joints"

ChiMan — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 19:50:30 +0000

AI performs best in non-deterministic environments where highly extensive if slightly imperfect (or even hallucinatory) knowledge works just fine. When mapped onto today’s jobs, the fit feels less natural for high-level engineering than for “looser” tasks that would do well to be armed with wider knowledge. In other words, it seems like AI—or AI-armed humans—are more squarely aimed at executives.

New comment by ChiMan in "AI is killing the web – can anything save it?"

ChiMan — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 14:54:42 +0000

Seems possible that one possible unintended consequence of AI could be a rebirth of the Web as something closer to what we knew. Because why use search at all for general inquiry when AI can satisfy much of that?

More critically, it’s not hard to imagine that, with AI-boosted boosted coding, a thousand bespoke search engines and other platforms being just around the corner, radically changing the economics of platform lock-in. When you can build your own version of Google Search with the help of AI and do the same with social media or any other centralizing Internet force, then platforms cease to be platforms at all. With AI, the challenges of self-hosting could become quite manageable as well. And while we’re at it, some version of the same, individual-centered computing economics on your own devices seems possible.

In these senses, it’s quite possible that Jobs’s vision of computing as extensions of individuals rather than individuals being extensions of computing is again at hand, with the magic of self-curated order from a chaotic Net not far behind.

New comment by ChiMan in "Local-first software (2019)"

ChiMan — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 01:19:04 +0000

The speed alone is sufficient for a local-first approach. The latency of any cloud software I’ve ever used is like constant sand in the gears of thinking. Although taking supplements that slow my thinking—essentially natural downers—do improve my experience with such software, the improved experience comes at the expense of IQ. Basically, you need to be a little slow and dumb for the software to work as intended.

This is nuts. Computers are supposed to enhance and enable thinking, not make you stupid. In this sense, cloud software is possibly the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the paying, computer-using public.

For the love of God, please bring back my late 1990s and early 2000s brain-boosting computer experience.

New comment by ChiMan in "Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests"

ChiMan — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 09:41:04 +0000

The problem with that solution is that it would work too well, making it unattractive to lawmakers who need the issue to maintain their careers.

New comment by ChiMan in "Google is burying the web alive"

ChiMan — Tue, 27 May 2025 00:48:46 +0000

Major free-rider problem, this is—one, however, that property rights could protect against: You own your data. If the OpenAIs of the world want to ingest your data, they pay you for it.

New comment by ChiMan in "Engineers discover new class of materials that passively harvest water from air"

ChiMan — Mon, 26 May 2025 15:39:12 +0000

Uses in AC and clothing seem like obvious use cases.

New comment by ChiMan in "Layoffs Don't Work"

ChiMan — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 18:54:19 +0000

The more fundamental question is: If mass layoffs are so necessary, then who’s responsible for the unnecessary mass hiring? In any mass layoff, fire that person first. Get to the root of the problem.

New comment by ChiMan in "Satya Nadella on knowledge work"

ChiMan — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 07:26:41 +0000

With AI, I'd say white collar work should become less like factory work. Generative AI is non-deterministic, the opposite of factory work.