Hacker News: FuckButtons

New comment by FuckButtons in "DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis"

FuckButtons — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 15:54:13 +0000

There’s fan noise, but the acoustic engineers at Apple have done a very good job of making it be pretty much not noticeable to someone who has noise sensitivity (me).

New comment by FuckButtons in "Show HN: XY – A Fast, composable, GPU-accelerated interactive plotting library"

FuckButtons — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:54:50 +0000

I too have felt that pain. Funcanimation is passible for a few datapoints but it really struggles with anything meaningful in real time.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Claude Opus 5"

FuckButtons — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 06:12:57 +0000

You know PowerPoint is just a zip archive of xml files right?

New comment by FuckButtons in "Fil-C: Garbage In, Memory Safety Out [video]"

FuckButtons — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:19:42 +0000

the only reason to use cython (in my experience) is to write quick numpy extensions without a tonne of extra baggage from having a complete compiled extension in C/C++/Rust. Often, you explicitly want to avoid the compiler offering you any kinds of additional checking because you want to get maximum throughput. Most of the functions I’ve written in cython explicitly opt out of bounds checking etc since the memory access is sequential and bounded by construction and very obvious when you mess things up by writing simple unit tests. Given that, it doesn’t seem useful to me to add any kind of memory safety as additional overhead. YMMV I mostly do scientific computing and signal processing.

New comment by FuckButtons in "I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year"

FuckButtons — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:40:00 +0000

I don’t think any of what you just said is true. Code quality matters even with testing even up to proof of correctness using formal methods, because working software is a moving target and quality is a measure of how easy / expensive it is to continue to track that target going forward.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)"

FuckButtons — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:21:57 +0000

I take the authors point about empires being necessarily cosmopolitan, but it’s not as though it’s a new phenomenon that people have a myopic view about what empire is or how they should operate. (Eg, Russification) Its always been true that empires use various means of social engineering to reduce differences in populations to engender a more uniform polity over various time scales (because it’s beneficial to the entity to do so, eg: Spanish and Italian are both just bad latin) It’s also often true that ethnic cleansing does take place. (If empire was just about getting the already existing social structures to work for you, america would look very different). It’s not true that empires are purely extractive on the periphery, otherwise they would only ever be loose confederations with a tax system and a hegemonic central power. Which is sometimes true, but is not what most empires do. Even saying that empire is just about reifying one polity over another doesn’t hold together all that well on closer inspection. It doesn’t explain why, for example, the Roman Empire shifted from being culturally italic and centered in Rome to being centered in Constantinople and culturally Greek. How could the periphery take over the center if it’s a purely extractive enterprise by one group over its periphery?

I guess the point I’m making, is that empires are very complicated, and trying to reduce them to being solely a thing imposed by one group onto a periphery in order to extract resources is almost as reductive as to say they only exist through colonization and genocide.

While it’s reasonable to say that people get their view of the world through media, I think it’s fine that media can contain simplifications of reality. Otherwise I would have to play Europa Universalis, which is boring.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber"

FuckButtons — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:16:22 +0000

My 2 cents: you don’t have to look at the pelican if you don’t want to.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Agent swarms and the new model economics"

FuckButtons — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:05:29 +0000

not only that, but what all of this misses is the fact that the specification that they used was a product of writing the software, not the other way round. It would be much, much more difficult to first write a correct specification than to first write a correct program, because programs are formal systems that can be executed to observe their correctness. You can’t do that with a specification.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price"

FuckButtons — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:00:49 +0000

The only barely sane rationale that I’ve heard for wanting datacenters in space is that they would give space-x low latency signal processing capacity it would need to turn Starlink into a real time Passive SAR constellation.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Codex Micro"

FuckButtons — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 18:26:03 +0000

Given that their initial product was called ChatGPT I’m not sure that anyone should expect them to be able to name anything remotely sensibly.

New comment by FuckButtons in "The Tower Keeps Rising"

FuckButtons — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:24:25 +0000

While you’re not wrong, this is also simply mechanical, the context window is the root problem here, if the llm doesn’t happen to have read implementation n of a thing that it needs that session, well now you have n+1 implementations.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"

FuckButtons — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 01:05:55 +0000

One would hope, though I suspect they may want to make things a bit flashier than “we made the audio transcription on the keyboard not terrible” in the changelog given the amount of work that’s gone in.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"

FuckButtons — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:00:14 +0000

Yeah, apple will be optimizing a model to work on ANE and then turn it into a native app. My only hope is that it has a reasonable api so that I can use that as a generic input source across iOS / macOS that’s equivalent to the ubiquity of the keyboard.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k"

FuckButtons — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 03:14:48 +0000

Also not true, they want you to pay for a higher subscription bracket and then use only marginally more than you would have, which I think they’re doing quite effectively for most people based on my interactions.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Claude Code sends 33k tokens before reading the prompt; OpenCode sends 7k"

FuckButtons — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 19:26:02 +0000

Nope, that’s not true, because they want you to pay for the higher subscription bracket.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Leaded gas was a known poison the day it was invented (2016)"

FuckButtons — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:34:12 +0000

There are two major sub-fields in materials science. 1: Making materials with interesting new properties. 2: figuring out how to remove the lead from them.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Hy3"

FuckButtons — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:48:55 +0000

qwen 27b at q8 is slower and worse than ds4 at q2 in my experience.

New comment by FuckButtons in "US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers"

FuckButtons — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:21:52 +0000

The pentagon can’t stop gold plating requirements, but that’s not just a problem of this administration. We’re still feeling the effects of the self inflicted hollowing out of the defense industry at the end of the Cold War, every defense contractor has learned that the only sane way to survive financially is to put as many bells and whistles on to their contracts as they can safe in the knowledge that the one or two other companies bidding for the contracts will be doing the exact same thing and the pentagon has lost the institutional knowledge on how to purchase systems and get anything like a good deal.

New comment by FuckButtons in "US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers"

FuckButtons — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:49:47 +0000

If you look at us military procurement over the past 20 years you will find that many, many projects have been sunk because of this exact reason.

New comment by FuckButtons in "Using precision editing to study human embryo development shows master gene"

FuckButtons — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 01:27:23 +0000

I will never understand this mindset. What exactly do you think primary scientific research is if not collecting data on questions to which you do not know the answer? How are you supposed to get data to said questions without observing the actual events? I suppose you’re sanguine with the idea of letting future generations of children be born with potentially preventable genetic disorders based on your squeamishness?