Hacker News: GavinAnderegg

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "Scorched Earth 2000 – Web"

GavinAnderegg — Thu, 14 May 2026 02:41:34 +0000

Scorched Earth taught me the concept of software versions. It was the first program that I ever knowingly interacted with more than one point-release of. I had version 1.0, but a friend had version 1.2. My very young mind was boggled by the concept of software being updated.

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

GavinAnderegg — Tue, 12 May 2026 02:27:26 +0000

I'll state it plainly, then: Python is more widely used and supported. It has more examples, and more people understand it and can debug it. I hope that helps you.

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

GavinAnderegg — Tue, 12 May 2026 02:23:26 +0000

It's strange to me that this blog post was written in English. If AI is available, why aren't we all communicating in Lojban? [0] It's an obviously superior language. What does it matter that many people already communicate in English and much of computing depends on that language? AI doesn't care about that. Plus, if you ever need to edit Lojban without AI, you should be able to pick it up in a few weeks, right?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "AI and software security: the slop is now signal"

GavinAnderegg — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:05:22 +0000

Author here: to be clear, I was trying to relay the best version of the argument from the Mozilla blog post I linked to. They specifically wrote:

    The defects are finite, and we are entering a world where we can finally find them all.

I'm not sure if I buy that either, but that's the argument they were trying to make.

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "How Cloudflare responded to the “Copy Fail” Linux vulnerability"

GavinAnderegg — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:17:14 +0000

I’ve been hit by this when posting links. If you edit the post, you can re-add the stripped word and it will stay. “Why” is another that is often stripped.

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "The Hiddn Financial Bubble in AI Infrastructure [pdf]"

GavinAnderegg — Sun, 03 May 2026 17:10:12 +0000

There's also an HTML version here: https://financial-ai-bubble.pagey.site

Utah to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs

GavinAnderegg — Sun, 03 May 2026 14:36:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/vpn/utah-becomes-first-us-state-to-target-vpn-use-with-age-verification-law

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47997358

Points: 235

# Comments: 282

Uptime Golf

GavinAnderegg — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:12:07 +0000

Article URL: https://anderegg.ca/2026/04/27/uptime-golf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927366

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "LLM pricing has never made sense"

GavinAnderegg — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:01:28 +0000

Author here. I'm not complaining or trying to talk smack. I'm just pointing out something that seems to be coming: LLM price increases or the products being degraded to make more revenue. If I knew how to solve that, I'd be insanely wealthy.

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "LLM pricing has never made sense"

GavinAnderegg — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:52:02 +0000

Author here. The reason I wrote that local hardware is "sipping power most of the time" is because most of the time it's not doing LLM-related work. If you're just using your local machine (or eventually maybe even your phone) to do local LLM tasks, you're not doing that all day.

I agree that data centres will be set up to be more efficient, but we're also going to need fewer of them if local LLMs take off. If that's true, overbuilding data centres is more revenue pressure for AI companies.

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances"

GavinAnderegg — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:38:10 +0000

Thanks for this! Seems like a bold stance… but the Online Safety Act also seems like a poor piece of legislation.

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "The future of everything is lies, I guess – Part 5: Annoyances"

GavinAnderegg — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:20:58 +0000

Is this something you're seeing personally? If so, how do you know it's because of the Online Safety Act? This is a personal blog and it doesn't seem to have any adult content that I can find. The homepage of the site isn't blocked when I check it here: https://www.blocked.org.uk/check

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "Maze Algorithms (1997)"

GavinAnderegg — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 09:10:43 +0000

The book starts with generating fairly standard mazes, but transitions to making more interesting ones in later chapters. There are 12 algorithms explained in the book (listed in the link above), and the author does care about making pleasant mazes.

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "Maze Algorithms (1997)"

GavinAnderegg — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:47:06 +0000

This is a great list! A while back I also enjoyed reading “Mazes for Programers” and playing around with different maze generation algorithms from that book over a holiday break. The book isn’t super deep, but it has a fun set of projects and further ideas/reading as well. https://pragprog.com/titles/jbmaze/mazes-for-programmers/

Apple at 50: My journey to the Mac

GavinAnderegg — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 21:17:10 +0000

Article URL: https://anderegg.ca/2026/04/01/apple-at-50-my-journey-to-the-mac

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47606677

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Make Devices Go Brrr

GavinAnderegg — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:36:16 +0000

Article URL: https://brrr.now/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47522106

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

GavinAnderegg — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:05:15 +0000

> AI is getting better/faster/cheaper at incredible rates, but regardless of when, unless you believe in magic, it's only a matter of time until we reach the point at which machine intelligence is indistinguishable from human intelligence. We call that point AGI.

I still don’t think this is certain. It’s telling that code generation is one of the few things these systems do extremely well. Translating between English and French isn’t that much different than translating between English and Python. These are both tasks where the most likely next token has a good shot of being correct. I’m still not sold that we should assume that LLM-based tech will be well-generalized beyond that. Maybe some new tech will come along to augment or replace LLMs and that will get us there, who knows. Just because the line is going up quickly at the moment doesn’t mean it always will.

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "Office.eu launches as Europe's sovereign office platform"

GavinAnderegg — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:46:24 +0000

From the FAQ on the homepage:

    What is Office EU?
    Office EU is a European productivity suite for files, email, calendars, documents and calls, built on Nextcloud Hub. It brings Files, Talk, Groupware and Office together in one platform.

Looking through the Office EU screenshots, they do look like Nextcloud Groupware/Files/Office with the logo changed.

Mostly adding this because I wasn't sure if it was a new product or not based on a first glance over the Office EU site. Nextcloud offers recommendations for providers on their site, most of which are in the EU [0]. The Office EU website seems to be new since around January of this year [1]. More managed hosts for Nextcloud is a good thing in my book, but I'd be a bit wary to host my stuff with a brand new provider.

[0]: https://nextcloud.com/providers/

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260116234614/https://office.eu...

XProtect Behavioral Flop

GavinAnderegg — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:14:02 +0000

Article URL: https://melomac.com/posts/xprotect-behavioral-flop/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47217574

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by GavinAnderegg in "My WordPress"

GavinAnderegg — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 19:09:46 +0000

This is a fully local version of WordPress running in the browser. It's based on the WordPress Playground project (https://wordpress.org/playground/), and allows for editing the WordPress files, administrating the SQLite database, and doing things like installing plugins. A really handy way to play around with the platform.