Hacker News: Joker_vD

New comment by Joker_vD in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

Joker_vD — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:26:17 +0000

My point is, when you go from hardware to software, there is a noticeable change in attitude and corresponding drop in reliability. Inside hardware, there is a lot of effort to detect and correct glitches and provide reliably correct behaviour; in software, the most common assumption is that the hardware will just work as intended. How many filesystems store checksums? Even back in the days when HDDs were way less reliable? And ECC exists in no small part because writing software that's reliable in the face of memory-corruption (at the very least can detect such corruption) while is possible, it's hard, costly, and produces less performant software (obviously).

Anyway, a larger point of my comment is that when we go from traditional software to AI, there a) seems to be an even bigger drop in reliability, b) the attitudes are even more cavalier, c) the software people largely lack most of discipline/knowledge required to build more reliable system from less reliable ones — because they spent most of their careers doing exactly the opposite: building software that they know will work incorrectly even on perfect hardware, and being fine with it. "You just tend to accept the risk", my ass. Yes, when it comes to software, people do this, but when it comes to hardware — remember when Intel messed up the division algorithm inside their chips?

New comment by Joker_vD in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

Joker_vD — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 03:59:13 +0000

> you already have buggy compilers and buggy OSes and buggy libraries.

Which run, I must add, on effectively infallible hardware. Most of the software straight up assumes that the CPUs and the RAM will function perfectly and don't bother even trying to detect such failures (unless those failures manifest themselves in a catastrophic manner, the show will simply go on).

So in effect, we also can, and do, build less reliable systems out of more reliable components, and that's how software is different.

New comment by Joker_vD in "Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses"

Joker_vD — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:17:56 +0000

I've actually looked at RFC 1034 § 3 you've mentioned in another comment, and it states

    To simplify implementations, the total number of octets that represent a
    domain name (i.e., the sum of all label octets and label lengths) is
    limited to 255.

Which, AIUI, corresponds to maximum of 253 ASCII characters (including dots) in the common "subdomain.domain.tld" string format. So "\.{1,100}@\.{1,253}" it is (because, again, it's probably very likely that I wouldn't want to interact in the first place with people who think that the local part of their e-mail having more than a hundred characters is reasonable).

New comment by Joker_vD in "Software is made between commits"

Joker_vD — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:35:15 +0000

> Having a bunch of "fixed, added, deleted" commits all pushed into main seems like a disaster of noise unless

unless you skip non-merge commits when reading the history of main. And personally, I don't remember needing to read main's history more often than probably once a year, and even then mostly out of curiosity.

Also: having a bunch of "ticket resolved" commits all pushed into main seems like a disaster of noise, compared to simple "release 203", "release 204", etc. series of commits that comprise the main. Squash even further! Just as you don't need to track every small development change inside a feature request, you don't need to track every small feature or fix inside a full release. Right? You write a changelog (if you even write them) using those 400 merge-commits, then squash it into a one commit for you release, bang, clean history.

New comment by Joker_vD in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

Joker_vD — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:10:25 +0000

I would prefer it to finally figure things out properly, and then just stop changing, yes.

> Writing CSS today has gotten significantly easier with flexbox, variables and now nesting.

Which, you know, are not some technically complicated ideas that simply could not have been done thirty years ago. Heck,

existed, and so did the algorithm that laid it out, from the outset yet getting flexbox to replicate that functionality took literal decades. And nesting is in no way more complicated to implement than cascading.

> BEM is not part of the CSS spec, that's just a design methodology.

Yes, and it existed for a reason, to paper over the deficiencies of the built-in functionality.

New comment by Joker_vD in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

Joker_vD — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:01:31 +0000

You know, this speaks volumes. Layout is a complicated business, sure, but CSS just keeps having monumental shifts in how you're supposed to approach it year after year; it's as if it's done without any overarching theory/vision but merely groping in the dark, trying things and fixes, and seeing what sticks and doesn't suck too horribly (this latter part is optional; remember Yandex's BEM?)

New comment by Joker_vD in "Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses"

Joker_vD — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 05:33:27 +0000

Realistically, people would need to go out of their way to have an e-mail with the domain part longer than a hundred ASCII characters (although considering Punycode, this limit perhaps should be more like 200, for CJK domains...) so if they do, well, it's their problem.

I just don't like the idea of allowing to paste 20 MiB-long text into the input field for what normally is a "short line of text", so there should be some upper limit.

New comment by Joker_vD in "Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses"

Joker_vD — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:59:56 +0000

    \.{1,100}@\.{1,100}

I'd probably also have a red warning line under the input field for something really fishy and also most common typos (like "gmail.con") but other than that, I'd let it through.

New comment by Joker_vD in "If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know"

Joker_vD — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:29:50 +0000

> some company where the wages are lower are going to come along, build it cheaper (not necessarily better quality either) and ship it to the world.

Yeah, it's called competition. It existed even in the socialist countries (where is was called "socialist competition/emulation").

New comment by Joker_vD in "AI misidentification results in wrongful arrest; man seeks justice"

Joker_vD — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:15:58 +0000

> The idea with a lineup is that you have some other sort of evidence, not based on how people look, and then have them identify the person

No, that's not the idea with lineups; if that was it, you could just show one photo of a single suspect and ask "Is that them?" Which, as you know, has tremendous problems with accuracy of identifications.

New comment by Joker_vD in "AI misidentification results in wrongful arrest; man seeks justice"

Joker_vD — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:08:48 +0000

> already sketchy eye witness practice.

Frankly, eyewitness' testimony should be inadmissible in court. Why does it even count as evidence at all, and "direct" evidence at that? People can't be trusted to accurately remember things. Neither can technology be trusted to uncover the circumstance correctly. Perhaps we should just abolish the criminal system entirely; wrongful prosecution is a much bigger problem than complete lack of prosecution would ever be.

New comment by Joker_vD in "Cannibalism"

Joker_vD — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:07:56 +0000

> a perfectly efficient labor market

But in a perfectly efficient market, the good would be traded at its marginal price. And the marginal price of labour is the sustenance wage, not the marginal product of labor as neoclassical economists seem to believe.

New comment by Joker_vD in "Cannibalism"

Joker_vD — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:02:53 +0000

> It only goes into the factory owner's pocket to the degree that the factory has no competitors

Nope! Marx explicitly presupposes fully free market, where everything (including labour) is bought and sold at the marginal cost. But the marginal cost of labour is less than what that labour produces — workers produce more than they get to consume, you know, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to feed the children, the elderly, the politicians, the priests, etc.

New comment by Joker_vD in "If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II"

Joker_vD — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 08:03:54 +0000

So just the same, it shouldn't make a difference if LLMs simulate "human-like attributes" or actually possess them, right?

New comment by Joker_vD in "Cannibalism"

Joker_vD — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:32:40 +0000

> Instead, it brought 16 hour factory shifts.

To paraphrase Marx, "And so, the equivalent amount of labour required to produce the goods needed to sustain a worker for a day is, say, 4 hours. But that doesn't mean the selfsame worker can work for no longer that 4 hours! He can be forced to work six, or eight, or twelve hours a day, and whatever additional goods he produces — that's the surplus product, which in this case goes straight to line up the factory owner's pockets".

New comment by Joker_vD in "Win16 Memory Management"

Joker_vD — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:27:51 +0000

> the Unix dynamic linking model

What? It's just like static linking! Only, you know, we do it at load time. At least the filenames of the shared objects to load are included into the executable — we could instead just load and search the whole of /usr/lib in unspecified order, you know!

New comment by Joker_vD in "If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II"

Joker_vD — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:04:21 +0000

Because computers don't actually do arithmetic, they simulate it. When you take 2 sticks, add 2 sticks, and obtain 4 sticks, that's arithmetic. Having a raised flag with one lowered flag to the right and the left of it and then changing this configuration to having a single raised flag with two lowered flags right to it, and interpreting this charade as having added 2 to 2 and obtained 4 — that's just a simulation. It didn't actually have added 2 and 2 of anything.

New comment by Joker_vD in "The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy"

Joker_vD — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 05:56:41 +0000

> Many people seem to want democracy, but only if the public votes in the way that is acceptable to them.

Well, many people claim they want democracy, due to how our modern political discourse is shaped. But the amount of arguments of essentially "of course you can have any opinion, as long as it's the correct one" I've seen is quite astonishing.

New comment by Joker_vD in "If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II"

Joker_vD — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:44:57 +0000

"A human brain runs a perfect model of human consciousness. Some people make the mistake of supposing that that makes human brains somehow conscious."

New comment by Joker_vD in "If LLMs Have Human-Like Attributes, Then So Does Age of Empires II"

Joker_vD — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 22:17:51 +0000

Huh, makes you wonder — is the human brain a sufficiently-powerful substrate to present human-like attributes?