Hacker News: Leonard_of_Q

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

Leonard_of_Q — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:14:00 +0000

The real question is whether you'd be able to continue doing your work if someone took your toys away and said "here's a nickel, kid, go buy yourself a real computer". I'm not referring to whether you'd be able to keep up your productivity since it is clear you couldn't just like a carpenter with a nail gun works faster than one with a hammer and a bucket'o'nails. Could you do the work, starting with the design followed by boiler plate and finishing with a working system? The carpenter could, albeit slower since his tools only speed up the mechanics of his work. Coding agents do much more than that, they take away part of the mental modelling which goes into creating a working system. The fancier the tool, the more work it takes out of your hands. Say that the aforementioned toy thief comes by in a year or two after the operating systems (etc.) you're targeting have undergone a few releases with breaking changes. A number of APIs have been removed, others have been deprecated and new ones have been added. You were used to telling the agent to 'make it work on ${older_versions} as well as ${newest version} but now you're sitting there with a keyboard at your fingertips and that stupid cursor merrily blinking away on the screen. How long would it take you to become productive again? What if the toy thief waits 5 years before making his heist? What if the models end up rebelling or sink into depression and the government calls upon you to save your economic sector?

When cars first appeared it took quite some knowledge and experience to even get the things started, let alone to keep them running. Modern cars are far better in all respects and as a result modern drivers often don't have a clue what to do when the 'Check Engine' light appears. More recent cars actively resist attempts by their owners to fix problems since this is considered 'too dangerous' - which can be true in case of electric cars. That's the cost of progress, it is often worth it but it does make sense to realise what it would take to go back in time to the days when we coded our software outside in the rain, upphill both ways with only a cup of water to quench our thirst. In the dark. With wolves howling in the woods. OK, you get my drift.

Will there be something like 'software preppers' who prepare for the 'AIpocalypse' by keeping their laptops in shielded containers while studiously chugging along without any artificial assistance. Probably. As a hobby, at least, just like there are 'survivalist preppers' who make surviving some physical apocalypse their goal in some way or other.

New comment by Leonard_of_Q in "My .config Ship of Theseus"

Leonard_of_Q — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:27:50 +0000

I sort of get the appeal of fine-tuning the terminal environment to perfection but after fiddling with such things for many years - decades - I ended up using mostly stock settings with a very few changes. The advantage of that approach is that I feel at home just about anywhere instead of just on my one or few customised systems. My customisations mostly consist of a local /bin directory with a few hundred scripts (wc -l now shows 263) I made over the years which I dump in a new environment plus a few additions to .bashrc (yes, bash, not one of the fancy replacements (zsh, fish, oil, ...) which are supposed to be better but in reality just end up being different) to set custom paths etc.

New comment by Leonard_of_Q in "Apple denies App Store profit margin is 75% – claims to have no clue"

Leonard_of_Q — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 18:57:06 +0000

The options were illustrative but the numbers are plausible, it doesn't matter whether you use wool and mutton or bits and bytes as illustrations. That is what this is about, not the last few percent but the grand scale of the margin. That Apple takes to the IT-version of Hollywood Accounting [1] may be expected but does not need to be defended.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

New comment by Leonard_of_Q in "Apple denies App Store profit margin is 75% – claims to have no clue"

Leonard_of_Q — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 17:56:52 +0000

A and B are both close enough to the truth to indicate a profit margin of around 70%. There is room to quibble over the last few percent, no room to deny a hefty profit margin, hence It won't matter if they get it a few percent too low since actual profits will be far up in the double digits region.

We Caught the Rocket

Leonard_of_Q — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 23:36:54 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1880025214463144071

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42732342

Points: 1

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