Hacker News: LiamPowell

New comment by LiamPowell in "Surface Laptop Ultra"

LiamPowell — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:34:27 +0000

I don't think I've ever seen LLM output as bad as this output. They sometimes write like that, but not every second sentence.

New comment by LiamPowell in "Surface Laptop Ultra: Made for World Makers"

LiamPowell — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 08:10:07 +0000

What's this nonsensical video on the product page that allegedly shows an "all new thermal system"? https://videos.ctfassets.net/jy9s7k22hbg4/44R1LH71xb8uO4c9dD...

New comment by LiamPowell in "Surface Laptop Ultra"

LiamPowell — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:59:30 +0000

LLMs are not yet capable of generating the level of marketing wankery seen here.

New comment by LiamPowell in "Add a Prototype Agents.md File"

LiamPowell — Fri, 22 May 2026 11:34:43 +0000

TLDR:

> SQLite does not (currently) accept agentic code. However the project will accept agentic bug reports that include a reproducible test case. Patches or pull requests demonstrating a possible fix, for documentation purposes, are welcomed.

Add a Prototype Agents.md File

LiamPowell — Fri, 22 May 2026 11:34:13 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/commit/a1e5778889252d2609a59fd9b819d70392c5789e

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234459

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

New comment by LiamPowell in "GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension"

LiamPowell — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:53:06 +0000

Extensions never had to be given unsandboxed access to everything. That's a choice that they actively made.

New comment by LiamPowell in "Two computers, one monitor, zero fiddling (2025)"

LiamPowell — Tue, 19 May 2026 07:39:19 +0000

When did KVM switches get so expensive? Level1Techs doesn't appear to be much more expensive than the competition, but the margin on all of these has to be absurd. They're not a particularly niche product and the BOM cost is only going to be $20 at most (a TMUXHS4612 is $1 for reference).

I'm amazed that there's not more competition bringing the price down here.

New comment by LiamPowell in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"

LiamPowell — Sat, 09 May 2026 10:19:32 +0000

Trivially the answer is yes by the infinite monkey theorem. If we allow the sampler to pick any token then any stream of arbitrary tokens can be generated. Therefore if an original idea can be represented with written words then a LLM can generate it. That is perhaps not the most satisfying answer, but if you want a better one you'll need to provide a function that determines if an idea is original.

New comment by LiamPowell in "StarFighter 16-Inch"

LiamPowell — Wed, 06 May 2026 09:03:01 +0000

Why are "premium" laptop vendors still putting vents on the bottom of their machines? Did they never try actually putting their laptop on their laps and realise how much that design sucks?

New comment by LiamPowell in "Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?"

LiamPowell — Sat, 02 May 2026 07:00:43 +0000

2×? Try 5× for the Noctua NF-A12x25 compared the the Arctic P12 Pro that matches or beats it in most metrics. Which isn't to say the Noctua fan is bad, it's just a luxury product for reasons other than performance.

New comment by LiamPowell in "Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?"

LiamPowell — Sat, 02 May 2026 06:29:05 +0000

Last I checked they weren't really any quieter than their competitors at the same airflow and pressure (which is a little subjective because your curve will never match perfectly). They do have a really low number on their specs because they have a really low max RPM, but that's not really relevant when you can just lower the speed of other fans.

They're still really good fans, but a lot of this is just marketing.

At max power the Noctua NF-A12x25 has 56 CFM and 2.3 mmAq for 31dBA [1]. At 70% the Artic A12 Pro is 56 CFM, 4.3 mmAq, and 31dBA [2]. At 60% the Asus ProArt PF120 is 61 CFM, 2.6 mmAq, and 30 dBA [3].

Note that the ProArt is a bit thicker (25 vs 30 mm) and all these dBA numbers are almost certainly unobstructed airflow. The Noctua is certainly good, but it's literally over 5× the price of the Artic.

[1]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/4/

[2]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/175/

[3]: https://www.cybenetics.com/evaluations/fans/229/

New comment by LiamPowell in "Why does it take so long to release black fan versions?"

LiamPowell — Sat, 02 May 2026 06:24:46 +0000

It's par for the course in the premium PC parts industry. It's overkill in a way that does not impact performance at all because gamers will pay for that.

New comment by LiamPowell in "Where the goblins came from"

LiamPowell — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 06:19:06 +0000

The very simplified answer is that the models are first trained on everything and then are later trained more heavily on golden samples with perfect grammar, spelling, etc..

New comment by LiamPowell in "Patch applies fake diffs from commit messages"

LiamPowell — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:40:03 +0000

This has come up multiple times before [1], and more generally it's come up hundreds of times with Unix style tools in general. It's always been a stupid idea for every tool to have its own barely documented file format.

This wouldn't be an issue if patches were XML or JSON with a well defined schema, but everything must be a boutique undocumented format in the world of Unix tools.

Maybe the worst part about this is that it can entirely come from a patch being exported by git and then imported straight back in to git. If you can't even handle your own undocumented format then what hope do other tools have that want to work with it?

[1]: https://mas.to/@zekjur/116022397626943871

New comment by LiamPowell in "An update on GitHub availability"

LiamPowell — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:31:36 +0000

I can not figure out what on Earth they've done with these graphs, it almost seems like these are an artists impression of a graph.

Looking at the commit graph: Why do commits have big steps followed by slow rolloffs? Why do the steps not happen at uniform points Why do larger steps sometimes have less of a slope than smaller steps but not all the time?

Then looking at the other graphs there's completely different effects going on.

New comment by LiamPowell in "Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training"

LiamPowell — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 06:33:49 +0000

Those are legitimate grievances as mentioned, what they are not is Palantir themselves collecting massive amounts of data, which is often what they're portrayed as doing and what the GP asked about.

New comment by LiamPowell in "[dead]"

LiamPowell — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:07:47 +0000

Title does not match the title on the page, or even the content on the page for that matter:

> Screen captures are ephemeral and will only be saved temporarily on your computer.

New comment by LiamPowell in "Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training"

LiamPowell — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:57:17 +0000

> Does Palantir collect data or just analyze aggregated purchased data?

Neither. Palantir makes data management software, they've never been in the business of collecting or analysing data themselves at all. There's generally a fundamental misunderstanding online of what Palantir actually does.

Any time you see an article or comment saying something along the lines of "Palantir is stealing your data", consider if it makes sense when you replace Palantir with MySQL, if it doesn't then it's generally safe to assume that article is garbage.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons to have grievances with Palantir, but they're completely drowned out by nonsense.

New comment by LiamPowell in "Sudo for Windows (2024)"

LiamPowell — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 04:21:54 +0000

It's wget for Windows all over again, just like with wget there's absolutely zero arguments shared between the two that do the same thing.

New comment by LiamPowell in "FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account"

LiamPowell — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 10:47:31 +0000

They're not trying. I've seen an advertiser remain active for months with literally tens of thousands of ads where clicking them directly downloads a malicious exe file that most antivirus scanners flag.