Hacker News: MDGeist

New comment by MDGeist in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

MDGeist — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:18:39 +0000

A former colleague of mine recently took a role that has largely turned out to be "greybeard that reviews the AI slop of the junior engineers". In theory it sounds workable, but the volume of slop makes thoughtful review impossible. Seems like most orgs will just put pressure on the slop generators to do more and put pressure on the approvers and then scape goat the slop approvers if necessary?

New comment by MDGeist in "How to talk to anyone and why you should"

MDGeist — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 14:48:43 +0000

I think it depends on the part of the US. In my experience, being from the south, I am used to people engaging in small talk with strangers. However, working in the northeast I find people to be very transactional until you wear them down over an extended period of time haha.

New comment by MDGeist in "IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off"

MDGeist — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 16:31:15 +0000

IBM was ahead of the boat! They had Watson on Jeopardy years ago! /s

I think you make a fair point about the potential disruption for their consulting business but didn't they try to de-risk a bit with the Kyndryl spinout?

New comment by MDGeist in "Laptops with Stickers"

MDGeist — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 17:57:51 +0000

I used to add stickers obtained from visiting my company's clients/partners to my laptop. After 5 years the laptop was basically advertising a bunch of dead brands (either through acquisition or lack of VC funding).

New comment by MDGeist in "How AWS S3 serves 1 petabyte per second on top of slow HDDs"

MDGeist — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 13:00:53 +0000

I always assumed the really slow tiers were tape.

New comment by MDGeist in "Generative AI as Seniority-Biased Technological Change"

MDGeist — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 15:55:57 +0000

Kinda feels like a lot of companies think they can be option 1 because someone else will be option 2, and then they'll hire the young people away after they become experienced.

New comment by MDGeist in "Magic Lantern Is Back"

MDGeist — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 16:37:35 +0000

Awesome thanks for the heads up! I wasn't using anamorphic lenses back when I tried ML so I'll have to give it another try now.

New comment by MDGeist in "Magic Lantern Is Back"

MDGeist — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 15:36:26 +0000

It has been many moons since I used Magic Lantern. Has anamorphic desqueeze ever been a feature or could it be in the future? That's one missing feature that bums me out about shooting videos on Canon.

New comment by MDGeist in "A visual introduction to big O notation"

MDGeist — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 20:11:15 +0000

Every time there is a thread on big O notation I'm hoping someone is going to explain something that will make it clear how it relates to the anime The Big O. I'm still trying to understand what happened in that show.

New comment by MDGeist in "How Not to Buy a SSD"

MDGeist — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 16:25:06 +0000

This is the reason I also go to Microcenter for components. It's too bad there are so few of them and Fry's is defunct. Not many brick and mortar options left.

New comment by MDGeist in "AOL to discontinue dial-up internet"

MDGeist — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 15:49:56 +0000

I had an aunt who was a hold out until this past year. She was in a rather wooded and sparsely populated area and although faster internet became available awhile ago it was much more expensive and she was already used to the limitations of dial-up so she didn't feel compelled to make the jump. If she really needed fast internet for some reason (maybe emailing an attachment) she would drive to the nearest library.

New comment by MDGeist in "Proxmox Donates €10k to the Perl and Raku Foundation"

MDGeist — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 17:24:58 +0000

Kind of wondered if that was part of the rationale for making it news. Maybe another company will say "that's all!? we can do better" and help out.

New comment by MDGeist in "Why are there no good dinosaur films?"

MDGeist — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 14:45:02 +0000

I did not entirely hate the sequels, but I feel like the Animatrix was better and kind of flies under the radar.

New comment by MDGeist in "Microservices are a tax your startup probably can't afford"

MDGeist — Thu, 08 May 2025 15:44:32 +0000

I've also seen the top down version where senior leadership like a CIO/CTO wants to put a huge "modernization" project on their resume and they don't care if it is impossible to maintain or falls over after they move on.

New comment by MDGeist in "Heart disease deaths worldwide linked to chemical widely used in plastics"

MDGeist — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 14:58:38 +0000

There was a recentish David Cronenberg movie about humans evolving to eat plastic so we'll be fine. Can't wait to chow down on plastic.

New comment by MDGeist in "Restructuring Announcement"

MDGeist — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 20:59:06 +0000

I was at a company that let people keep laptops (after they were wiped) largely because the severance was so meager it seemed they expected people to sell the laptops for some extra cash. :p

New comment by MDGeist in "Canon EF and RF Lenses – All Autofocus Motors"

MDGeist — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 15:43:42 +0000

They weren't dead to me immediately just because there are still third party RF lenses that rock, but when Sirui did the AF anamorphic lenses and I couldn't get one for my Canon then it really bummed me out. :/

New comment by MDGeist in "OpenDAW – a new holistic exploration of music creation inside the browser"

MDGeist — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 16:28:04 +0000

I think you make an interesting point about the implications of the no-VST constraint. In the earlier days of Reason (before they had VST support or even Rack Extensions) it was great because I could work on a song on any system that had just Reason installed and anyone that also had the current version could open it as is. No installing plugins and no plugin compatibility issues between users. Away from the studio for a weekend? Just install on a laptop and use the dongle, no problem!

Creatively it was very freeing. Naturally, plugin envy eventually crept in and I was glad when they did add VST support, but I miss the ease of use and portability. And you got to know the stock effects inside and out which offered some streamlining in workflow.

New comment by MDGeist in "Boring tech is mature, not old"

MDGeist — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 15:42:26 +0000

Totally agree, but how often is the young coworker using the hip new language in their position because they were told learning it was the key to getting a job in a competitive market and it is what they have to fall back on?

Somewhat similarly, I feel like the boring/mature infra often gets ripped up in favor of something hip and new by a CIO who wants a career checkmark that they "modernized" everything. Then they move on to the next company and forget the consequences of breaking what was stable.

New comment by MDGeist in "Society for Technical Communication to permanently close its doors"

MDGeist — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 21:32:08 +0000

I think mileage may have also varied based on industry and location. I eventually found my way into tech as a writer anyways, but most of the people I met via the STC were not working at tech companies. Granted it was DC so lots of defense contractors and the like.