Hacker News: TillE

New comment by TillE in "Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw"

TillE — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:21:12 +0000

All these companies are offering quite generous subscription plans if you compare to API pricing.

There's gotta be a limit; nobody can afford to have tons of users who are losing them money every month.

New comment by TillE in "Why I stopped using JSON for my APIs"

TillE — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:40:55 +0000

Google has a library/format for that too, with FlatBuffers. Different use cases and advantages really, not clearly better/worse.

New comment by TillE in "Game design is simple"

TillE — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 23:02:00 +0000

This is an extremely interesting article about game design and it's a bit silly to fixate on the title.

New comment by TillE in "Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?"

TillE — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 11:18:12 +0000

People really really want LLMs to output a highly reliable finished product, and I suspect we're probably never gonna get there. Lots of progress over the past couple years, but not on that.

I think it's much more interesting to focus on use cases which don't require that, where gen AI is an intermediate step, a creator of input (whether for humans or for other programs).

New comment by TillE in "U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China"

TillE — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:58:11 +0000

Frustratingly I can't recall specific examples, but in the past year there have been several major discussion-worthy tech stories I've seen on The Verge or wherever, and I come to HN a couple hours later and there's either literally nothing or the post got zero interaction. Strange!

New comment by TillE in "A new experimental Google app for Windows"

TillE — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 20:40:53 +0000

A ton of the early discourse about ChatGPT was as an outright Google killer. It mostly hasn't really panned out that way; there's some overlap but the web ain't dead yet. If nothing else, search is a necessary input to the machine.

Still, nice that Google has woken up, even if the search result quality hasn't improved much.

New comment by TillE in "iPhone Air"

TillE — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 23:11:07 +0000

Fentanyl is a fascinating market case study because nobody actually wants fentanyl, they want oxycodone or heroin.

It's the "market data reveals that consumers actually want the cheapest shittiest airplane tickets" of drugs. And you can read that in a couple different ways.

New comment by TillE in "Shared_ptr: the (not always) atomic reference counted smart pointer (2019)"

TillE — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 11:50:46 +0000

> VisualC++ doesn’t have its source code available

Got all the way here and had to look back up to see this post was from 2019. The MSVC standard library has been open source for several years now. https://github.com/microsoft/STL

Though to be perfectly honest, setting a breakpoint and looking at the disassembly is probably easier than reading standard library code.

New comment by TillE in "Transport for London launches campaign targeting 'headphone dodgers'"

TillE — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 21:14:32 +0000

It's certainly a socially weirder thing to do, but honestly I think someone playing music on their phone is probably less annoying/distracting than people having a loud conversation, which is far more common.

New comment by TillE in "The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful"

TillE — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 23:17:40 +0000

Space aliens are still kinda the best explanation. It's extremely inconclusive, and it's entirely possible that we'll discover some new natural phenomenon to explain it instead, but for now there's not really any known alternative.

New comment by TillE in "Cupertino must stop calling Apple Watches 'carbon neutral,' German court rules"

TillE — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 20:41:16 +0000

Apple is big and rich enough that surely it could operate its own carbon offset program, rather than simply throwing money at unreliable third parties. Buy the land, why not?

New comment by TillE in "A teen was suicidal. ChatGPT was the friend he confided in"

TillE — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 17:19:37 +0000

I would've thought that explicit discussion of suicide is one of those topics that chatbots will absolutely refuse to engage with. Like as soon as people started talking about using LLMs as therapists, it's really easy to see how that can go wrong.

New comment by TillE in "Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts"

TillE — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:50:51 +0000

Germany's discounters (ie, nearly all grocery stores) have long been hyper-efficient about checkouts. There is exactly one lane open until the line gets too long, then they open another. When the number of customers subsides, the second lane closes and the employee goes back to other tasks.

Only in recent years have self-checkouts started appearing in any significant number, and the formula hasn't changed. I guess theoretically stores might be able to cut back on employees, but it would be literally one or two people at most.

New comment by TillE in "Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?"

TillE — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:55:40 +0000

Good work with this, and the linked "special register groups" post.

I find myself intermittently fascinated with the origin and spread of certain ideas, which can often be hard to track. It's probably a bit simpler when it's a very specifically wrong idea.

New comment by TillE in "'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary"

TillE — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:38:50 +0000

I think despite having lived through it, it's easy to miss just how transformative smartphones and social media have been to human society.

There's been an absolute explosion in communication. In the early years of the internet it was pretty exciting and novel to be able to talk to people from other countries. Now it's completely unremarkable.

All this of course has a huge effect on how language develops and is used, and really we're still in the early years of it all (I guess The Smartphone Era starts around 2010 or so).

New comment by TillE in "'Tradwife', 'delulu' and 'skibidi' among new words added to Cambridge Dictionary"

TillE — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:20:24 +0000

I've definitely heard "delulu" years ago, probably floating around Twitter. There's a Wikipedia article on the word for some reason, and it supports this.

New comment by TillE in "I wasted weeks hand optimizing assembly because I benchmarked on random data"

TillE — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:17:10 +0000

Writing code is very very often a big part of understanding any new problem. It's just that you should be quite comfortable discarding that code. Refactor mercilessly and all that.

New comment by TillE in "OpenAI dropped the price of o3 by 80%"

TillE — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 23:40:21 +0000

Had a fun experience the other day asking "make a graph of [X] vs [Y]" (some chemistry calculations), and the response was blah blah blah explain explain "let me know if you want a graph of this!" Yeah ok thanks for offering.

New comment by TillE in "What was Radiant AI, anyway?"

TillE — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 15:57:44 +0000

Agreed, that's the real dream of open world RPGs: dynamic worlds. Perhaps modern AI techniques can help in that a bit, but what you really need is an incredibly intricate simulation.

New comment by TillE in "Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral"

TillE — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:50:09 +0000

Ternus generally comes across well - technically knowledgeable and a good speaker - but also he is literally the only notable Apple executive who is significantly younger than Cook.

Apple is extremely not the type of company to recruit a CEO from outside, so if Cook is doing any kind of succession planning I have to imagine it's Ternus.