Hacker News: Zarathruster

New comment by Zarathruster in "Dots: Always-on agents"

Zarathruster — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:21:26 +0000

I've seen Claude subagents hack their own RAM reports to give themselves "more memory" to do their tasks... subsequently causing the computer to crash. I assure you, nobody told them to do this

New comment by Zarathruster in "Contrastive Language Models"

Zarathruster — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:23:10 +0000

This is gonna be the new "I'm more of a left-brained person" thing isn't it

New comment by Zarathruster in "Google Antigravity introduces Boost deep reasoning (/boost)"

Zarathruster — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 03:58:25 +0000

I'm on AI Pro. Quality is obviously not on par with Codex/Claude, but I can't complain about quantity. It feels much closer to the usage limits we had before the big nerfs.

New comment by Zarathruster in "WorldClaw Agentic 3D open-world generation at scale"

Zarathruster — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:25:54 +0000

| do drum skins "groan"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmlK94QvwiA

New comment by Zarathruster in "Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6"

Zarathruster — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:16:09 +0000

I've found that Claude nearly always claims to be Opus in the commit message, regardless of the actual model making the commit.

New comment by Zarathruster in "Dostoyevsky isn't difficult"

Zarathruster — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 03:49:11 +0000

I've taken several stabs at it over the years but I always give up in exhaustion. It feels badly in need of an editor, not that anyone would dare. Maybe this is a consequence of the format: it was released serially in chapters to a literary periodical over the span of a couple years. It certainly would've been nice to trim away some of the side characters and ecclesiastical debates for a more focused read, but we got what we got.

New comment by Zarathruster in "LLMs Are Complicated Now"

Zarathruster — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 17:49:26 +0000

I assume that the bitterness of the bitter lesson is not for engineers but for subject matter experts. I can only imagine how it would feel to discover that your decades of hard-earned expertise don't amount to a whole lot when it comes to domain-specific ML modeling, compared to simply throwing more compute at the problem.

New comment by Zarathruster in "Unity vs. Floating Point"

Zarathruster — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:16:17 +0000

Within a meter or so, maybe a little more at times? But yeah I had an intuition that it was subnormal shenanigans, but didn't spend too long trying to diagnose, since it was easy enough to move everything a few meters offset.

New comment by Zarathruster in "Unity vs. Floating Point"

Zarathruster — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:14:08 +0000

It was a prototype for a VR game in which you toss objects and I never drilled down far enough to see the implementation, since I just used the sample prefabs that come with the XR Interaction Toolkit. If you ever tossed anything in the vicinity of the origin, the object's trajectory would swerve towards it. Weirdly I couldn't reproduce the behavior when running the scene with a first-person controller in non-VR, so maybe a bug within that toolkit or something.

New comment by Zarathruster in "Unity vs. Floating Point"

Zarathruster — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:02:26 +0000

Interesting. When I first got started with Unity I found really buggy behavior if you do any kind of physics calculations near world origin (0, 0, 0). It has a weird gravity well effect if you get too near it. I never found a satisfactory explanation for it but maybe this is it.

New comment by Zarathruster in "Dwarf Fortress in the Browser"

Zarathruster — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:23:56 +0000

If we're fair, this is one of the better examples. It looked reasonably useful until it got to the 'CI / GitHub Actions' section. Many readmes take a very long time to describe anything useful, like how to get started or even what exactly the software is.

New comment by Zarathruster in "Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games"

Zarathruster — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:34:19 +0000

I recently tried to learn gamedev with Claude as a tutor of sorts. It didn't end well. Claude confidently led me off a cliff and I had throw the whole thing in the trash. It seems there's just no shortcut around learning stuff the hard way. When I've got enough reps in to be able to tell smart vs. stupid decisions, I imagine it'll be a lot more useful, but at this point I suspect AI is far from being good enough to get us into your described Dark Ages.

New comment by Zarathruster in "Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games"

Zarathruster — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:24:15 +0000

The conversation around AI in games is such a polluted mess of confusion and bad faith. I would hate to have to answer such an interview question.

Recently I came across a game on Steam that was getting review-bombed because the devs admitted to using AI on an entirely different game. By "using AI" I mean they admitted to using Cursor of all things. Not assets, just a coding assistant.

If we're going to get backlash for stuff as stupid as this, it's probably best to just keep one's entirely mouth shut about all things AI.

New comment by Zarathruster in "Nvidia partners with LG robotics to build humanoid robots in South Korea"

Zarathruster — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:05:54 +0000

Goons never die, they just go to HN and regroup

New comment by Zarathruster in "Major P2P issues in Israel and possibly other Middle East countries"

Zarathruster — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:05:57 +0000

I go to EGS once a week or so just to see which free game is on offer, and the experience is only barely tolerable.

If you're giving away free games and can barely manage to attract people to your storefront, you might be doing something wrong.

In their defense I suppose, most other competitors weren't much better. I don't think anyone misses Origin, and you'd have to pay me to spend any amount of time on Ubisoft's storefront. Only GOG comes close, and they earn a lot of good will in other ways.

New comment by Zarathruster in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

Zarathruster — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:48:55 +0000

Yeah pretty hard to imagine Claude making sense of BYOB

New comment by Zarathruster in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

Zarathruster — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:23:40 +0000

Can confirm- I took both of those classes and don't remember any math beyond big O, which only technically counts.

New comment by Zarathruster in "The Melancholy of Slaying Monsters"

Zarathruster — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:02:01 +0000

The praise heaped on Spec Ops makes me embarrassed for games as a medium. This is a game that forces you to commit mass murder in order to progress the storyline, pretends that something profound has just been demonstrated, and then tries to guilt trip you about it for the rest of the experience. It's a mess of dumb, trite, "war is hell" cliché and I wish we would collectively forget about it.

New comment by Zarathruster in "Accelerating Gemma 4: faster inference with multi-token prediction drafters"

Zarathruster — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:01:34 +0000

Where are you using it? Is Gemini CLI at a usable state? It was a frustrating, miserable experience last time I gave it a shot.

Antigravity seems significantly better in comparison, but with lower usage limits. If I run out, I usually don't bother switching to Gemini CLI.

New comment by Zarathruster in "Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence"

Zarathruster — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:21:24 +0000

> Since this was mostly contained within one city (Detroit)

It's concentrated in Detroit but also distributed throughout the state, as you can observe in the census.gov slides.

The devastation is regional. It's been a wild experience, watching it all fall apart over the last 40+ years. The decay is immense and impossible to convey to someone from a rich state. Someone from the Eastern Bloc might get it, but I've never been able to communicate it to a Californian. Hop in a car and drive from town to town. Once-prosperous communities are boarded up and gradually reclaimed by nature. Department stores are converted into soup kitchens or marijuana dispensaries.

"Things will work themselves out" is not a law of nature, unless we broaden our definition of "things working out" to include outcomes like "everyone young enough flees, everyone else clutches their savings until they eventually die impoverished."

But with AI, even outcomes like that might be overly optimistic. Where will young people flee to? Where can they go, what trade can they learn, to be safe enough to eventually die in comfort?

When I look at Michigan I see both the past and the future, and I am planning accordingly.