Hacker News: acjohnson55

New comment by acjohnson55 in "'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey"

acjohnson55 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:20:37 +0000

> You don't direct the action of an LLM - you make requests and it acts on its own, without your energy or continuous direction. This request/automation cycle is not wielding, it's not control, it's not continuous, it's without feedback.

There are certainly many ways of using coding agents, but the way he describes it is not my approach. There's a huge amount of direction and feedback.

I don't know if I'd call it a tool so much as a modality of building software. Within the modality, you have everything from truly unsupervised YOLO coding to something far more structured. To an extent, it's similar to how you go about setting up standard operating procedures to get teams of humans to do work at scale.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "RJ Mitte has died"

acjohnson55 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:04:44 +0000

I'm really sorry you have gone through that. I have been pretty deeply depressed a couple times in past, to the point of considering suicide. What I share with people is that in those periods, it truly felt like things weren't going to get better and I was just going to be in emotional pain indefinitely.

But gradually, things got better in my life. I have had so much joy in the 20 years since. I still have bad days sometimes, but on the whole, I feel such a sense of gratitude.

I can't promise anyone that their own situation will get better. I can only say that my experience is that it is possible.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "FlowCE: Calculus on your TI-84 Plus CE"

acjohnson55 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 21:05:22 +0000

I used to use a TI-89 in high school, which had a calculus-enabled CAS built-in. It was really handy for checking my work and for working on components of problems. And if you're in a class where the work is more applied math, like physics, it's really helpful so that you can think of the overall problem without getting bogged down in the computation.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "Typesafe AI raises $870M at $7.5B"

acjohnson55 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:48:29 +0000

For sure. It still seems pretty speculative, but that's the game.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "Typesafe AI raises $870M at $7.5B"

acjohnson55 — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:09:23 +0000

> Decision models have the potential to have an even larger impact on the Real World than LLMs have to this point (which is obviously quite large). But the model itself matters less than the product experiences you build around the model, and its very likely that the incumbent labs are treating the area as something more like "oh yeah I guess we can ship that and then forget about it" rather than investing in what building business processes on decision models looks like.

I agree that the potential is enormous, but I'm not sure why it would be Typesafe who figures out the best way to develop and package this capability. They have a bit of an advantage in the amount of time they have been thinking about this problem specifically, but I think it's a big leap to say that they will be able to dominate the category.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "The Escalation of War in Ethiopia"

acjohnson55 — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 04:00:40 +0000

Correction: I meant west Asian.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "The Escalation of War in Ethiopia"

acjohnson55 — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 11:50:32 +0000

Yeah, one of those Scotsmen is my ancestor, along with the enslaved woman he raped. And then he enslaved his own child.

Look into:

- the Mau Mau in Kenya (https://radiolab.org/podcast/mau-mau)

- prerevolutionary Haitian society from the Black Jacobins by CLR James (https://politicaleducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CL...)

- what King Leopold of Belgium did to the Congo

- what happened to Rapa Nui (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCyzrie_les)

- Heart of Darkness on British imperialism in the Congo

The cost of the socio-economic mobility provided to lower classes in colonizing societies was absolutely staggering. Unimaginable cruelty, suffering and destruction was visited upon the native populations.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "The Escalation of War in Ethiopia"

acjohnson55 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:45:12 +0000

> Which is why these countries are so much more prosperous when outsiders rule them, supressing the clan systems for anything more meritocratic.

That's generally not how colonization worked. Quite often, colonization intentionally created the large scale tribal identities. Allegiance to clans grows because of deep suspicion of extractive governments put in place by outsiders.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "The Escalation of War in Ethiopia"

acjohnson55 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:34:05 +0000

Europe didn't exist as a cultural concept at that time. There was Rome, but that was a Mediterranean empire with hugely significant southern European, east Asian, and north African components. Citizens and elites came from all parts.

Eventually, we get a Europe united under Christianity, but I wouldn't call that fully developed until the end of the Viking age.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B"

acjohnson55 — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 06:13:43 +0000

Do you know anything about whether their post-Evernote acquisitions have played out similarly?

New comment by acjohnson55 in "David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models"

acjohnson55 — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 01:20:50 +0000

Okay, so if they don't police themselves, then they're full of crap. But then what?

David Sacks holds an advisory role in the government. If all of this stuff goes belly up and all he was doing was tweeting, then he is not only full of crap, but failing the citizens he's supposed to be serving.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet"

acjohnson55 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 21:59:04 +0000

The book Seveneves is about civilization confronting impending doom from the moon exploding. I never finished the book because I felt it was depressingly realistic.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom"

acjohnson55 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 01:10:47 +0000

You might enjoy this unfinished project of mine: https://fakestory.acjay.com/

It's the culmination of years spent chasing an explanation of where all this stuff came from.

Highly informed by Tymoczko, who was mentioned in a sibling reply, and a bunch of other thinkers on the topic.

The first signs of dark matter particles may have been spotted

acjohnson55 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:01:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2587086-the-first-signs-of-dark-matter-particles-may-finally-have-been-spotted/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49531571

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by acjohnson55 in "Reverse engineering my ADHD test"

acjohnson55 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 02:38:14 +0000

This is the case for me. I finally got diagnosed last year and prescribed Ritalin this year, and it has been transformative in aiding me in getting out of ruts/stalls.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

acjohnson55 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 05:26:04 +0000

For families, do children also cost $500/mo?

New comment by acjohnson55 in "Bede Liu, a digital signal processing pioneer, has died"

acjohnson55 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:44:41 +0000

This is so sad to hear. Prof. Liu was my advisor when I did my masters degree. He was so encouraging and welcoming, and a fantastic teacher.

One of my favorite memories was when I was discussing my first semester schedule with him. I was interested in taking a high level signal processing course. I asked him if that was OK, considering I had never taken the prerequisites.

He laughed and responded, "if we accepted you to this program, it's because we thought you can do pretty much whatever you want. So maybe you'll want to go to the library and read a textbook, but sure, you can do it."

And so I did. It was tough, but I pulled it off, and it taught me I had a gear I never had to exercise up until that point.

He was a great guy.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?"

acjohnson55 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:23:54 +0000

Something I've been worried about for years is the proliferation of technologies that give ever smaller numbers of people with smaller amounts resources the ability to impact billions of people, in potentially irreversible ways. Combined with automation, this is a recipe for disaster. We're clearly lacking in the ability to regulate and govern ourselves, and real world market forces (as opposed to the hypothetical free market) encourage reckless aggressiveness at the level of companies and countries.

Although, I must admit, as a doomer, I'm pleasantly surprised things aren't already worse than they are.

New comment by acjohnson55 in "Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal"

acjohnson55 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:49:27 +0000

Airplane was an awesome product, but I think that was basically just an aquihire. I don't think Airplane had built a sustainable business.

Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

acjohnson55 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:35:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/bending-spoons-makes-first-post-ipo-acquisition-with-13-billion-airtable-deal-2026-08-04/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49173831

Points: 5

# Comments: 1