Hacker News: aj_hackman

New comment by aj_hackman in "FBI arrests CIA official with $40M in gold bars in his home"

aj_hackman — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:00:24 +0000

I have offered you a theological counterpoint to your claim, and you may take it or leave it, but you may not call me names and continue in any kind of meaningful dialogue here. It is beneath us both.

"For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." - Matthew 5:20

New comment by aj_hackman in "Claude Opus 4.8"

aj_hackman — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:56:31 +0000

Allow me to restate my point: human beings and AI both create via synthesis, but we are the only ones capable of what we could categorize as true original thought or creativity. It could be argued that nothing we do as humans is truly original or creative either, but I would counter that with the claim that an LLM could not have created any element of the society and culture that gave birth to LLMs. Maybe in six more months.

New comment by aj_hackman in "Claude Opus 4.8"

aj_hackman — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:48:05 +0000

I could make a robotic picture coloring machine with truly superhuman capabilities - picking only the most beautiful color combinations and staying 100% in the lines while finishing entire murals in < 1 second. However, if you need a completely new and original image rendered, the machine is of only partial utility for you. It is very well possible that your cure for cancer (if that's even feasible) or whatever else you desire is a completely new picture.

We have these breathless conversations about the new AI frontier at the peril of losing sight of reality and our own human potential.

New comment by aj_hackman in "Claude Opus 4.8"

aj_hackman — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:27:21 +0000

You forget that these models are still only interpolating between human-generated datapoints fed to them. They cannot reason beyond the data they've been given, so unless everything you want to create with AI is a synthesis of prior art, you're back to relying on the stone-age human brain that created AI in the first place.

New comment by aj_hackman in "FBI arrests CIA official with $40M in gold bars in his home"

aj_hackman — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:27:01 +0000

As outlined in John 1:1, Jesus is in fact God himself, and God is something far greater and more magnificent than a humanist. The message of the Bible is a total inversion of humanism, teaching us to believe in God alone rather than ourselves for deliverance from the necessary and ultimately temporary problems of evil and suffering. It's full of stories of human beings attempting to fix things on their own and failing spectacularly (which is ironic given the history of the church).

New comment by aj_hackman in "RISC-V and Floating-Point"

aj_hackman — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:05:32 +0000

Might be an interesting read for you: https://www.gregorygaines.com/blog/emulating-ps2-floating-po...

New comment by aj_hackman in "The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It"

aj_hackman — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 18:16:53 +0000

This doesn't account for the potential instability of modern technology. If you have an efficient electric range and your neighbors are still burning wood when the power goes out, you're in dutch. This is relevant to the AI discussion, as there is still a class of people doing things "the old way", and their skills might come in clutch for a society that's let itself atrophy in convenience.

New comment by aj_hackman in "The Orange Pi 6 Plus"

aj_hackman — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:04:22 +0000

I daily drove my Raspberry Pi 5 for all of 2024. It primarily compiled tons of C++ and served 1080p video via Jellyfin, and it did so flawlessly.

New comment by aj_hackman in "Full network of clitoral nerves mapped out for first time"

aj_hackman — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:42:33 +0000

The anti-master position also willfully disregards synonymy. Just because I have mastered the English language does not mean it belongs to me. Master Splinter does not own the Ninja Turtles.

New comment by aj_hackman in "Meta acquires Moltbook"

aj_hackman — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:09:43 +0000

Is the market so bad that non-exec-level new hires are making the news?

New comment by aj_hackman in "Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19"

aj_hackman — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:29:02 +0000

`sudo cpupower frequency-set -g conservative` might help a bit with battery life.

New comment by aj_hackman in "Can you slim macOS down?"

aj_hackman — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 20:24:46 +0000

> I've recently heard that using Linux is an excuse to spend the day tinkering and ricing and do no productive work.

This is why, despite 20 years of using Linux with many successful Arch and Gentoo installs behind me, I just use Fedora or Mint. I can get a development environment set up in 15 minutes, and when everything inevitably explodes and a system update deletes glibc I haven't invested much.

New comment by aj_hackman in "Libgodc: Write Go Programs for Sega Dreamcast"

aj_hackman — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 18:38:23 +0000

It was a dream relative to anything else on the market (until 2001, when the Xbox and GameCube were released), made even easier for some titles due to the optional Windows CE SDK. You still needed to do a fair bit of SuperH assembly programming to get reasonable graphics performance, but it was nothing like the nightmarish complexity of the PS2, despite having half the RAM. It's still one of the more popular homebrew targets.

New comment by aj_hackman in "Google is dead. Where do we go now?"

aj_hackman — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 14:42:07 +0000

It's almost as if we desire each other.

New comment by aj_hackman in "No Graphics API"

aj_hackman — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 17:24:23 +0000

What happens when you want to do something very new, or very specific?

New comment by aj_hackman in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)"

aj_hackman — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 16:23:54 +0000

As bearish as I am on AI, outside of the agent deciding it only wants to play "Semi Charmed Life" and nothing else, I fail to see how this is a nightmarish hellscape in and of itself.

New comment by aj_hackman in "Jujutsu worktrees are convenient (2024)"

aj_hackman — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 20:35:18 +0000

What motivated you to move from Mercurial? I'm still using HG for personal projects because it's so easy to self-host on a Raspberry Pi. Just `hg serve -p 8001` or whatever and I'm able to use TortoiseHG from any machine to easily stage commits.

New comment by aj_hackman in "Show HN: I wrote a minimal memory allocator in C"

aj_hackman — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:47:01 +0000

Who allocates the allocator?

New comment by aj_hackman in "PHP 8.5"

aj_hackman — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 19:36:19 +0000

Python has been massive since the 2000s. When AI rolled around, it was already there, a bunch of people knew it, and it was Good Enough (tm).

New comment by aj_hackman in "OOP is shifting between domains, not disappearing"

aj_hackman — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 19:12:53 +0000

In times of old, people wrote COBOL and BASIC.