Hacker News: ajs1998

New comment by ajs1998 in "DaVinci Resolve – Photo"

ajs1998 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:58:33 +0000

Is it only in the Studio version? Or the 21 Beta release? I downloaded the free version of Resolve 20 and I don't see any evidence that I can edit my raw nikon photos. The "Color" tab looks like it could be helpful if I knew how to turn my images in the media pool into "stills"

New comment by ajs1998 in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

ajs1998 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:57:33 +0000

Oh my god the PC history is hilarious

https://th.if.uj.edu.pl/~odrzywolek/homepage/personal/pc/pc_...

New comment by ajs1998 in "A perfectable programming language"

ajs1998 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:59:44 +0000

It is verso. My understanding is that it's like really fancy javadocs that makes communicating Lean code easier for everyone.

https://github.com/leanprover/verso

New comment by ajs1998 in "Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth"

ajs1998 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:11:18 +0000

It disappoints me greatly they're not raw :(

New comment by ajs1998 in "Artificial-life: A simple (300 lines of code) reproduction of Computational Life"

ajs1998 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:16:29 +0000

Awesome. I've been meaning to play around with this more after first hearing about this paper. I tried a similar automata with an even simpler representation for turing machines and there wasn't an abiogenesis moment. I guess the many no-op characters in the original paper allow for it to explore a bigger space of valid programs or to hide data without completely overwriting itself.

I would like to try alternative character encodings, including ones with fewer no-ops where most bytes are valid BF characters. Are more no-ops better? Is self replicating goo the best we can do?

New comment by ajs1998 in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)"

ajs1998 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:31:38 +0000

  Location: MO, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Maybe
  Technologies: Java, Spring, Typescript, React, GCP, MySQL
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-sweeney-a206301a8/
  Email: ajs1998@gmail.com

I've been programming since I was 13, I graduated with a Bachelor's in Computer Science, and had almost 3 years of experience as a full stack software engineer at a startup. I designed the company's CI/CD pipeline, wrote backend APIs, frontend code and styling, and database queries across about a dozen microservices. I love software engineering and I would love to do it again.

New comment by ajs1998 in "US Tech Force"

ajs1998 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 20:07:43 +0000

If you scroll to the bottom there's another image of the robot with lights/dark stripes flipped. And his head is different.

This government is a joke.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Schizophrenia sufferer mistakes smart fridge ad for psychotic episode"

ajs1998 — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:30:43 +0000

I would not go back. YouTube is a wonderful thing that I can't afford to pay for, and I don't want to live without. There are so many creators I love that would not be able to create and share beautiful things if they didn't get ad money. It's not all bad.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive"

ajs1998 — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 15:33:59 +0000

Not defending the software, but if you hand over control of your data to software that has the ability to fuck with it permanently, anything that happens to it is on you.

Don't trust the hallucination machines to make safe, logical decisions.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship"

ajs1998 — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 23:41:45 +0000

Remote work is great (for the reasons you gave and more) and saying it "sucks" made me roll my eyes, and it's reductive in the same way as saying office work "sucks." I wouldn't have had a job if in-office was the only option. It certainly didn't suck for me.

Being bad at problem solving with people far away is just another problem you can solve with practice. Same as being bad at problem solving even when help is right next to you.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Affinity Studio now free"

ajs1998 — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 20:08:43 +0000

Yeah this is driving me crazy. It must be a bug because it says "a new tab has been opened in your default browser" but my default browser is not Safari.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Formal Reasoning [pdf]"

ajs1998 — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 20:33:24 +0000

Join the Lean Zulip. There are many people interested in this.

https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/

New comment by ajs1998 in "My first week of vibecoding"

ajs1998 — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 01:42:54 +0000

I don't think there's a clear distinction between vibecoding and AI assisted coding because there's black boxes EVERYWHERE no matter how knowledgeable you are. Compilers assist me to not have to think about machine code. Web libraries and frameworks assist me to not care about networking details. AI, vibe coding or not, is all just another thing to assist the user by reducing distractions.

I think it's valuable for developers to understand more of their code rather than less, but who cares to precisely label how much they understand? If they're happy with the passing tests, comfortable making it public, and others want to contribute, then that's what matters.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Tangled, a Git collaboration platform built on atproto"

ajs1998 — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 02:32:03 +0000

After learning about ActivityPub and ATProto, people that talk about them literally cannot agree on what decentralized means.

New comment by ajs1998 in "User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality"

ajs1998 — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 23:19:36 +0000

I think Bluesky exists to demonstrate that people want the features that come with centralization without the oppressive platform lock-in. If Bluesky's moderation, TOS, UI, default feeds, etc. are intolerable to you, then you should be free to move your content and your network to an app with different moderation, TOS, feeds, etc.

Bluesky isn't marketing itself as a decentralized platform because it's not. It's an opinionated view of a decentralized network, and others are free to use differently opinionated views or make their own.

New comment by ajs1998 in "User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality"

ajs1998 — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 21:04:36 +0000

My understanding is their TOS was unclear and they clarified it after the outrage, but their moderation policy didn't actually change. They're not going ban people that break the TOS outside the S, because that's practically unenforceable.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Ask HN: What Arc/Dia features should we prioritize?"

ajs1998 — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 19:49:45 +0000

Not really. I could imagine AI-integrated docs pages being useful just from the huge volume of information available and how overwhelming it can be to learn something new.

I've used plenty of AI tools and models, local and paid, agents and chatbots, and the hallucination problem is a huge roadblock every time. I treat it like an autocomplete and I babysit its output because I have to. It just can't be trusted to give a correct answer.

I think LLMs being good at producing language is a trap. The chatbot interface is the obvious product to build around it, but it just sucks right now.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Ask HN: What Arc/Dia features should we prioritize?"

ajs1998 — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 19:17:53 +0000

I want a browser to let me do more things, not fewer. I barely trust myself to press the right buttons on a page, I certainly don't trust an AI to buy shit for me. I don't have a million tabs open because I close them when I'm done, and I don't pretend to be good at multitasking.

AI browser integration offers no value to me. I find GitHub Copilot and similar coding agents to be useful only because they can index the codebase and documentation faster than I can. There is no analogous problem AI can solve for me in the browser unless websites dramatically change how they interact with requests from AI.

I like Zen. I'm sticking with Zen.

New comment by ajs1998 in "The contrarian physics podcast subculture"

ajs1998 — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:12:29 +0000

I absolutely love Sean Carroll's podcast. He's so good at explaining things in terms most people can understand, but also not afraid to get into the weeds and spend an hour building up to a point. Also not afraid of politics or how he will be seen by taking a political stance.

He seems like a great guy on top of being an excellent communicator.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Bezier-rs – algorithms for Bézier segments and shapes"

ajs1998 — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 15:32:12 +0000

Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but this video is excellent. And her other video on Splines is also great.

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