Hacker News: alchemism

New comment by alchemism in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

alchemism — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 23:23:28 +0000

Mmmmhmmm. Ah yes 1921, the year both the Klu Klux Klan (and European Fascism) metastasized in society. All immigration controls come from a rather interesting, dark place; shifting of the Overton Window, and all that.

New comment by alchemism in "The Art and Beauty of Blade Runner (2015)"

alchemism — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 05:44:05 +0000

The highlight of my summer was Blade Runner Live At the Acropolis. The movie was shown in the ancient theater with a live orchestra performing Vangelis.

They may have a global tour of it in some places this fall.

New comment by alchemism in "I'm becoming AI-blind"

alchemism — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 05:10:09 +0000

I tend to think of it in reverse: not that LLMs are intelligent, but that humans are more empty than we…think we are.

New comment by alchemism in "Don't Paste the AI, please"

alchemism — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:06:10 +0000

Don’t use a calculator, either.

New comment by alchemism in "Don't Paste the AI, please"

alchemism — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:04:15 +0000

If I’m answering your question, and you are not directly paying me for being an information desk, you are definitely getting the AI reply.

New comment by alchemism in "Don't Paste the AI, please"

alchemism — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 10:58:44 +0000

Half the audience perceives it as AI anyway. Does it matter if you spend the time or do not spend the time to write it? The result is the same.

New comment by alchemism in "Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?"

alchemism — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:15:13 +0000

This seems the right place in the discussion to mention The Gervais Principle, a legendary piece of business writing if you haven't heard of it. https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

New comment by alchemism in "How Organizations Use AI: Evidence from ChatGPT [pdf]"

alchemism — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:51:37 +0000

If orgs don’t want to pay for tools, that’s on them. Aka “Shadow IT.”

New comment by alchemism in "Lovable raises $400M Series C"

alchemism — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:54:04 +0000

To be fair, I doubt a job role would include the name of a specific product. A business posts a hiring ad for a Graphic Artist, not for an Adobe Photoshop Artist.

New comment by alchemism in "Termixer (TUI DJ Mixer)"

alchemism — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 20:14:19 +0000

Cool! Plz do VJing next

New comment by alchemism in "US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search"

alchemism — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:31:04 +0000

There is an excellent monologue in the middle of The Hateful Eight on this subject.

New comment by alchemism in "Can a MUD evaluate LLMs? A $99 proof of concept"

alchemism — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 18:50:52 +0000

Well now, you've given me an excellent idea for how to speed up development in my vibecode MUD reboot.

New comment by alchemism in "I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens"

alchemism — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:02:55 +0000

Enterprises running in public clouds have Zero Data Retention policies with the vendor. Routing the ai spend through Azure or AWS usually bring these policies along with it, ie enterprise data and useage is not ingested to retrain the model.

New comment by alchemism in "GPT-5.6"

alchemism — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:40:01 +0000

It’s almost as complex as compiling software for different runtime environments; it requires a knowledge artifact repository and publishing system, e.g. https://github.com/thinkingsage/context-bazaar

New comment by alchemism in "Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again"

alchemism — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:18:04 +0000

…young children have immense neural plasticity while adults, especially 40+, have little.

New comment by alchemism in "Completing a computer science degree on Coursera"

alchemism — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 04:07:16 +0000

Congrats! I am also an autodidact who desired a stronger school name on my resume after a long run in startups, so I took a senior engineering role at Johns Hopkins.

I'm not affiliated with the engineering school or familiar with their curriculum. It may not be as famous as the schools of medicine or public health, but in general they are quite good.

New comment by alchemism in "“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky"

alchemism — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 07:48:44 +0000

You mean like the British Empire? ....The Spanish Empire maybe?

The only modern contender, the Japanese Empire, arose partly by the encouragement of Teddy Roosevelt.

New comment by alchemism in "“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky"

alchemism — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 04:19:59 +0000

Fun fact: a successful invasion of the North American continent has very little to do with weaponry and more to do with logistics and projection of force across an ocean. There is only one superpower with the capabilities to do it at all.

New comment by alchemism in "Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research"

alchemism — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 04:47:54 +0000

...and if you aren't pronouncing it "Var" you might be one ;-)

New comment by alchemism in "No LLM Code in Dependencies"

alchemism — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:10:47 +0000

It's a fair comparison. There's a fair amount of plausible-sounding bullshit being peddled as a transparent advertisement for an ai-driven "code security" firm.