Hacker News: alexchengyuli

New comment by alexchengyuli in "Tin Can, a 'landline' for kids"

alexchengyuli — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:27:04 +0000

Funny enough, China already ran this experiment. Kids' smartwatches started as call-only devices for safety. Then they added friend lists, status updates, like counts, popularity rankings. Little Genius now has 48% of the global kids' smartwatch market [1]. Kids delete real-life friends for not having enough likes on the watch. Once a device enters a kid's social life, there's no market incentive to keep it simple.

[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3328227/move-o...

New comment by alexchengyuli in "PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading"

alexchengyuli — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:16:37 +0000

Sadly many people wouldn't even notice 500MB anymore. That's kind of the point. A PS2 game was 4GB. Now a single update patch is 50GB. Software stopped being designed for everyone a long time ago. It's just more obvious when it's a 500MB article about RSS readers.

New comment by alexchengyuli in "A Copy-Paste Bug That Broke PSpice AES-256 Encryption"

alexchengyuli — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:31:50 +0000

A 4-byte key and a 32-byte key both produce output that looks like ciphertext. Unlike most bugs, crypto bugs don't produce visible errors. That's why this one survived 12 years.

New comment by alexchengyuli in "Are AI Agents like von Hammerstein's industrious and stupid?"

alexchengyuli — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 11:09:47 +0000

Hammerstein's matrix works because armies have rank, evaluation, and consequences. The classification is useful because there's a system behind it that can observe, judge, and act.

But if "stupid" just means can't adapt and repeats what it's told, that's every script and cron job ever deployed. We used to call that automation. Humans can be stupid too, and we don't fire all of them. We put reviews, audits, and liability around them.

AI agents have none of that. A junior dev who breaks prod gets a postmortem. An agent that modifies 50 files gets a git revert. The problem isn't stupidity. It's that there's no structure around it.

New comment by alexchengyuli in "Thinking Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning"

alexchengyuli — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 10:56:20 +0000

The paper puts AI next to System 1 and 2, but those are ways you think. With AI the thinking still happens, you just can't see or control it anymore.

When you googled something and got five contradictory results, that told you the question was hard. A clean AI answer doesn't give you that signal. Coherence looks the same whether the answer is right or wrong.

The failure mode didn't get worse. It got quieter.