Hacker News: andrewstuart2

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "AI is making me dumb"

andrewstuart2 — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:22:51 +0000

I have ADHD and have done quite a bit of reading and study on it, so I'm pretty familiar with how dopamine and dopamine disorders work. I've also been in the workforce as a software engineer long enough to have done some really hard things. So my life and career have both been plenty challenging lol.

And I'm not alone here. Like I said, I was discussing this with a bunch of friends who are also quite senior and accomplished in their engineering careers, and the sentiment was familiar for us all.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "God Damn AI is making me dumb"

andrewstuart2 — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:49:54 +0000

I was talking to some friends about this over drinks the other day. I feel it has the same effects as any drug (or behavior) that triggers dopamine. If I can get a dopamine hit for lower effort AI in 10 minutes, and maybe a tiny bit better of a hit doing it myself after a day, why would my brain go for anything but AI? Especially when my DIY muscles are a bit atrophied.

And of course the hedonic treadmill (if that's even valid any more, IDK) has reset the baseline so that anything less than the quick gratification feels like nothing. It makes the stuff I used to absolutely love feel like more of a chore compared to just cranking out features with code only an AI can love.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

andrewstuart2 — Mon, 11 May 2026 23:31:04 +0000

I'm on board with your gut that this feels more YOLO than careful but to be fair, in the engineering world fly by wire is very much precedented. I'm specifically thinking of the B2 bomber where it's essentially unflyable without a computer between the inputs and the outputs. Partially just keeping the plane from turning into a frisbee by reacting faster than a human possibly could, but also treating the controls inputs as the intent and manipulating the control surfaces programmatically in order to make that work. It's not quite the same thing of course but I think there's some carryover.

Still. Not a huge fan of this announcement or the general ways the landscape is evolving these days.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "F-35 is built for the wrong war"

andrewstuart2 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:46:39 +0000

One thing you and the OP are not addressing is that most of these modern tactics are also necessitated by the fact that building an air force, navy, or cavalry that can beat modern superpowers is just a complete non-starter.

I'm not so sure the F-35 is built for the wrong war as much as the war would probably call for the F-35 if it didn't already exist.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Claude Opus 4.7"

andrewstuart2 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:09:15 +0000

You know, that's also true. I am where I am because I'm stubborn AF and just keep hacking on things until they work. Maybe one of the biggest differences is just ego, lol.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Claude Opus 4.7"

andrewstuart2 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 23:13:57 +0000

Honestly I feel sometimes like about the only thing they do successfully is hacking. Not just in the sense of breaking into systems that are assumed to be secure although also in that sense. They're just, highly effective at fumbling around with a hatchet until something works. We just happen to have version control and automated testing that generally makes that approach somewhat viable for the task of programming. But while I've been genuinely impressed at how much it can put features into a workable state, I've never been confident looking at its output that it's going to do more than POC quality at the current state of things. But it's pretty dang effective at that given enough time and a space safe to hack away and reset until the product looks close enough.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Backpacks got worse on purpose"

andrewstuart2 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:35:05 +0000

I mean, it's a post a week. I think that's pretty plausible. The worst part of this era is just not knowing if I'm reading generated output or genuine human thought.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview's cyber capabilities"

andrewstuart2 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:04:07 +0000

The great irony is that now that Splunk audit trail will probably end up being consumed by LLMs on the lookout for threat actors who are probably also using LLMs to attempt intrusions.

It's a great time to be selling GPUs.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Lunar Flyby"

andrewstuart2 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:55:15 +0000

Yeah, gives me very similar vibes to the famous "pale blue dot."

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]"

andrewstuart2 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:10:32 +0000

I'm getting flashbacks to the 2018 hit:

    This is extremely dangerous to our democracy

We evolved to share information through text and media, and with the advent of printing and now the internet, we often derive our feelings of consensus and sureness from the preponderance of information that used to take more effort to produce. Now we're now at a point where a disproportionately small input can produce a massively proliferated, coherent-enough output, that can give the appearance of consensus, and I'm not sure how we are going to deal with that.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market"

andrewstuart2 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:09:45 +0000

Finally, good efficient code is going to get its moment to shine! Which will totally happen because it's not like 80% of the industry is vibe coding everything, right?

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run"

andrewstuart2 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 21:42:53 +0000

My main complaint about the project changes we've seen lately is that these companies are happy to take all the code that previous contributors have written for free in good faith, and profit off of it without any sharing. The whole reason I and many people have contributed to some of the projects out there is under the premise that I've been given something great/useful for free so I'm going to give back for free. If you want to create a project that's source-available or whatever you want to call it, from the start, you'll probably even get my support.

Sure, it's totally legal for the company to change how they operate in the future. But it burns all that good faith of previous contributions in favor of profit. And so yeah, I hope the companies that pull this crash and burn in proportion to how much free code they accepted from contributors that they now wish to profit from.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

andrewstuart2 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:31:04 +0000

I tried that recently and it didn't seem to work with my particular setup (Sway window manager). Or at least, the tray app won't open any windows to see if it's enabled/disabled/configured properly.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?"

andrewstuart2 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 01:06:31 +0000

My experience lately has been similar. Most things work well now.

But, I think the article has some valid points about how long it's taken to get even this far. And it just kinda sucks that some things are still broken or don't have alternatives (the #1 thing I miss right now is Barrier (Synergy) for using my macbook from my linux desktop). HDR gaming on linux is possible thanks to Valve but it's still nowhere near as simple as plugging in your HDR display and toggling one switch.

And it's been rough getting here, and it seems like there are still some things that are slow and hard to get right. I'm not a display protocol dev, so I don't really have educated opinions about the protocol. But I know it's been a rough transition relative to other projects I've adopted even when there was major pushback (systemd springs to mind).

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers"

andrewstuart2 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:40:53 +0000

As a certified graybeard (just literally graying on my beard now) who now prefers the CLI, I am SO GLAD that tools like this exist. I owe probably all of my high job satisfaction and higher income to the fact that I got to play around with Linux via Ubuntu (and Compiz Fusion via CCSM) and later Webmin and other tools I eventually played around with. I learned so much without realizing I'd be using it later, though IIRC it involved much swearing and gnashing of teeth. It's crazy to think that 20 years later so much of it comes naturally. Though I'm still learning just as much (with just as much swearing at the computer usually) every day.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk"

andrewstuart2 — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:57:46 +0000

Crossing red lines for previous administrations is clearly a goal at this point.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "AirSnitch: Demystifying and breaking client isolation in Wi-Fi networks [pdf]"

andrewstuart2 — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:29:11 +0000

Yeah, this is a much clearer source and the abstract gets pretty directly to the point. The first paragraph tells you pretty much everything you need to know before you read more. The Ars article took 4 paragraphs to mention "client isolation" and even longer to get into the meat.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"

andrewstuart2 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:47:23 +0000

The problem was always the platform. For me, I saw very early on that kubernetes was exactly what I wanted after reading about how Google "treats the datacenter like one large computer." And I've been very happily running my own side projects on my own home cluster for 10 ish years (my kube-system namespace is 9y old). But selling any of my employers on this was a very hard proposition until enough people had shown it working at that scale.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Nvidia is about to challenge 'Intel Inside' with as many as eight Arm laptops"

andrewstuart2 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 06:42:19 +0000

Apple does a decent job off challenging Intel with just a few laptops. I suppose it depends on your definition of laptop vs specs. Kinda hard to find out what they mean in TFA with the paywall.

New comment by andrewstuart2 in "Wine-Staging 11.1 Adds Patches for Enabling Recent Photoshop Versions on Linux"

andrewstuart2 — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 16:59:54 +0000

I'd be pretty thrilled if I could run Lightroom on Linux. Photoshop is great too but Lightroom is my main app for my biggest hobby and I've had to buy myself a whole MacBookPro just to do it without dual booting Windows, which really raises the mental barrier for me to jump in and edit photos, which makes me want to take them a lot less.

I've tried Darktable and it's pretty impressive software and could probably handle most of my needs. But apparently I'm now that old guy who's been using software X for 20 years and refuses to change his ways because it's not worth it. At least when it comes to Lightroom.