Hacker News: aposm

New comment by aposm in "LLM Voice"

aposm — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 01:38:35 +0000

This, to me, is the strongest evidence that even with all the money frontier labs are throwing into pushing the boundaries of model training and fine tuning, they still don't actually understand what they're doing & don't have as much control as they want you to believe. If they had any real ability to tune & adjust the model & its output, they would have fixed "LLM voice" by now.

Even if you don't think it's a problem, even if you believe that it's just different than human writing, it seems the majority of "regular" people can tell when something is LLM-written and find it distasteful or unpleasant to read, at best. That alone should be more than enough incentive for frontier labs to train this out of their state-of-the-art models, if only they could. The fact that they haven't suggests that they cannot, despite all the claimed advances in model analysis and "explainability."

New comment by aposm in "Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs"

aposm — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 12:44:38 +0000

There's a pretty significant difference there, even in some of the examples you picked to make your point. TCP and HTTP are well defined standards that, for all their flaws, were designed and conceived to be useful abstractions that you didn't need to understand deeply in order to use. The things that LLMs allow novices to skip nowadays aren't designed with that in mind, and generally aren't something you can just skip over without getting yourself into hot water later. If you mess up Stripe or Auth0 setup because you don't understand the implications of the boilerplate the LLM spit out, you can very easily get your whole app compromised or end up on the hook for a lot of fraudulent credit card charges, etc. I see the point you're making and I don't entirely disagree, but I think current iterations of LLM coding tools still make it far too easy for beginners (or even fairly experienced engineers) to convince themselves that a detail falls into the former category of abstractions they can safely skip understanding, when they're very much the latter.

New comment by aposm in "Illinois just passed a law that puts Linux on the hook for age verification"

aposm — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 21:37:56 +0000

I'm now pretty convinced that this is the best argument for persuading non-technical and non-internet-privacy minded people why this is a problem. It's hard to explain all the technical factors that make it impossible to implement without compromising privacy... but it's pretty easy to get them to understand the real intent. If you start them thinking through what mechanisms would make sense _if_ the original premise truly was protecting kids from content they aren't ready to see, it's easy to arrive at that answer, and equally easy to see why "everyone must provide their ID so we can verify their age" probably comes from other motivations.

New comment by aposm in "Show HN: Are You in the Weights?"

aposm — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 23:12:48 +0000

I only got hallucinations of random combinations of my (fairly unique) last name & first names that do not exist, combined with very accomplished and completely fictional biographies. I guess I'm not notable enough which is somewhat comforting.

New comment by aposm in "Venom and hot peppers offer a key to killing resistant bacteria"

aposm — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:30:14 +0000

Maybe you should not omit those "dozens of words" that clearly explain what you're trying to portray as a contradiction.

> These molecules have a particular property: When they come into contact with air, they oxidize and change color. One becomes blue and the other red.

New comment by aposm in "The secrets of the Shinkansen"

aposm — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 10:23:57 +0000

When I lived in Japan it was in a relatively recent (last 10 years) but not brand new apartment block - Maybe if you are talking about a rural area or an old postwar Showa era house, sure. But either way the sound proofing is worlds better than any new construction in the US.

New comment by aposm in "The secrets of the Shinkansen"

aposm — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:59:52 +0000

All the major metro areas on the Acela corridor are also on a straight line, on significantly flatter land than Japan. Notice how the Acela never spends 10+ minute periods in long, deep tunnels under mountain ranges. The Acela primarily spends most of the trip going below 100 mph because it is operating on 100+ year old infrastructure that has only ever been upgraded piecemeal as it starts to fail.

New comment by aposm in "The secrets of the Shinkansen"

aposm — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 09:49:02 +0000

I think a big part of it is also that (partly because of the necessity of building for earthquake resistance), Japanese construction is a lot more robust than American housing, and also tends to have extremely good soundproofing on windows and doors. Actually, it's most of the rest of the world, except the US.

New comment by aposm in "JuiceSSH – Give me my pro features back"

aposm — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 23:43:58 +0000

Yikes. I also just noticed that all the plugins (part of the pro feature set) rely on separate apk downloads from the Play Store, which all appear to be dead/delisted. This is really a shame, I too have thought of this as "the best" Android SSH client in the past.

New comment by aposm in "My First Meshtastic Network"

aposm — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 15:08:53 +0000

Yes, it is enabled by default (in fact this caused problems earlier on). Licensed hams (in the US) can increase transmit power (and theoretically use additional spectrum outside of ISM) but even the default "public" channel was encrypted with a known, publicized key. There was some debate whether this ran afoul of amateur radio rules against encryption, even if the key is known, since it cannot be disabled. I believe there was some progress in fixing this and allowing truly unencrypted channels for licensed operators, but I haven't checked back recently.

New comment by aposm in "AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'"

aposm — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 18:28:09 +0000

We frequently get juniors or interns who are perfectly capable of pumping out many LoC with the use of AI in various forms - the issue is that they _don't_ actually ever learn how to think for themselves, and can't fix problems when something goes wrong or the LLM paints itself into a corner. I have found myself doing a lot more shepherding and pairing with juniors when they can't figure something out recently, because they just have not had the space to build their own skills.

New comment by aposm in "RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung"

aposm — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 14:43:57 +0000

A few years later but similarly - I am still running a machine built spur-of-the-moment in a single trip to Micro Center for about $500 in late 2019 (little did we know what was coming in a few months!). I made one small upgrade in probably ~2022 to a Ryzen 5800X w/ 64GB of RAM but otherwise untouched. It still flies through basically anything & does everything I need, but I'm dreading when any of the major parts go and I have to fork out double or triple the original cost for replacements...

New comment by aposm in "How to Assemble an Electric Heating Element from Scratch"

aposm — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 19:16:17 +0000

How can I take your comment seriously if you didn't read the article? It looks like someone didn't actually make an effort to understand the context of the images.

New comment by aposm in "Whatever happened to cheap eReaders?"

aposm — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 15:20:09 +0000

> Moore's law is supposed to drive down the cost of electronics

The core of the article is this complete misunderstanding of Moore's law. From there, all the rest of the confusion follows, unsurprisingly leading to the author's claim that ~$100 for a long-lasting device is unreasonably expensive.

New comment by aposm in "Gemini Diffusion"

aposm — Thu, 22 May 2025 14:46:48 +0000

A human working on an existing codebase does not have any special signal about what is _not_ in a codebase. Instead, a (good) human engineer can look at how a problem is handled and consider why it might have been done that way vs other options, then make an educated decision about whether that alternative would be an improvement. To me this seems like yet another piece of evidence that these models are not doing any "reasoning" or problem-solving.

New comment by aposm in "Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview"

aposm — Wed, 07 May 2025 18:52:13 +0000

I had a coworker making very similar claims recently - one of the more AI-positive engineers on my team (a big part of my department's job is assessing new/novel tech for real-world value vs just hype). I was stunned when I actually saw the output of this process, which was a multi-page report describing the architecture of an internal system that arguably needed an overhaul. I try to keep an open mind, but this report was full of factual mistakes, misunderstandings, and when it did manage to accurately describe aspects of this system's design/architecture, it made only the most surface-level comments about boilerplate code and common idioms, without displaying any understanding of the actual architecture or implications of the decisions being made. Not only this coworker but several other more junior engineers on my team proclaimed this to be an example of the amazing advancement of AI ... which made me realize that the people claiming that LLMs have some superhuman ability to understand and design computer systems are those who have never really understood it themselves. In many cases these are people who have built their careers on copying and pasting code snippets from stack overflow, etc., and now find LLMs impressive because they're a quicker and easier way to do the same.

New comment by aposm in "Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution in Erlang/OTP SSH"

aposm — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 17:22:28 +0000

Oops..... we are currently trying to sell an elixir-based greenfield project internally. This doesn't affect elixir by default as other commenters pointed out, but still might make our project a bit harder to pitch to management...

New comment by aposm in "Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes"

aposm — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 23:53:11 +0000

Nothing they do makes sense until you accept that hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug, for them and their base. They know that what they're asking for is impossible to meaningfully comply with...

New comment by aposm in "How to speed up US passenger rail, without bullet trains"

aposm — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 23:37:34 +0000

There is no secret lost knowledge that enabled a steam-powered train to go from New York to Chicago in 16 hours in the 1930s. We simply do not care to run fast passenger trains anymore since they have largely been replaced by domestic air travel. The current NYC to Chicago train takes 20 hours and is routinely several hours delayed... all we have to do is invest in infrastructure and rebuild our rail system, but that won't happen unless it's "sexy" and can compete with air travel, and the best way to do that is with HSR. So while our passenger rail system _could_ be a lot faster (without true HSR) if it was run well, I don't think that's going to happen until we get the marketability/"sexiness" of HSR.

New comment by aposm in "E Ink faces growing competition in the "paper-like" display space"

aposm — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 13:02:37 +0000

Yep, I had a cheaper MIP garmin watch that I was very happy with until it spontaneously bricked itself one day. It was just barely in warranty, and they replaced it, but refused to give me an equivalent replacement and instead sent the newer OLED model in the same lineup. It's... fine, but the battery life is abysmal with the always-on display and just OK without.