Hacker News: automatoney

New comment by automatoney in "I created my first AI-assisted pull request"

automatoney — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 02:56:41 +0000

I feel similarly to the author, and I appreciate the links to other authors with similar sentiments - "hirirng a taskrabbit to solve a puzzle" or "feeling nothing about the results". I don't enjoy using LLMs, and I'm sad that it feels like we are a shrinking minority of programmers. It feels like a growing gulf that I increasingly don't want to try and reach across - I do not have fun with this tool, and I don't really want to hang around somewhere people are frequently pedaling it.

At the very least the change has made me reduce the amount of time I spend here. But I'm still a bit bummed about it.

New comment by automatoney in "Performance hacks for faster Python code"

automatoney — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 15:37:18 +0000

There's some genuinely interesting tips in here, but #10 is for sure just padding so they could call the article "10 Hacks" haha. Everything else is at least somewhat Python specific, but "Hack 10: Avoid repeated function calls in loops" is just applicable to anything.

New comment by automatoney in "Formatting code should be unnecessary"

automatoney — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 04:02:19 +0000

I've never understood why people care so much about the linter settings. It's so obviously bikeshedding, just make a choice, run the linter automatically and be done with it. I'm too busy doing actual software engineering to care about where exactly everything goes - I promise after a week you'll just get used to whatever format your team lands on.

New comment by automatoney in "Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself"

automatoney — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 05:28:35 +0000

The writing feels odd in a sort of off putting way. Maybe too much vividness and a kind of pseudointellectual vibe. Or like a bit egotistical? I don't know if that's what you're getting at, but it's what I was getting from it.

New comment by automatoney in "Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels"

automatoney — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 02:27:49 +0000

Your comment made me realize that maybe we're just going through the transition to a collectively better understanding of people. Right now we sort of have to pass through the clinical diagnosis/therapy terms in order to recognize something as not being a moral failure/making someone less valuable as a person. And then the next step we're building to is maybe like acceptance of people's differences without needing to make reference to diagnostic labels. Kind of like what's happened with queerness: past - fluid, undefined, marginalized; present - labels, understanding, less marginalization; future - moving beyond the need for labels in order for people to accept and understand.

New comment by automatoney in "Chomsky on what ChatGPT is good for (2023)"

automatoney — Mon, 26 May 2025 02:00:59 +0000

Word embeddings (that 1000-dimension vector you mention) are not new. No comment on the rest of your comment, but that aspect of LLMs is "old" tech - word2vec was published 11 years ago.

New comment by automatoney in "Expanding on what we missed with sycophancy"

automatoney — Fri, 02 May 2025 20:16:11 +0000

A little strange to compare it to palm reading, I feel like a more apt comparison is some other random medical field like podiatry. I wouldn't expect my friends' podiatrist usage to come up, so I'm sure more of my friends than I know have been to one. And presumably, like with podiatry, all the people who need professional therapists are people who are experiencing issues in the relevant area.

New comment by automatoney in "Why Heroism Is Bad and What We Can Do to Stop It"

automatoney — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 16:56:28 +0000

I haven't run into this person but I'd love to hear about problems you've seen people create - I can't even think of a problem I could create and fix.

New comment by automatoney in "Technical Details on Today's Outage"

automatoney — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 03:01:40 +0000

To my biased ears it sounds like these configuration-like files are a borderline DSL that maybe isn't being treated as such. I feel like that's a common issue - people assume because you call it a config file, it's not a language, and so it doesn't get treated as actual code that gets interpreted.

New comment by automatoney in "Google Arts and Culture site I didn't know existed"

automatoney — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 02:44:48 +0000

Taken as a whole, the title guidelines feel more focused on titles of articles, rather than whole website titles. I can understand the complaint, but in my opinion this title is fine. The title just feels a little... bare without the note.

New comment by automatoney in "85% of People Want Global Ban on Single-Use Plastics"

automatoney — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 19:18:51 +0000

Oh wow, I haven't heard of theis "plastic pollution treaty" it sounds super promising! I think one of the things that makes this issue so popular is just how obvious it is to see plastic trash all over the place. Climate change and carbon emissions can be a bit abstract, but plastic pollution is everywhere, and extremely visible.

New comment by automatoney in "NYC Congestion Pricing Delayed Indefinitely by Governor Kathy Hochul"

automatoney — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 17:41:27 +0000

I don't have super strong feelings on congestion pricing, but I'm a bit skeptical of anyone who says working class people are the major car users in NYC.

But all that aside, why aren't we talking about the insantiy that is free street parking. I have to pay $$$ for my small apartment, but your car gets to hang out all day for free? If you live and work in Manhattan, especially the congestion zone, you don't need a car for personal use.

New comment by automatoney in "Statement from Scarlett Johansson on the OpenAI "Sky" voice"

automatoney — Mon, 20 May 2024 22:56:45 +0000

In the United States, likeness rights vary by state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

New comment by automatoney in "No one is "non-technical" (2022)"

automatoney — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 21:06:13 +0000

Probably should have just said POC in my parent comment to skip all this side discussion, but the repetition is the point. - it's used for emphasis.

From wikipedia:

"The term aims to emphasize the historic oppression of black and indigenous people, which is argued to be superlative and distinctive in U.S. history at the collective level."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color#BIPOC

New comment by automatoney in "No one is "non-technical" (2022)"

automatoney — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 19:29:53 +0000

I'm personally increasingly less interested in language-focused critiques when it comes to systemic issues. The article makes interesting points, but I think the effort it's trying to make is kind of on a euphemism treadmill. The article even says it - the issue is not with the terminology itself, but with the valuation of certain skillsets over certain other ones under our current economic system. It's also a bit pedantic - in this context it doesn't really make sense to use the dictionary to cite the "hierarchy" of what a word means. The word is being used in a specific context, and so it makes more sense to talk about it there.

I'd think I'd be more sympathetic if there were an alternative advocated for that wasn't just "don't refer to this concept". The concept itself isn't problematic - non "computery" people think about computers differently, and it is useful to discuss non-computer-expert users.

Even just thinking about other terminology - we use BIPOC for "non-white" because umbrella terms are useful. It's not that we shouldn't have a term, it's that maybe there's a better one.

New comment by automatoney in "Offline Chat with Marcus Aurelius"

automatoney — Wed, 24 Jan 2024 17:21:44 +0000

I haven't read any Marucs Aurelius, so my impression might be off, but the way the AI speaks feels... I don't know, like a British person, or some American from an older time? It keeps saying "my dear" which feels very incorrect. I studied Latin in school, so maybe I'm more used to the translationese and odd grammar you see with that (like here - although this is also an older translation so you get some of that older english vibe https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2680/pg2680-images.html)

I'm guessing this was trained on a certain translation of his works, but I think part of the fun of speaking to a bot would be to replicate that sort of language barrier feeling.

New comment by automatoney in "Why more PC gaming handhelds should ditch Windows for SteamOS"

automatoney — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 03:16:41 +0000

As a hobbyist game developer, I would love to see the field move away from being so windows focused. It's pretty annoying that every other kind of development I do works well enough across all platforms, but when I want to do game dev I pretty much have to boot into windows.

And as a game user, I would also just rather have games be cross platform, than use whatever OS specific optimizations happen now. But I've also never really cared too much about having high framerates, high resolution, millions of polygons, etc.

New comment by automatoney in "Super Mario 64 on the Web"

automatoney — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 03:28:14 +0000

Looks like this is forked from the original at https://github.com/28klotlucas2/Mario64webgl ?

New comment by automatoney in "Moai in Video Games"

automatoney — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 16:22:55 +0000

Pretty interesting to have a list, but I was kind of hoping there'd be more information. The FAQ is a good start, and there's the link to wikipedia, but I was hoping for more insight than "Moai are cool. And video games are cool." More information that moves the site from a plain dataset to a more complex discussion. Just as an example, I was wondering what present day Rapa Nui people think of depictions of moai. Are there kinds of depictions that they feel represent/misrepresent their culture?

New comment by automatoney in "I spent 3 years working on a coat hanger [video]"

automatoney — Fri, 17 Nov 2023 04:37:01 +0000

It's called a loft bed - this one would probably be considered a low loft. This kind of bed is also frequently seen in American university dorm rooms.