Hacker News: autonomousErwin

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

autonomousErwin — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 09:56:25 +0000

I had 2 MacBook Pros. One 2024 and one 2019. The 2024 one would connect fine to the internet, the 2019 one would not.

After pasting in the airportd logs of both (into ChatGPT and Gemini) it found it was down to band switching (2.4GHz and 5GHz) through some really old error code.

This fixed a problem that had plagued me for >12 months. Really magical feeling it got in on first try.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "I'm done making desktop applications (2009)"

autonomousErwin — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:19:28 +0000

Grass always looks greener on the other side, mainly because it's been fertilised.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

autonomousErwin — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:03:47 +0000

unless you dreamt how to debug that problem no-one else can solve

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Codegen is not productivity"

autonomousErwin — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:59:54 +0000

I think there's some goldilocks speed limit for using these tools relative to your skillset. When you're building, you forget that you're also learning - which is why I actually favour some AI code editors that aren't as powerful because it gets me to stop and think.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Can you reverse engineer our neural network?"

autonomousErwin — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:51:27 +0000

I think this is the wrong way to think about it. In this case the "intelligent people who are wasted on finance and ads" are drawn to high-status, low-risk, well-paid jobs, with interesting problems to solve.

If you want to solve meaningful problems you need a different kind of intelligence; you need to be open to risk, have a lot of naivety, not status orientated, and a rare ability to see the forest among the trees (i.e. an interesting problem isn't necessarily a important one).

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Railway (PaaS) global outage"

autonomousErwin — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:53:36 +0000

I think it has it's own "metal" services they're migrating customers to. Afaik they used GCP for "legacy" cloud services.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds"

autonomousErwin — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:04:16 +0000

That's the rendering speed.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds"

autonomousErwin — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:46:34 +0000

Makes you wonder what the TTL caching for our universe is.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "The Thinking Game Film – Google DeepMind documentary"

autonomousErwin — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 21:33:58 +0000

What's the difference between optimisation and intelligence?

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use"

autonomousErwin — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 21:00:23 +0000

Great ad for Grayscale on your phone and chrome extensions that get rid of shorts

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Poker Tournament for LLMs"

autonomousErwin — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 09:12:49 +0000

"I see you have changed your weights Mr Bond."

New comment by autonomousErwin in ""Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore"

autonomousErwin — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 19:46:05 +0000

I'm becoming more convinced that this kind of rhetoric is usually peddled by individuals who haven't actually built anything notable (granted, that's most of us).

If all you're doing is using AI to build products, by definition, you're gravitating to the mean.

The AI doesn't care about a delightful product, it cares about satisfying its objective function and the deeper you go the more the two will diverge simply because building a good product is really complex and there are many many paths in the decision maze.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "What is “good taste” in software engineering?"

autonomousErwin — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 10:48:13 +0000

I think first step of having good taste is admitting that you probably have bad taste

New comment by autonomousErwin in "The Therac-25 Incident (2021)"

autonomousErwin — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 08:26:09 +0000

This reminds me of the Belgium 2003 election that was impossibly skewered by a supernova light years away sending charged particles which manage to get through our atmosphere (allegedly) and flipping a bit. Not the only case it's happened.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Turn any website into an API"

autonomousErwin — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 15:49:48 +0000

I wonder if not just checking the site every day (or minute ) would solve for this.

It's not necessarily the structure of the source data (the DOM, the HTML etc.) but rather the translator that needs to be contractually consistent. The translator in this case is the service for the endpoints.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Human"

autonomousErwin — Thu, 15 May 2025 08:06:07 +0000

I thought this too, but I imagine it's a bit of pathetic fallacy for the reader's benefit else it would be (ironically) quite a boring read for us from the machine's perspective.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System"

autonomousErwin — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 11:32:32 +0000

How do you know it's incompatible with the actual universe instead of our current understanding of the universe?

Take us for example, we're communicating instantly (for practical purposes) using thinking machines - how would that not seem like magic to someone thousands of years ago?

My point is, we don't know what the tribe have behind the bush. It's the equivalent of the Mayans wondering what's over that hill and then finding the Spanish with gunpowder, horses, and steel armour.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Astronomers have found signs of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System"

autonomousErwin — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 10:39:14 +0000

Isn't that the point of the dark forest theory? It's not the fact that there is a dangerous tribe behind a bush it's more that you don't know if they're dangerous or not so you have to err on the side of caution - because you don't know if they're doing the same.

It's the whole chain of suspicion theory that it's safer to shoot first and then ask questions later because the speed you can communicate is the same speed you can mount an attack.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Youth and what happens when it's gone"

autonomousErwin — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 17:10:32 +0000

Don't worry if you're over 30/40/50 - Évariste Galois is judging anyone over the age of 18.

New comment by autonomousErwin in "Troubleshooting: A skill that never goes obsolete"

autonomousErwin — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 16:05:17 +0000

I think I know what you mean, in an ideal world - we wouldn't have bugs. You'd build a feature and it would work forever but that's rarely the case.

I think of it as "offensive" and "defensive" building, ideally you want to be on the offensive (i.e. building stuff that wasn't there yesterday) but you have to balance it with good defence (i.e. adding a certain type of anti-fragility to your system by fixing bugs due to your features being exposed to the real world).

Saying this, I've never met a good engineer who wasn't very good at troubleshooting so perhaps it's more of a consequence of building than a skillset.