Hacker News: bertylicious

New comment by bertylicious in "Launch HN: RonanRX (YC S26) – Personalized Peptides and GLP-1s"

bertylicious — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:10:04 +0000

What exactly are these benefits beyond weight loss?

New comment by bertylicious in "GPU World"

bertylicious — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 06:56:50 +0000

But the contest does not ask what needs to happen to achieve even and fair distribution of wealth, it specifically asks what might happen after we reached that point. That kind of blindness towards today's political and socio-economic conditions has always been very typical for this kind of techno optimism. I believe it actually prevents revolutionary thought by assuming some kind of revolution has already occurred somehow in order to then attribute all following societal progress to the technology alone.

New comment by bertylicious in "A migrant surge tests Spain's open policies"

bertylicious — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:43:18 +0000

By your definition a migrant needs to cross borders and successfully settle on the other site. What do you call the people being forced back or stuck in holding facilities and internation camps then?

New comment by bertylicious in "A migrant surge tests Spain's open policies"

bertylicious — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:36:25 +0000

You don't happen to have a reliable source for this ludicrous claim?

New comment by bertylicious in "The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras"

bertylicious — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:18:20 +0000

> In theory the government is hired by sofereign to govern the country to the benefit of the people.

This kind of suggests that the people ever sat together and decided on a political system that would benefit them. The reality is that even the most egalitarian and liberal system has been put into place by the ruling class and naturally was designed to benefit them. I'd say this is and was true for at least all major western societies. "By the people, for the people" is propaganda to legitimize said political systems after the fact. And we believe it, because it's the ruling ideology.

New comment by bertylicious in "2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results"

bertylicious — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 08:29:19 +0000

Are you claiming that LLMs have an intent beyond producing the statistically most "correct" output? This sounds a bit like you are saying LLMs are conscious.

New comment by bertylicious in "2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results"

bertylicious — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 08:20:39 +0000

How would you define high-quality LLM output? How do you differentiate it from LLM slop?

I think all LLM output used "as is" for content/entertainment/art is slop.

New comment by bertylicious in "Bohemia Interactive: Cold War Assault Remastered Source Code on GitHub"

bertylicious — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:03:49 +0000

Funny, I had a similar experience. I wrote a script that enabled players to "call in" mortar support, by looking at the target and selecting a distance. Also using shoddy trigonometry and also one of my earliest programming experiences. Very basic from today's perspective, but I was mighty proud back then and so hooked!

New comment by bertylicious in "Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?"

bertylicious — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 06:13:06 +0000

My impression is that smaller companies, that depend on rapid prototyping to gain clients, exert a lot of pressure onto their devs to use LLMs. At least that's the situation in the companies some friends of mine are working at.

I'm in a slow-moving, much bigger company. Lot's of talk about "AI" here and we can use copilot if we want to, but there is 0 pressure. I'm in a small team and one colleague uses copilot often. In the beginning there was a minor conflict between him and me, because I found the quality of the LLM code unacceptable and had to ask him to review it more carefully. I think that's settled now, but it makes me sad how a once motivated colleague now seems to try to cheat his way out of work.

I personally find it incredibly boring to write copilot prompts or read its answers full of boiler plate and sycophancy. I don't understand how anyone would want to replace the cognitive work of programming, that I find enjoyable for the most part, with the cognitive work of "talking" to an LLM.

Anyway, I think it will be like this at least for a little while longer: only vibe coding allowed in small companies and less vibe coding the bigger the company is.

But before vibe coding can take over the slow-moving big companies, all the accumulated technical debt will come back to haunt us and vibe-free software will be the new fad. That's what I hope at least.

New comment by bertylicious in "Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem"

bertylicious — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:17:45 +0000

No. They cut on maintenance to make line go up. And then they deconstructed existing switches, signal boxes, train lines, and train stations to cut costs even more. This is not an EU problem or a regulations problem or labour cost problem. These are the fruits of privatisation and capitalism.

New comment by bertylicious in "AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere"

bertylicious — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:43:36 +0000

Have you read the PR discussion?

New comment by bertylicious in "The SpaceX Squeeze"

bertylicious — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 06:47:37 +0000

Link is paywalled and archive.ph does not work on it. Could you please summarize the argument?

New comment by bertylicious in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

bertylicious — Sun, 24 May 2026 07:05:10 +0000

My mistake. I see my oversight now. `Either String String` is not equivalent to `String | String`, but to `Left String | Right String`. The same must be done for the C# version.

You are correct that this requires support for disjoint unions (aka tagged unions), which Haskell always had and C# will soon have.

New comment by bertylicious in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

bertylicious — Sun, 24 May 2026 06:54:08 +0000

My mistake. I see my oversight now. `Either String String` is not equivalent to `String | String`, but to `Left String | Right String`. The same must be done for the C# version.

New comment by bertylicious in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

bertylicious — Sun, 24 May 2026 03:49:01 +0000

Have you considered trying them out (maybe in F#) to understand why they are so popular in many other languages?

New comment by bertylicious in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

bertylicious — Sun, 24 May 2026 03:38:28 +0000

I think it's almost always about making code more concise and programming more ergonomic. Assembly could already solve all the problems higher-level languages can solve. Yet we didn't discard them as useless.

New comment by bertylicious in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

bertylicious — Sun, 24 May 2026 03:12:51 +0000

But you can have an `Either String String` which is what GP was talking about.

New comment by bertylicious in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

bertylicious — Sun, 24 May 2026 03:10:04 +0000

No, it's a union of a left value (that happens to be a string) and a right value (that happens to be a string). But the compiler-generated code can't tell them apart.

New comment by bertylicious in ".NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types"

bertylicious — Sun, 24 May 2026 02:54:29 +0000

I don't think it's a matter of the type of problem and I always found it weird how F# is being framed as being only useful for "math-heavy" problems.

What matters is what libraries you are gonna use for your solution. If most of them are C#-only and don't have an F# equivalent then you'll lose the ergonomics and conveniences that make F# so easy to work with.

New comment by bertylicious in "Is AI Profitable Yet?"

bertylicious — Sat, 23 May 2026 04:14:54 +0000

What's the company's name? And why the unnecessary secrecy in the first place? It's a publicly traded company so this information is public by definition.