Hacker News: bgarbiak

New comment by bgarbiak in "GPT-6 Astra"

bgarbiak — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:18:10 +0000

I’m all for an UBI but a future where people have no purposeful jobs, no way to actually make a real difference to anything around them, is a bleak one.

New comment by bgarbiak in "GPT-6 Astra"

bgarbiak — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:14:26 +0000

Yeah. I’m almost glad I didn’t invest any time in any of my 100s ideas for a startup. Most of them would be destroyed by AI by now.

But, you can create cool stuff just for yourself. That’s the upside. It’s just hard to make a living on cool stuff for yourself.

New comment by bgarbiak in "You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It"

bgarbiak — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 09:58:23 +0000

The point of the article is not that banners are good; it’s that they would not be needed at all if websites didn’t share all the possible data about their users with hundreds of vendors.

Fun fact: the OP blog doesn’t display a GPDR banner.

New comment by bgarbiak in "It's Not the End of Programming"

bgarbiak — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:26:44 +0000

Isn’t it the same as relying on human developers?

Gotchas aside: I’m not saying the end of programming is a good thing. I’m just saying: it’s happening. Unless the LLM tech will suddenly hit any sort of ceiling.

New comment by bgarbiak in "It's Not the End of Programming"

bgarbiak — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 12:16:54 +0000

The responses about code quality, wisdom that comes with experience, etc. are missing the big picture: no one will ever care about any of this as long as things work as explained in the prompt.

Eventual shortcomings will be fixed not by looking into the code, but by typing in another prompt, asking another agent.

Doing it manually will not bring any value to anyone.

I saw it already with my own eyes: a friend of mine started an online psychology counseling site. A year ago they would hire a developer. Now, he only needed an LLM. And it’s the whole thing: a booking system, video calls, a website. What’s underneath: he doesn’t know. The only thing that matters to him is that it works.

That to me looks like the end of programming.

New comment by bgarbiak in "Electric motors with no rare earths"

bgarbiak — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:54:39 +0000

The cheapest Minis are made by GWM in China, and are using different motors and batteries.

However, comparing prices between cars nowadays is a complicated matter. BMW's iX1 and iX2 (they use the BMW EESM motors) theoretically cost about €55k, but they have been very recently available to lease for about €250 euro per month - so pretty much for the same price as the cheapest electric Renault if leased.

New comment by bgarbiak in "Electric motors with no rare earths"

bgarbiak — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:13:55 +0000

BMW also makes rare-earths-free motors for their EVs and - at this very moment - theirs are far more advanced. They offer almost twice the power (up to 300kW vs 160kW) and are on a 800v architecture.

New comment by bgarbiak in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

bgarbiak — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:57:21 +0000

Working in the music industry and not being aware who Rick Rubin is… is a bit weird.

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It

bgarbiak — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 07:07:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/magazine/ai-coding-programming-jobs-claude-chatgpt.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47374095

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

New comment by bgarbiak in "Tesla registrations crash 17% in Europe as BEV market surges 14%"

bgarbiak — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:57:35 +0000

It’s not about goodwill. Selling parts is simply a good business. The margins at authorized dealers are crazy.

New comment by bgarbiak in "Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%"

bgarbiak — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 20:44:24 +0000

I guess it depends on who you’d ask. BMW made a switch from prismatic cells to cylindrical design only recently, and it looks like the biggest gain was in costs and weight efficiency. The range/capacity ratio didn’t improve that much. Although, to be fair, none of these parameters depend on battery alone.

New comment by bgarbiak in "Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain collapses as partner writes down deal by 99%"

bgarbiak — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 20:18:58 +0000

Europe doesn’t need new entrants. They got legacy automakers that are no worse at making EVs than Chinese and American startups.

The problem is: they can’t make them cheap enough to compete with China in developing countries. I’m not sure if they even want to do that at this point, the margins there are so low. It’s easier to just rebadge a Chinese car as your own (Renault and GM already do that in SA).

New comment by bgarbiak in "China's BEV trucks and the end of diesel's dominance"

bgarbiak — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 06:43:14 +0000

There is also Mercedes eActros line and MAN eTGX. There are already thousands of them in Europe. Funny how that just happened, without fanfares and trillion dollar evaluations.

Speaking of which, I don’t know why would anyone still wait for Tesla Semi or any other up-and-comers. Promised better efficiency sounds good on paper, but means nothing if the product doesn’t exist or is an unreliable prototype with no service support.

Now Chinese want to enter the market with cheaper trucks, but - as the article clearly mentions - these are not yet ready to be used in Europe or the States, and making them ready will increase the price.

New comment by bgarbiak in "My Impressions of the MacBook Pro M4"

bgarbiak — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 06:07:10 +0000

You can absolutely be a hobbyist photographer for a fraction of $3k. A hobbyist lens collector is a different story.

New comment by bgarbiak in "This website has no class"

bgarbiak — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 12:35:40 +0000

I tried this approach years ago. Now I consider it an anti-pattern. You really don’t want the look of your website/document to be dependent on its structure. Things like li:has( > a + p) - it seems so clever initially, but then you need to have a button instead of an a, or an icon, or a wrapper over entire thing; but only for a single item on the list. You either end up with messy CSS that covers all these scenarios, or you just go back to classes.

I kinda see a potential usefulness of custom attributes, but I’m still not entirely sure how they’d be better than classes. What’s the advantage of [shape-type="1"] over .shape-type-1?

New comment by bgarbiak in "Microsoft Favors Anthropic over OpenAI for Visual Studio Code"

bgarbiak — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 15:54:09 +0000

https://archive.is/hO6YV

New comment by bgarbiak in "Just Use HTML"

bgarbiak — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 14:44:04 +0000

Well, nowadays, you can implement a lot of logic for forms using HTML and pure CSS, without JS at all. Example:

  form:has(.conditional-checkbox:not(:checked)) .optional-part-of-form {
    display: none;
  }

I’m not saying it’s better (it’s not). Just saying there’s a lot of space between “just HTML” and “a web framework”. It’s worth considering these other options instead of going “full React” from the get-go.

New comment by bgarbiak in "E-paper display reaches the realm of LCD screens"

bgarbiak — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 23:20:02 +0000

How about mobile monitors? Like Uperfect?

New comment by bgarbiak in "European Commission fines Google €2.95B over abusive ad tech practices"

bgarbiak — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 18:40:08 +0000

In that case people (some of them at least) would switch to a different browser. Reducing Chrome market share would be healthy for the web too.

New comment by bgarbiak in "Age verification doesn’t work"

bgarbiak — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 07:58:33 +0000

It was cool to smoke when all the cool guys in the movies were smoking. One of the reasons it’s not cool anymore is that the cool guys in the movies don’t smoke nowadays (although they do it more often now than they did ten years ago; which is worrying).

The correlation between an exposure and initiating smoking is proved: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27043456/