<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: billypilgrim</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=billypilgrim</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:21:18 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=billypilgrim" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "WorldTUI: I trained a 360M model to pretend to be a terminal"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thank you for linking that. I distinctly remember this moment as an important point in time, played around with emulating a terminal for hours, couldn’t believe how realistic it was, it even remembered when I changed a file earlier etc. Another point was when people on twitter with early access were like “oh my god it can write code too! I asked it to design a website and it just works!”, programming wasn’t even what LLMs were about, and now it’s one of the main use cases. Another revelation was when it could kinda play chess. A single model that can one shot a huge array of different problems, still mind blown how well all of this works to this day.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 22 Oct 2026 09:50:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50193273</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50193273</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50193273</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "Sorry, I'm in a meeting"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Or, you know, you could just pay for a service that you enjoy. I watch a lot more YouTube and see a bigger need to keep it alive than Netflix, HBO and co for which I am paying good money already, why should YouTube be exempt from that?  
Also if Netflix goes away tomorrow, you’ll find their content on torrents easily, but if YouTube goes away, we will lose decades of videos that no one has backups of. Expecting them to offer this service for free and without ads is crazy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:27:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50021022</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50021022</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50021022</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "PS5 Jailbreaks Are Escalating at an Unprecedented Pace"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That was always true according to an old saying in software cracking circles: „everything is open source if you know reverse engineering“</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:38:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49994357</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49994357</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49994357</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "The art of defusing a second world war bomb"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It really is very common here in Germany to get an alarm that a WW2 bomb was found somewhere near you, telling people close by to evacuate. Like every couple of months. It doesn’t even register with people, I don’t know if the news even report it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:32:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49994280</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49994280</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49994280</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "Claude Opus 5.5 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis (Max)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not the one you asked but I genuinely think it’s possible that a part of the answer is the psychological effect of getting used to models performing well and picking up more if they fail, but also … If you have a product that works well for 95% of software engineering tasks (for the sake of this argument), with a large number of users there will inevitably be some poor schmucks who get bad results multiple times in a row. It would be highly unlikely if that _didn’t_ happen at all. 
Now assuming you have millions of users, there will always be groups of thousands that experience this, and if those people go online to complain, it will look like an actual issue when it can just be explained by randomness and large numbers.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:32:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815132</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815132</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815132</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "Data-only attacks are easier than you think (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Similar use case here! Combining AI with fuzzers is so powerful, especially for creating a special fuzzing harness, or generating seeds for hard to reach code. That was taking hours/days and was frustratingly boring work before. Unfortunately the Codex models refuse a lot for me, I’m mostly using the cheapest models because they refuse the least, have you found Kimi to be a good alternative? Any other you tested that you can recommend? Thinking of switching.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:25:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49813934</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49813934</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49813934</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "Instagram's head says engagement falls by half without the algorithm"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I honestly do not understand why we let it continue when we have been seeing the drastic negative effects for years now. The recommendation algorithm and the data it relies on must be opened up to to some kind of elected agency, and they need to be vetted for negative health effects just as we do now with drugs. Any algorithm that is addictive enough to keep users mindlessly scrolling for hours needs adjustment or needs to be banned. This would put a stop to infinite scrolling. Give the user more agency in deciding if they want to continue or stop there. We should no longer allow for-profit companies to hijack our attention for long periods and abuse our brains need for digital sugar.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:55:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658506</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658506</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658506</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "GPT-6 Astra"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>„The depressing thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never be as good as a wall.“ -Mitch Hedberg</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:28:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557328</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557328</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557328</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "Muse Spark 1.3"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Grok? The model that was deliberately adjusted to not say that Elon Musk or Trump spread misinformation? No idea how people can actually believe that Musk is interested in the truth. 
<a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/23/grok-3-appears-to-have-briefly-censored-unflattering-mentions-of-trump-and-musk/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/23/grok-3-appears-to-have-bri...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2026 22:17:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49543348</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49543348</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49543348</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "Kuna: Decompiler Development in the Age of Coding Agents"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>idalib with Claude Code already works really well. But honestly, despite what people have been saying, LLMs have been very good at decompiling for at least two years now, I have been using it for that purpose regularly. Even just copying disassembly from the current function and all nested called functions from IDA into ChatGPT is already unexpectedly good.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:51:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112569</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112569</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112569</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "I hated writing until I learned there’s a science to it (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The thoughts you are having about this show me that you are at a local maximum, but you will find your way out if you keep trying everything. There is no single thing that will help. Read novels, copy them word by word, translate them, write short stories, dissect stories, stop movies halfway and ask yourself how you would continue them. Read a ton of writing advice, try them out but don’t take it as gospel.<p>Even if you don’t improve for 100 days straight, small successes accumulate. In a decade you will have transformed yourself.<p>There is just no way you won’t improve significantly if you keep trying new things and bring yourself to fail ever day.<p>What helped me was the saying “your first million words are gonna be shit”. I still distinctly remember, four or five years into writing every day, when things finally clicked, my voice came through, and my sentences became fun. It is delayed gratification to the max.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 21:55:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316061</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316061</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48316061</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "Halt and Catch Fire"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That’s too bad because I think the last episode is brilliant. I think about it a lot even years after seeing it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 08:00:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48166925</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48166925</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48166925</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "I won a championship that doesn't exist"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I must say I expected an actual poisoning of the data used to train the LLM and was excited, but the examples indicate that the LLM just searched the web and reported what it found? When you create a website with fake information and search Google for that information, it will of course bring up your site, not because it’s factually correct but because it’s related to what you searched for. What am I missing?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:52:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941350</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941350</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47941350</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "The 1944 Warsaw Uprising, in Color"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ten years ago multiple tech giants openly stated they would not help the Trump administration build a Muslim registry [1]. Since then, several of them have bowed the knee and donated to his second inauguration.  
I’m from Germany, and keep wondering how much more damage the NSDAP could have done if they had access to the data these companies now have on everybody.
[1] <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/16/13990234/google-muslim-registry-refusal-donald-trump-silicon-valley" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/16/13990234/google-muslim-r...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2026 22:53:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47915638</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47915638</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47915638</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "Detecting DOSBox from Within the Box"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Also: malware often tries to detect a VM or an emulator too, for example Windows Defender uses an emulator internally to detonate samples, and there are attempts by malware to detect this and change the behavior to something benign.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 18 Apr 2026 07:40:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47813980</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47813980</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47813980</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Modern ransomware are not just encrypting data but uploading them somewhere too, the victim is then threatened with a leak of the data. A backup does not save you from that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:46:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766344</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766344</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766344</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polgár" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polgár</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:08:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535068</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535068</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47535068</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It may be maddening to them because you are implying that physical color mixing is somehow that one defining thing that makes it art. Imagine someone said that about writing a book: if you don't write it by hand but use Microsoft Word instead, it's not a real book. How would that even be the case? The software is not doing the work for you (unless it's AI).<p>I can tell you with confidence that physical color mixing itself is a really small part of what makes a good traditional artist, and I am indeed talking about realistic paintings. All the art fundamentals are exactly the same, wether you do digital art or traditional oil, there are just some technical differences on top. I have been learning digital painting for a few years and the hardest things to learn about color were identical to traditional painters. In fact, after years of learning digital painting and about colors, it only took me a couple of days to understand and perform traditional color mixing with oil. The difficult part is knowing what colors you need, not how to get there (mixing, using the sliders, etc.)<p>And just to add a small bit here: digital artist also color mix all the time and need to know how it works, the difference here is that mixing is additive instead of subtractive.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Sep 2025 11:06:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45238951</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45238951</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45238951</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "Ask HN: Has anyone here turned around their life in their 40s?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is true, that's how I'm getting therapy right now. I was scared this was too much paperwork for me at first, but my therapist explained that I basically needed to only do three things:<p><pre><code>  (1) go to a GP (Hausarzt) and explain my situation so they fill up a report and confirm that the issue is indeed psychological and not physical,  

  (2) go to a therapist that works with public insurance so they can write another report, your therapist might refer you to one of his/her colleagues, and  

  (3) email five therapists that work with public insurance and ask them how long their waiting list is. They likely will all tell you it's longer than 3 months, which is what you need to hear.  
</code></pre>
You basically send this stuff to your insurance company and they deal with the rest.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 19 Dec 2022 22:30:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34058688</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34058688</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34058688</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by billypilgrim in "WhatsApp scaled to 1B users with only 50 engineers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why didn't MSN become what WhatsApp is today? I always wondered how they could screw this up. Smartphones are perfect for chat apps, that's basically what they are supposed to be used for, and MSN / ICQ already covered a gigantic portion of the instant messaging market. Did they just assume people would stay on desktop for chatting forever?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 25 Oct 2021 16:27:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28989715</link><dc:creator>billypilgrim</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28989715</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28989715</guid></item></channel></rss>