Hacker News: bloomca

New comment by bloomca in "YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos"

bloomca — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:22:57 +0000

I thought about "poisoning" in this context as well. Even if there is not that much AI, if there is enough that you start second guessing every other comment, I start thinking what am I doing there.

New comment by bloomca in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

bloomca — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:34:29 +0000

Could be just the team culture. The meeting thing is pretty weird, but what happens if you just show up and tap them on the shoulder? Do they get annoyed or overall happy to chat? What about just drinking coffee/tea?

It also can be that the office space itself is too noisy so any discussion can distract a lot of people.

New comment by bloomca in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

bloomca — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:30:43 +0000

I suppose the issue is that they will simply ask their LLM to summarize and to reply, so if anything, it might just normalize and justify it a bit more.

New comment by bloomca in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

bloomca — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:20:49 +0000

Turning people down when they ask questions is such a short-sighted perspective. When you answer, you can tailor it to them, you can give extra context, you can elaborate, you can dive into specific nuances. Long-term it will be very likely a positive thing as the person will trust you more, they will be comfortable asking more questions and the knowledge might actually help them to contribute in the future.

New comment by bloomca in "Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking"

bloomca — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:40:34 +0000

I've seen people on reddit having entire conversations with clearly bots, often on a post clearly written by a bot itself. I am sure some people are disgusted by that (I am certainly not a fan), but it seems that many are fine, or who knows, maybe it was even other bots.

I suppose there could be a tipping point if enough people leave and genuine interaction becomes rare that it will be too obvious, but at this point I don't know. But I am on a brink of quitting reddit, nearly all popular subs I like are AI-infested and it is just exhausting.

New comment by bloomca in "Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking"

bloomca — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:36:49 +0000

Every other post too. At this point it is quite challenging to find a genuine human interaction on popular online sites.

New comment by bloomca in "The real cost of owning a home"

bloomca — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:05:06 +0000

All you need is to invest into the index funds tracking some sort of the total market and you are golden. Not sure if I would describe that as aggressive.

But I fully agree that mortgage forces people to actually save money, most people would just spend it all.

New comment by bloomca in "The real cost of owning a home"

bloomca — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:59:17 +0000

The biggest advantage of buying a house is that it forces people to actually put money into a giant savings account which is not easily accessible. Otherwise people just spend the vast majority of the money they have. As an investment, houses are historically mediocre outside of some hot areas.

New comment by bloomca in "The real cost of owning a home"

bloomca — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:47:10 +0000

HOAs can be very tricky, the money comes to maintain some shared amenities. Usually it is not too bad, but in case of condos HOAs maintain much more and sometimes the board makes very questionable decisions and can end up short on cash when big things are required, and that can hike the payments a lot.

As for the insurance, the best advice is just to avoid high-risk areas like flooding zones.

New comment by bloomca in "The real cost of owning a home"

bloomca — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:42:12 +0000

> If you take the money you'd use for a down payment and mortgage and invest it instead (after paying rent) you end up in about the same place.

You'd actually end up in a much better place historically, homes were never a particularly good investment in the US, but there are very few people who can pull it off and actually invest the difference and not just spend it.

New comment by bloomca in "Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)"

bloomca — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:18:48 +0000

I love to walk and think through things, but I honestly think walking itself is just a tool. It just allows your mind to wander as long as you are not busy (not alone, listening to a podcast, etc) and in the modern world it is a bit too easy to get distracted.

Show HN: CD-DA Reader, Rust library to read audio CD data

bloomca — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:49:11 +0000

I have lots of audio CDs and last year I did some systems programming, so I figured it would be cool to rip audio CDs using my own software. I used LLMs to understand how it is done, and I've learned a great deal on how SCSI commands are formed and processed.

I also wrote a separate app to actually rip the CDs using this library and populate the metadata, but I think technically it is much less interesting.

I think the biggest takeaway is that if you have some intimidating project, give it a try! It might be very much doable.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47980108

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bloomca in "ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state"

bloomca — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:29:24 +0000

The biggest issue is that there is no native component support for that. So everyone implements their own and it is both brittle and introduces some issues like:

- "ctrl + f" search stops working as expected - the scrollbar has wrong dimensions - sometimes the content might jump (common web issue overall)

The reason why we lost it is because web supports wildly different types of layouts, so it is really hard to optimize the same way it is possible in native apps (they are much less flexible overall).

New comment by bloomca in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

bloomca — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 17:37:30 +0000

It's about the same as talking to yourself, LLMs simply agree with anything you say unless it is directly harmful. Definitely agree about talking to an abuser, though.

Sometimes people indeed just need validation and it helps them a lot, in that case LLMs can work. Alternatively, I assume some people just put the whole situation into words and that alone helps.

But if someone needs something else, they can be straight up dangerous.

New comment by bloomca in "Make macOS consistently bad unironically"

bloomca — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:17:56 +0000

It is just the most obvious, macOS is a death by thousands cuts

Show HN: Vellyr – small JavaScript non-lazy signals library

bloomca — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:36:14 +0000

During my explorations of UI libraries and atomic updates I came to a conclusion that signals is one the best composable state primitives for that task.

Observables are great as well, but they are fundamentally more complicated, so I built a super simple eager signals library with explicit derived/effects semantics (so, no proxies) and wanted to share here.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520615

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bloomca in "Windows native app development is a mess"

bloomca — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 23:05:10 +0000

You mean conceptually or to match it? Native components are pretty much impossible to match without actually using the native framework which provides them, so you need WinUI/WPF.

Win32 provides its own components which are basically Win95 style apps, and you can draw the components using some graphics APIs by yourself.

The whole native development area is a mess exactly because making your own (decent) renderer is a huge undertaking.

New comment by bloomca in "Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices"

bloomca — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:56:28 +0000

Maybe Android has its own libc? So they compile it for Android, but not for general Linux.

Also curious about this.

New comment by bloomca in "We might all be AI engineers now"

bloomca — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 08:46:59 +0000

Windows APIs docs for older stuff from Win32 is extremely barebones. WinRT is better, but still can be confusing.

I think AI is really great to start with the systems programming, as you can tailor the responses to your level, ask to solve specific build issues and so on. You can also ask more obscure questions and it will at least point you at the right direction.

Apple docs are also not the best for learning, so I think as a documentation browser with auto-generating examples AI is great.

New comment by bloomca in "MacBook Neo"

bloomca — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:45:05 +0000

I have an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB and it struggles even without the light development part, and latest macOS made it all much worse. To be honest I am impressed how fast the experience degraded as there was a lot of headroom.