Hacker News: botanical76

New comment by botanical76 in "Why users cannot create Issues directly"

botanical76 — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 12:20:52 +0000

Does this actually work? I would think it will be out of date by at least weeks, and I'd be surprised if their crawlers actually iterate through every issue page.

New comment by botanical76 in "CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat"

botanical76 — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 15:05:00 +0000

I don't agree with your conclusion, but just wanted to say the segment on "roast nothing" was hilarious and absolutely true. Quite right that many cuisines depend on meat to be worth eating. I'm just happy that the food I eat no longer consumes animal lives; the mechanism to do that is a triviality compared.

New comment by botanical76 in "Running Claude Code in a loop to mirror human development practices"

botanical76 — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 13:59:04 +0000

This is my experience as well. If you want it to write good tests, you have to take a much more involved approach of first making it establish what needs testing in each module, writing each test one at a time, and making it prove that it can break the test by modifying the source code to introduce a bug, modify the test to be appropriate, rinse and repeat. I haven't done this much because it's very expensive in terms of time and premium tokens...right now, I just write most tests myself so at least I have faith in the verification suite.

New comment by botanical76 in "Android developer verification: Early access starts"

botanical76 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 19:17:19 +0000

I understand your concern, though your suspicion is a little shortsighted. It can be personally dangerous to volunteer for projects that directly circumvent the control of the establishment.

New comment by botanical76 in "Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work"

botanical76 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 11:07:51 +0000

I mean, I talk like this as well. It's not really intentional. My interests influence the language that I use.

Why is the rationalist movement asinine? I don't know much about it but it seems interesting.

New comment by botanical76 in "Life After Work"

botanical76 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:58:54 +0000

Can you explain the subtext here?

New comment by botanical76 in "Keep Android Open"

botanical76 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 12:41:55 +0000

Many Android devices are unlockable, you can run your own software, and yet we still have a problem. This problem exists irrespective of what you can technically do with the hardware due to the vote by corporations to favour device "security" over user freedom. A phone is useless to most people without the apps they depend on.

New comment by botanical76 in "Gemini 3.0 spotted in the wild through A/B testing"

botanical76 — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 06:17:57 +0000

AI coding is in many ways antithetical to great software engineering.

It is the current spear-edge of the investor pressure to ship products faster, and monetize users more aggressively, all at the cost of quality, reliability, ethics, security.

If you, as a software engineer, once held an ideal about programming as an art or craft, AI coding flies in the face of all that.

It turns out that maximising for short-term profit leaves many other objectives behind in its wake.

New comment by botanical76 in "M5 MacBook Pro"

botanical76 — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 18:08:34 +0000

Yes, with major tradeoffs. Asahi Linux is an amazing project, but they have not yet figured out how to get anywhere close to a Mac's power efficiency when it is running MacOS. For example, you will lose a lot of battery life[0][1] with the lid closed, whereas on MacOS you lose pretty much nothing.

Also, note that thunderbolt not yet supported[2].

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20241219125418/https://social.tr... [1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/262 [2] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/overvie...

New comment by botanical76 in "LineageOS 23"

botanical76 — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 04:38:34 +0000

Note, GrapheneOS seems to have been able to secure partner access to Android early security releases, but this comes with the cost that the source used to make these special "01" builds is private until general availability. This might not be a tradeoff that LineageOS is willing to take; GrapheneOS has provided the option on a recommended opt-in basis.

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/27068-grapheneos-security-p...

New comment by botanical76 in "Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)"

botanical76 — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 05:29:38 +0000

I imagine so. I understand that Opera GX, for example, provides a specialized version to Russian IPs that locks down the search engines that can be used.

New comment by botanical76 in "Age verification doesn’t work"

botanical76 — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 04:37:23 +0000

Can you provide more context on this?

New comment by botanical76 in "White Noise – secure and private messenger"

botanical76 — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 01:09:59 +0000

As I understand it, it's just a nostr client, so it uses nostr's decentralized network of relays.

New comment by botanical76 in "Show HN: An open source alternative to Wakatime"

botanical76 — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 18:54:14 +0000

When trying to login via GitHub, I was redirected to "https://wakana.io/login?error=An+unexpected+error+occurred+w...", without an error message being displayed.

New comment by botanical76 in "Ask HN: How should junior programmers use and/or not use AI for programming?"

botanical76 — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 12:44:24 +0000

Well, rewriting entire features without tact can be a little toxic in collaborative environments. There may be good reasons for the design that does already exist, and those reasons may not be backed by the test suite, and you may only find out about them once you've burned through a month of dev time and further changes on top of the rewrite.

You should consult the code owner or primary set of authors before proposing a large rewrite. But if you do this, you should understand very well the pros/cons of throwing away all of this old code, documentation, and unit tests that have an implicit dependency on the existing structure.

I worry that if you are just vibe coding and letting the AI rewrite everything at will, you could not be further from understanding the details involved.

New comment by botanical76 in "Revealed: How the UK tech secretary uses ChatGPT for policy advice"

botanical76 — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 14:43:48 +0000

> Seriously. Stop using LLMs to "help" you do stuff you already know how to do.

Why?

New comment by botanical76 in "NCSC, GCHQ, UK Gov't expunge advice to “use Apple encryption”"

botanical76 — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:10:06 +0000

It's also understandable why services opt to use a Cloudflare proxy, what with the growing threat that is DDoS attacks from large botnets.

I feel we should build an extension to HTTPS to allow Cloudflare / other reverse proxy services to proxy web requests without circumventing the SSL guarantees between the user and the host. It should be trivially possible.

That said, the cynical side of me worries that it works this way by design.

New comment by botanical76 in "NCSC, GCHQ, UK Gov't expunge advice to “use Apple encryption”"

botanical76 — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 18:45:23 +0000

Why bother? They can just visit Cloudflare HQ, who already proxy 19.3%[1] of the internet. AFAICT, all https traffic proxied by them is accessible to them in plaintext. Of course, Cloudflare are disallowed by law from letting us know if the UK government were surveilling all of their proxied traffic.[2]

[1] according to this particular metric: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cn-cloudflare [2] "the IPA makes it illegal for companies to disclose the existence of such government demands." https://www.macrumors.com/2025/02/21/apple-pulls-encrypted-i...

IANAL

New comment by botanical76 in "I'm done with coding"

botanical76 — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 01:59:36 +0000

Isn't it self evident that this person has principles if they have left their job over it?

Does Visa Insights save lives?

New comment by botanical76 in "Hot take: GPT 4.5 is a nothing burger"

botanical76 — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 14:54:16 +0000

I would implore that you just write a blog post or two (or three) instead, but it is your choice of course.