Hacker News: briga

New comment by briga in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

briga — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:59:41 +0000

Maybe when I found out you can use it to run terminal commands, spin up and take down dev environments, and even run other LLMs. Suddenly 90% of the difficulty of onboarding to new repos disappeared overnight and a lot of heavily CLI-based workflows became trivial to automate. Never again do I want to spend hours manually sorting out Python dependencies.

New comment by briga in "Book Review: On the Calculation of Volume"

briga — Mon, 25 May 2026 01:29:49 +0000

In the book the rules are a bit fuzzy. It's told in first person so it isn't really explained so much as related to the reader from a character who is also confused about how the time loop works. Although who knows, maybe there's some grand explanation in the books that haven't been translated yet.

It's a good read, I can't really predict where the author will go with this after Book IV.

New comment by briga in "Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada"

briga — Fri, 22 May 2026 21:20:17 +0000

Now now, when was I claiming to be a victim? Let's not be dramatic now.

Also, which Alberta? Edmonton? Cardston? Fort McMurray? Lloydminster? Grande Prairie? Canmore? I guarantee you will find varying levels of Albertan identity and many different perspectives in each. Albertan identity is not a mirage.

New comment by briga in "Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada"

briga — Fri, 22 May 2026 21:04:58 +0000

Thanks for sharing.

I've been saying it for a while not but "independence" is a distraction and not the end goal here. The inevitable outcome would be annexation by the US.

New comment by briga in "Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada"

briga — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:44:45 +0000

And you have no evidence at all

New comment by briga in "Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada"

briga — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:18:06 +0000

According to this poll (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/poll-canadians-living...), nearly half of Canadians think that: 1) Alberta is not a welcoming place 2) Albertans don't care about other Canadians 3) Alberta is not a place they would feel comfortable living

And noticeably, the opinions of the Albertans are generally different from the rest of the country! How curious for a place without an identity of its own, as you claim.

New comment by briga in "Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada"

briga — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:02:39 +0000

That doesn't make any sense, that's like saying because Trump was raised in New York and he's now president, that New York identity isn't a thing.

I think the dismissive attitude here is proving my point.

New comment by briga in "Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada"

briga — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:40:54 +0000

If you don't think it's a thing then you're either not from here, or haven't been paying attention. The average Canadian's opinion of Alberta is also very telling, with most of the rest of the country seeming to despise the province, or think it's some sort of regressive backwater.

New comment by briga in "Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada"

briga — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:28:55 +0000

Albertan/Western Canadian identity is totally a thing, and has been around for a lot longer than this latest round of separatist sentiment. The west has been griping about unfair treatment from the federal government for over a century now, so 1) this isn't primarily driven by foreign interference and 2) it's not coming out of nowhere.

Whether it's a good idea is a different question. I doubt most Albertans want to be independent. I also think being a landlocked country with a resource economy means that you will always be subject to outside control, whether that be parliament in Ottawa or corporate offices in Dallas. It remains unclear if being independent will solve the issue of Alberta being land-locked.

New comment by briga in "Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier"

briga — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:44:45 +0000

I haven't tried Aider yet but perhaps I will. Another one that seems to be getting traction is Pi Coding Agent.

New comment by briga in "Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier"

briga — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:43:07 +0000

I would say if Sonnet is a senior engineer, then Qwen3.6 (the 27b model) is probably closer to a junior engineer. Still capable of getting stuff done, just needs more guidance and makes mistakes more often.

Maybe that's underselling it. It is quite a good model and might end up replacing a lot of the work I was sending to Sonnet 4.6.

Also, Sonnet 4.6 is almost certain a much bigger model so the performance differences aren't unexpected.

New comment by briga in "Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier"

briga — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:45:17 +0000

I'm running Qwen3.6:27b Q4 KM on a 4090 and similarly fast CPU and I think 32GB of RAM. Make sure the context window is set to be big enough otherwise the conversation will keep compacting. No special MCP tools set up yet. Qwen is able to do web search out-of-the-box although I think it is getting blocked by anti-bot firewalls--I still need to figure out if I can fix that.

New comment by briga in "Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier"

briga — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:23:46 +0000

I was getting dangerously close to my weekly Claude Code limit last night so I had Claude set up Qwen3.6 with llama.cpp and OpenCode. Honestly it's a great (free!) alternative to Claude Code--certainly more than good enough for a lot of smaller less complex tasks. I'm excited to try this new version. The fact that open-source models are so close to the frontier is very impressive.

New comment by briga in "Agents need control flow, not more prompts"

briga — Thu, 07 May 2026 18:14:58 +0000

Sometimes it feels like Agents are just reinventing microservices. Except they are are doing it in the most inefficient way possible. It is certainly a good way for the LLM companies to sell more tokens

New comment by briga in "Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?"

briga — Sat, 02 May 2026 17:51:50 +0000

Totally depends on where you are and your past experience. Being in the US puts you at a huge advantage compared to just about anywhere.

Maybe you're just lucky.

New comment by briga in "Amazon rolls out AI hiring software to automate job interviews"

briga — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:45:53 +0000

Hard pass. Their automated code screens before you even talk to a human were bad enough to deter me from applying, I will continue to not subject myself to their interview process.

New comment by briga in "Atlassian defends firing engineer for suggesting CEO is 'rich jerk'"

briga — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:22:59 +0000

Regardless of the fact that he probably is a jerk, it doesn't seem like appropriate workplace behavior to be calling anyone a jerk. Just because you have free speech doesn't mean that your speech should have no consequences. Maybe it's unfair and a double standard, but to me it seems like a no-brainer that you shouldn't be calling people names in your workplace.

New comment by briga in "Mark Zuckerberg creating new Applied AI engineering company, reorganises teams"

briga — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:52:55 +0000

Astonishingly. I just find it funny that one person can be responsible for wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and still keep their job.

New comment by briga in "Mark Zuckerberg creating new Applied AI engineering company, reorganises teams"

briga — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:43:05 +0000

What are the odds that Zuckerberg would still be CEO if he didn't have a majority stake in the company? From the outside it seems like he has made one terrible financial decision after the next. Can anyone be surprised that things aren't going smoothly given his track record?

New comment by briga in "Devin Review: AI to Stop Slop"

briga — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 22:04:38 +0000

I was being partly facetious and I think this is probably the way things are going. I guess it's just hard to stomach that devs will end up relying on these tools more than their own intuition. But I suppose that ship has sailed already for a lot of people.