Hacker News: briga

New comment by briga in "Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive"

briga — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 04:47:09 +0000

I don't think this is entirely true: let's just say the jobs boom is unevenly distributed. There are definitely more openings than there were a year ago, but it is also now much more of a challenge to effectively market yourself as a person in tech.

On the one hand there is the problem that every job posting is flooded with hundreds of bogus AI resumes which, if they are not outright fabrications, stretch the truth enough to make it hard to tell who is qualified and who is not.

Anecdotally, it seems to me like directly applying to jobs is a waste. You either have to find some way to attract recruiter outreach, or network with people who can get you a foot in the door.

New comment by briga in "Micron announces $10B research hub in Boise"

briga — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:00:14 +0000

They certainly aren't politically progressive, but Boise is probably one of the cleanest, safest, nicest cities in the US. It is really quite pleasant, at least it was when I visited.

New comment by briga in "We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled"

briga — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 11:55:16 +0000

A true casualty of AI. Em-dashes used to be one of my favorite punctuation devices, now I find myself consciously editing them out of my writing.

New comment by briga in "We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled"

briga — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 11:47:00 +0000

What exactly makes it "obvious" that this is written by AI? I could totally believe that AI was used to generate parts of it, but I really don't get the sense that the whole thing was written that way. I've seen way worse examples on this site.

As software engineers we are constantly told that we need to heavily use these tools for our daily work. So is it surprising that software engineers use the same tools as writing aids? Using AI does not mean no human effort was involved.

New comment by briga in "Anthropic CEO reportedly worried new hires only care about money"

briga — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 05:48:46 +0000

Here's an idea: instead of paying your employees $800k, how about you cut their pay to $80k. See how many of them are truly in it for the mission.

New comment by briga in "New Orleans is testing Carbyne’s AI-powered Emergency Call Triage software"

briga — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 01:18:51 +0000

This sounds a little dystopian. How confident are they that this system is reliable? Any downtime could literally result in deaths. I would be highly skeptical of such a system being put in place in my city, not to mention the private company being paid to provide these services

New comment by briga in "Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees"

briga — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:19:12 +0000

Awful compared to what though? To our modern perspectives yes, but for subsistence farmers working in the fields 16 hours a day and rarely far away from starvation, life in a factory might not seem so bad. After all, wages were far worse before the factories and wage growth was almost non-existent.

New comment by briga in "Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees"

briga — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:19:36 +0000

The central premise of this post is basically not true: working conditions and wages have pretty consistently improved over the past 200 years. The cases where it didn't were generally offset by the rest of society benefiting from increased automation and productivity. Where the current revolution will lead remains unclear, but if the past is any indication things will probably continue to improve for most people.

New comment by briga in "GLM-5.2 is a step change for open agents"

briga — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:59:27 +0000

With subsidization from the Chinese government they will probably be equal to or better than the models here. I mean, have you looked at the author list of any given AI paper published within, say, the past 5 years? I wouldn't be surprised if half or more AI researches are from China.

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.