Hacker News: bsza

New comment by bsza in "Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive"

bsza — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:19:56 +0000

It's a completely different story. For cars, it happened because of relentless pressure from the auto lobby. It took years of propaganda from oil companies, car makers etc. to make us think the road is for cars [1]. We demolished and rebuilt entire cities to accommodate cars, partly because they gutted the public transport sector [2]. This made our infrastructure so hostile to our own bodies that we have no choice but to use cars now. We bought their products because they forced them down our throats. There is nowhere near that kind of pressure behind the adoption of... oh dear lord.

[1] https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2022/06/how-lobbyis...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

New comment by bsza in "My Software North Star"

bsza — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:02:59 +0000

I definitely did not mean using it as a prescription drug for a known condition. I meant using it without any medical indication, like many of us do. We know that amphetamines can lead to cognitive impairment [1] [2]. We know much less about reliance (over-reliance?) on AI, but what we know doesn't look good either [3] [4]. Of course, if you already live with a condition that makes it hard to concentrate, the benefits can outweigh the risks. But for most people they don't.

(Aside wrt being more effective with something than without: this is anecdotal, but my paragliding instructor once said that modern wings are often designed to correct for various pilot errors. He advised against buying those because he had seen people make worse mistakes after getting accustomed to them. In his own words: "you become dumber under a smart wing". Sharing because I think this applies to many things in life.)

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3639428/

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2670101/

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756322...

[4] https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...

New comment by bsza in "My Software North Star"

bsza — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 10:46:07 +0000

This might be a very naive take on my part, but I don't think of vibecoding as a competitor to actual coding the same way I don't think of doing amphetamines (even if they make you more productive in the short term) as a competitor to being clean. I think it's a self-destructive behavior that is ultimately going to degrade your critical thinking skills, especially if you're a beginner. As with everything, the smarter your tools, the dumber you get. People often claim to acquire "higher level thinking" skills from it (as do meth users), but even if that's true, they are also currently teaching those skills to the very tools that try to replace them.

The question is why would you fare any better if you don't use it. I don't know how it will play out, but this much I know: I will never pay for AI music, because I can replicate it for free. I'm still buying music from real musicians (in fact tons more than ever before), because I can't. Similarly, I have contributed to many FOSS projects (both financially and in PRs), but will not (knowingly) do the same for the ones that are vibecoded. Whether that will amount to anything or is just a fart in the wind, we'll see.

New comment by bsza in "Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?"

bsza — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:17:06 +0000

> In reality, we have the opposite: the post-Claude releases have way fewer commits than the pre-Claude ones.

No, they don't, you just made that up.

> What different metric would you suggest that would change the conclusion?

What would be a lot more useful to know is whether or not the original prompt used to generate this post instructed you to do a fair and unbiased review of these bugs, and whether or not that prompt itself was framed in a fair and unbiased way. If you take a piece of paper and write "therefore Claude is not at fault" at the bottom, then nothing you write above that line is admissible, no matter how well-reasoned.

New comment by bsza in "Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?"

bsza — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 07:39:30 +0000

No Claude, it still makes zero sense as a metric.

A commit is a measure of nothing. Severity weighted bugs per unit of nothing? What does that even mean? In any repo it's trivial to achieve a sev/10c that's arbitrarily close to zero while completely ruining everything.

I suggest you practice some humility and update your conclusion instead of updating the mental gymnastics you used to arrive at the same conclusion.

New comment by bsza in "Magnifica Humanitas"

bsza — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:48:40 +0000

I would advise against using it. The code it returns comes from real public repos, so including it in your work could lead to copyright issues. You'd probably be better off asking an LLM to come up with gibberish.

New comment by bsza in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

bsza — Thu, 21 May 2026 22:11:56 +0000

Sure, until it gets to the point where you're no longer able to just "buy a piece of hardware". Then it'll suddenly sound like a pretty sweet deal. Like when Nvidia nerfed ETH mining back when that was still a thing. That too was done to give more people access to hardware, not to take away their freedom.

New comment by bsza in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

bsza — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:18:59 +0000

Not counting tests, we haven't seen one in action in over 80 years. If we could practice this level of caution with AI, that would be a great start.

New comment by bsza in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

bsza — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:12:08 +0000

It's math that requires an obscene amount of compute. If it's possible to make DRM chips that don't let you play pirated movies and GPS chips that shut down when going too fast, then I reckon it's also possible to make GPUs that shut down when they encounter anything that looks like a transformer. The problem is regulatory, not technical.

New comment by bsza in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

bsza — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:23:46 +0000

> AI is here to stay

I've seen this mantra repeated over and over again with the exact same wording, and it's starting to sound like some kind of psy-op.

How about we start reasoning from here instead: Humans are here to stay. Whether or not we'll allow AI to stay is a function of whether or not it serves our collective interest.

New comment by bsza in "Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images"

bsza — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:49:40 +0000

Nothing morally wrong about finding an exploit in a system, it's what allows you to make it more secure in the future. Perhaps the most ethical course of action would have been to disclose this to Google/OAI first (which I don't know whether or not has happened), but I find that optional in this case since this isn't really a vulnerability in the conventional sense.

New comment by bsza in "Flipper One Tech Specs"

bsza — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:43:38 +0000

Wasn't it designed that way so you can pass it off as a toy in situations like that? It even comes with games and a dummy mode that hides everything except the tamagotchi screen.

New comment by bsza in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

bsza — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:44:41 +0000

We generally don’t allow cockroaches to thrive in the spaces we claim for ourselves. Question is how much space (economic or otherwise) will AI claim for itself and whether there will be any left for us.

New comment by bsza in "Remove-AI-Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images"

bsza — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:48:38 +0000

Would you prefer if someone did the same thing and kept it to themselves (or sold it to the highest bidder)? I think knowing it exists is better than not knowing it exists.

New comment by bsza in "The bottleneck was never the code"

bsza — Wed, 06 May 2026 20:00:52 +0000

They were right back then because these tools didn't exist yet, and they're right today because they do now.

What even is your point? Are you... mad because the truthiness of a statement can change over time?

New comment by bsza in "An open-source stethoscope that costs between $2.5 and $5 to produce"

bsza — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:12:34 +0000

It definitely doesn’t help that prints from filament printers are very porous, 100% infill or not. Maybe sealing it with epoxy after printing would help?

New comment by bsza in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

bsza — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:37:58 +0000

It's also probably easier to migrate to if you have complex workflows as Forgejo Actions is designed to be similar to GH Actions. (Never actually tried it myself though, I switched to Woodpecker long ago.)

New comment by bsza in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

bsza — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:46:34 +0000

I have nothing against open weight models, my issue is more with these mega-corporations posing as saviors of humanity. That said, how is your consumer hardware going to out-compete a datacenter when it has more mouths to feed per token than a datacenter? Who is going to give you money to run anything when a machine can do everything you can do?

No matter how you spin it, we humans are now becoming thermodynamically less efficient versions of LLMs. We contribute nothing of value to the system, so economics dictates we have no place in it except as investors. Skill is nothing now, and ownership is everything. So yeah, I'm afraid of the future. Call it FUD or whatever, I don't care.

New comment by bsza in "Men who stare at walls"

bsza — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:51:10 +0000

Nice find. I'm going to print this and put it on my wall.

New comment by bsza in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

bsza — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:47:46 +0000

You open with an insult directed at the HN community. Then you call me names. Then you lecture me about HN guidelines. Then you post this.

Flagging because this kind of language has no place on HN.