Hacker News: bsza

New comment by bsza in "Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick"

bsza — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:51:06 +0000

I dont’t see the relevance, the discussion is over whether boilerplate text that occurs intermittently in the output purely for the sake of linguistic correctness/sounding professional is of any benefit. Chain of thought doesn’t look like that to begin with, it’s a contiguous block of text.

New comment by bsza in "4D Doom"

bsza — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:41:27 +0000

Then what is it? I'm seeing 4x5 transform matrices in the code, looks 4D enough to me.

New comment by bsza in "The Cognitive Dark Forest"

bsza — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 09:53:56 +0000

Maybe, but that's hardly comforting (and definitely not in the spirit of open source) if you're forced to take that decision, knowing it will hurt your project, because the alternative is getting DDoSed.

New comment by bsza in "The Cognitive Dark Forest"

bsza — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 08:30:02 +0000

Well, if you open-source anything these days and it does make it big, you can be prepared for a flood of low-effort slop PRs that you must either review for free or stop accepting external contributions altogether, making it effectively closed-source. You can't choose to ignore the garbage, it will collide with your stuff, unless your stuff is small enough to avoid collisions (in which case no one will see it).

New comment by bsza in "The Cognitive Dark Forest"

bsza — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:33:09 +0000

The best analogy I can think of (quite similar to this one) is that the internet is low Earth orbit and AI is the Kessler syndrome. We abandon the place not to hide ourselves, but because it is saturated with garbage, and anything you try to put up there will only result in even more garbage being generated, without any positive effect.

The ideal solution would be to remove the garbage, but right now we can't even detect it, let alone figure out a way to get rid of it. Besides, it's a zero sum game, why bother cleaning up when you can just effortlessly pump out more garbage in hopes that some of it will remain in orbit for long enough to benefit you.

New comment by bsza in "If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos"

bsza — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:50:55 +0000

I've been encrypting my private git repos for a while because I had suspected they were going to do something like this.

https://github.com/flolu/git-gcrypt

It's very easy to set up and integrates nicely into git. Obviously only works if you don't need Actions or anything that requires Github to know what's in your repo (duh).

New comment by bsza in "Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming"

bsza — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:13:48 +0000

It’s not how many times, it’s what you do about it. DRY doesn’t mean you have to make abstractions for everything. It means you don’t repeat yourself. That is, if two pieces of code are identical, chances are one of them shouldn’t exist. There are a lot of simple ways you might be able to address that, starting from the most obvious one, which is to just literally delete one of them. Abstraction should be about the last tool you reach for, but for most people it’s unfortunately the first.

New comment by bsza in "I'm Not Consulting an LLM"

bsza — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:23:39 +0000

IME, even when an LLM is right, a few follow-up questions always lead to some baffling cracks in its reasoning that expose it has absolutely no idea what it's talking about. Not just about the subject but basic common sense. I definitely wouldn't call it the "same mental process" a human does. It is an alien intelligence, and exposing a human mind to it won't necessarily lead to the same (or better) outcome as learning from other humans would.

New comment by bsza in "No right to relicense this project"

bsza — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:21:57 +0000

That much I understand, but that question only comes up when the similarity is already an established fact, no? If we take the claim that this is a "complete rewrite" at face value, then there should be no reason for the code to have any uncanny similarities with chardet 6 beyond what is expectable from their functionality (which is not copyrightable) being the same, right?

So my (perhaps naive) understanding is if none can be found, then the author of chardet 1-6 simply doesn't have a case here, and we don't get to the point of asking "have you been exposed to the code?".

New comment by bsza in "No right to relicense this project"

bsza — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:51:31 +0000

Sorry, but that sounds like a witch hunt to me, not modern law. Isn't the burden of proof on the accuser? I.e. the accuser has to prove that "this piece of code right here is a direct refactoring of my code, and here are the trivial and mechanical steps to produce one from the other"? And if they present no such evidence, we can all go home?

New comment by bsza in "No right to relicense this project"

bsza — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 11:07:51 +0000

So by that logic, you're not legally allowed to implement your own character detector and license it as your own if you've ever looked at chardet's source code? I'm confused. I thought copyright laws protect intellectual property as-is, not the impression it leaves on someone.

New comment by bsza in "TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe"

bsza — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:57:27 +0000

> We know just how risky end-to-end-encrypted platforms can be for children

As opposed to doomscrolling and brainrot, which are not risky to expose children to at all. /s

If TikTok cared about children in the slightest, they would not exist.

New comment by bsza in "Don't become an engineering manager"

bsza — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:39:51 +0000

Alternatively, this is all a psy-op by AI companies to make engineers willing to work harder for less money so they can pretend all that productivity growth is thanks to their stuff.

New comment by bsza in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

bsza — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:24:39 +0000

Compromise between what? Disrupting people's sleep schedules and not disrupting people's sleep schedules?

New comment by bsza in "Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona"

bsza — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:53:56 +0000

Have you read my comment?

New comment by bsza in "Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona"

bsza — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:21:26 +0000

https://www.pcmag.com/news/godot-game-engine-is-drowning-in-...

https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/01/overrun-with-ai-slo...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/LLVM-Human-In-The-Loop

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

Just off the top of my head, I bet a lot of other repos are going through the same.

New comment by bsza in "Discord cuts ties with identity verification software, Persona"

bsza — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:19:37 +0000

I would have agreed 5 years ago, but not this day and age, when AI is raping open source projects and killing platforms like Stack Overflow.

We need a safe space from web crawlers and surveillance, and open forums ain't it. (Neither is Discord, but a sufficiently secure alternative might be.)

New comment by bsza in "I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978"

bsza — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 15:27:52 +0000

They did forget the typo though, the transcript is wrong.

New comment by bsza in "FreeCAD"

bsza — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:51:45 +0000

Your ball looks well parametrized to me, what kind of editing are you missing from it? Unless you want to change the shape of the locking mechanism altogether, which I think would be a chore in any format.

New comment by bsza in "FreeCAD"

bsza — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 09:19:52 +0000

Another advantage of OpenSCAD (if you can call it that) is that LLMs seem to be able to work with it pretty well. A few days ago I asked chatgpt to make me a box for storing batteries, and it came out perfect on first try without any modification. It also made an okay-ish looking 3D pelican after some back-and-forth.