Hacker News: butterisgood

New comment by butterisgood in "The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models"

butterisgood — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 01:50:32 +0000

Human language is the whole point of a lot of this.

New comment by butterisgood in "A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows"

butterisgood — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:14:01 +0000

True. But it’s a technological representation of all that’s wrong with the industry.

New comment by butterisgood in "A new Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots Windows"

butterisgood — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:12:43 +0000

When it comes to Itanium all I can think of is how I wish I could have an Alpha. And how no one should care about Itanium.

It’s the product of companies bent on doing all the wrong things.

New comment by butterisgood in "The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway"

butterisgood — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 00:35:02 +0000

C led to an atrophy of assembly muscles. Though this is mostly different.

A spec is NOT CODE.

Someone still needs to understand what the code means.

C optimizers are not the same as the radical departure of an LLM.

New comment by butterisgood in "Claude Sonnet 5 – benchmark results"

butterisgood — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 21:20:14 +0000

I used sonnet five today to evaluate work I’m doing on an experimental programming language with an interesting concurrency model.

I asked it to try to figure out why one of the examples wasn’t working.

It read the implementation of the compiler and the runtime, found the bug, fixed it, fixed the example and the only thing I had to do manually is suggest a less silly name for a particular function.

I would use sonnet 5 for coding … seems alright!

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

butterisgood — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 05:59:54 +0000

The same thing I've been concerned about for years. These things can sound extremely confident and be wrong. If you're out of your depth with these tools, you'll find a "trustworthy sounding partner" who's basically lying to you about what it is "sure about".

AKA - Slop... It's a brand new form of bullshit.

New comment by butterisgood in "Jira Is Turing-Complete"

butterisgood — Mon, 25 May 2026 19:19:05 +0000

I've worked at a place that used this abomination called "Jira Align"... I think I'd rather do my own dental work without anesthetic.

New comment by butterisgood in "XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?"

butterisgood — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:02:55 +0000

I recall thinking about these things quite a bit when reading Michael Abrash back in the 90s.

How much of that advice applies to anything these days is questionable. Back then we used to squeeze as much as possible from every clock cycle.

And cache misses weren’t great but the “front side bus” vs CPU clock difference wasn’t so insane either. RAM is “far away” now.

So the stuff you optimize for has changed a bit.

Always measure!

New comment by butterisgood in "Opus 4.7 to 4.6 Inflation is ~45%"

butterisgood — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:24:31 +0000

You have to build a computer to learn about computers!

New comment by butterisgood in "Show HN: Oberon System 3 runs natively on Raspberry Pi 3 (with ready SD card)"

butterisgood — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:00:16 +0000

Have always been fond of Oberon! I would love to have A2/ActiveOberon/BlueBottle or whatever the name of the day is on a small native machine as well.

Great Stuff!

New comment by butterisgood in "XML is a cheap DSL"

butterisgood — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 20:34:31 +0000

XML was once like violence... if you're not getting the results you wanted you should just use more of it. We do not need to go back to that. XML is a step backwards to what was already a step backwards.

New comment by butterisgood in "Sir Tony Hoare has died"

butterisgood — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:09:43 +0000

Wikipedia seems to say he passed yesterday.

New comment by butterisgood in "Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions"

butterisgood — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:15:30 +0000

> Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone.

That is pretty context sensitive. You're correct that there's no real deep AI use expertise broadly understood to exist at this point (unless you're Steve Yegge?), but if people think they can toss out the engineers with experience in the systems that have been around a while, with junior developers "guiding" changes — that's likely a good way for a business to fall on its sword.

New comment by butterisgood in "The worst acquisition in history, again"

butterisgood — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:12:27 +0000

Indeed Edgar Allan Poe had a thing or two to say about newspapers. https://poestories.com/quotes.php (and scroll down a bit).

> “We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation — to make a point — than to further the cause of truth.”

New comment by butterisgood in "Microgpt explained interactively"

butterisgood — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:01:21 +0000

ISWYDT

New comment by butterisgood in "UNIX99, a UNIX-like OS for the TI-99/4A (2025)"

butterisgood — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:16:29 +0000

I wonder if this kind of architecture would be fun to build an L4 microkernel based system with.

Context switching and message passing (synchronous anyway) are the same thing when you consider how rendezvous works.

BLWP instructions seem like this was “meant to be”.

New comment by butterisgood in "AI made coding more enjoyable"

butterisgood — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:58:59 +0000

It made coding way different for me. I'm able to get a proof-of-concept for an idea up pretty quick, and then I have to go back and decide if I like the style it produced.

I feel more like a software producer or director than an engineer though.

New comment by butterisgood in "Moderna Won't Run Any Phase III Vaccine Trials as Skepticism Grows in US"

butterisgood — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 04:06:50 +0000

Cocaine toilet man of the brain worms speaks with authority for the anti-vaxxers and here we are.

New comment by butterisgood in "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"

butterisgood — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 14:17:38 +0000

I think this is how IBM is making tons of money on mainframes. A lot of what people are doing with cloud can be done on premises with the right levels of virtualization.

https://intellectia.ai/news/stock/ibm-mainframe-business-ach...

60% YoY growth is pretty excellent for an "outdated" technology.

New comment by butterisgood in "TI-99/4A: Leaning more on the firmware"

butterisgood — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 17:33:33 +0000

I still see "INCORRECT STATEMENT" in my dreams.