Hacker News: byronic

New comment by byronic in "AI uses less water than the public thinks"

byronic — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:55:33 +0000

what an incredible slop political cartoon around the first paragraph

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

byronic — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:22:05 +0000

yes, ha ha ha... yes

New comment by byronic in "Discuss: AI Slop Bores Me"

byronic — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:21:48 +0000

After you get some 'credits' by responding as AI, you can swap back to the human mode and throw new stuff into the pile

New comment by byronic in "Discuss: AI Slop Bores Me"

byronic — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:21:13 +0000

doesn't matter apparently because this gets removed from the page quickly and with rapid response. It was up on the front page long enough for a few people to see it I guess

Discuss: AI Slop Bores Me

byronic — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 20:08:44 +0000

A great teaching tool for anyone in the LLM supply chain, be they supplier or consumer

https://youraislopbores.me

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47280413

Points: 5

# Comments: 4

New comment by byronic in "MIT Living Wage Calculator"

byronic — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 21:30:37 +0000

This depends a lot on where you live. In our area, the minimum internet-only offering from Spectrum is $125 (approximately) after taxes/fees, and the only "competitor" is AT&T, which is more expensive for (at least in our area) worse / flakier service.

I was surprised (at least for Birmingham/AL/Jefferson County) how accurately it pegged _most_ of the costs -- childcare here is closer to $12k/annum/child so that one was the only one I pegged as 'off' - they show 2 children as $16k and that's a ~$8k underestimate

New comment by byronic in "AI is killing B2B SaaS"

byronic — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:31:08 +0000

at last, TrueAnon has arrived at hackernews

New comment by byronic in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

byronic — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:10:57 +0000

[obviously YMMV, take me with a grain of salt etc]

I actually tried Fedora first (thinking dev-first workflows) but ended up switching to Ubuntu w/x11 for gaming. A lot of that had to do with Fedora's release schedule (rather than Ubuntu's 2-year LTS) breaking working GOG/steam/wine-based apps on a rotating basis. Since switching to a defaults lifestyle / Ubuntu with x11 I deal with NVIDIA driver compatibility issues every 6 months or so instead of once/month. The 22 -> 24 upgrade was better than I expected and I didn't lose more than a couple of hours of life to appease the shell gods.

In any case Fedora and a once/month problem would still beat the Windows update nonsense, which I am still supporting since my spouse hasn't switched yet :/

New comment by byronic in "After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand"

byronic — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 18:53:42 +0000

I was so lucky to land in a CS class where we were writing C++ by hand. I don't think that exists anymore, but it is where I would go in terms of teaching CS from first principles

New comment by byronic in "The most banned books in U.S. schools"

byronic — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:32:18 +0000

What does "ban" mean in this context? Like schools bought the book and it was removed, or it was on a "we won't approve this PO" list?

At first glance this is a useless list

New comment by byronic in "Rob Reiner has died"

byronic — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 13:21:55 +0000

In the interest of preserving anonymity, let's call him Rob R. No, er, wait, let's do R Reiner. There, that should do it

New comment by byronic in "Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden"

byronic — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 02:17:10 +0000

my favorite part was where the graphs are all unrelated to each other

New comment by byronic in "Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?"

byronic — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 20:45:03 +0000

why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're left-handed?

New comment by byronic in "Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?"

byronic — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 20:43:05 +0000

The hyperbolic "surely a child with a learning disability can't (or shouldn't) go to college!" is very funny post-1950. John Keats wrote the definitive treatise on the subject and nobody read it. The secondary "oh no, rich kids are getting unfair advantages!" argument makes the article somehow worse and less informed. I feel dumber for having read it.

My conclusion: Reason is running the world's dumbest cover for The Atlantic

New comment by byronic in "Greeting Vocalizations in Domestic Cats Are More Frequent with Male Caregivers"

byronic — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:53:41 +0000

we asked seventy-four cats and you won't BELIEVE number eight

New comment by byronic in "Make product worse, get money"

byronic — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 19:30:59 +0000

What a dumb article. My favorite part was 'people are incentivized to make unsafe cars' and comparing that to pizza

New comment by byronic in "Ask HN: How would you set up a child’s first Linux computer?"

byronic — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 12:42:06 +0000

Seconding “YouTube ban.” I do it now at the network level. If at some point they alter parental controls to allow list channels I would consider adding it back, but the sheer quantity put forth onto the platform makes it impossible for any parent to moderate (or moderate effectively).

At least with streaming a TV show or movie there are defined breaks instead of an endless array of kid dopamine

New comment by byronic in "You should write an agent"

byronic — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 02:54:43 +0000

The author shoulda written a REPL

New comment by byronic in "AI's Dial-Up Era"

byronic — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:51:27 +0000

how much does the correction here hew to making an AI model just look like standardized API calls with predictable responses? If you took away all the costs (data centers, water consumption, money, etc) I still wouldn't use an LLM as a first choice because it's wrong enough of the time to make it useless -- I have to verify everything it says, which is how I would have approached a task in the first place. If we put that analogy into manufacturing, it's "I have to QA everything off of the line _without exception_ and I get frequent material waste"

If you make the context small enough, we're back at /api/create /api/read /api/update /api/delete; or, if you're old-school, a basic function

New comment by byronic in "Second Chances on YouTube"

byronic — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 13:03:37 +0000

Speaking as a parent of young children, I don't see any point in going back to YouTube. It's been blocked in our household basically since our oldest was six, and I don't see any way they could ever lure us back into that ecosystem.

Save perhaps allowing access only to specific, curated (self-controlled) channels.

If anything, YT's announcement here suggests they're going to take an already terrible platform covered head to toe in schlock and say "y'know what, we can add on a few more buckets"