Hacker News: c048

New comment by c048 in "The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding"

c048 — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:35:57 +0000

Everything we know and see has proven that progress is exponential.

Your statement that progress or intelligence is binary has no basis outside of intentional and ignorant pessimism.

New comment by c048 in "2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results"

c048 — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 07:33:23 +0000

1. Is not a gamer's dream. It's terrible and you'll find out quite fast you're not interested in everyone's background and scream to most NPC's to shut the fuck up and get to the point.

It's just as terrible as injecting 'realism' in games for the sake of 'realism'.

New comment by c048 in "HTML is a native image format, hear me out"

c048 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:41:57 +0000

You can also paint by squashing flies against a wall. Doesn't mean it's a good, or efficient, idea.

New comment by c048 in "CRISPR takes important step toward silencing Down syndrome’s extra chromosome"

c048 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 08:42:30 +0000

The full diversity of life sounds wonderful, as long as you're not the one suffering painful, disfiguring or crippling conditions.

New comment by c048 in "Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube"

c048 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 08:31:22 +0000

Babylon 5.

When people asked me what I preferred, "Star Wars or Star Trek?", I've always responded with "Babylon 5".

New comment by c048 in "Eight more months of agents"

c048 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 12:07:04 +0000

I wonder what happened to the old addage of "only 10% of the time you actually spend coding, the rest of the time is figuring out what is needed".

At the same time I see people claiming 100x increases and how they produce 15k lines of code each day thanks to AI, but all I can wonder is how these people managed to find 100x work that needed to be done.

New comment by c048 in "When two years of academic work vanished with a single click"

c048 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 09:05:17 +0000

To make it even worse, he deemed none of it important enough to backup.

AI fan or not, that is astoundingly stupid.

New comment by c048 in "The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)"

c048 — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:16:11 +0000

So do I understand correctly that it's from a tooling issue? If so, thanks for that insight.

New comment by c048 in "The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)"

c048 — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:48:55 +0000

I've heared Americans, unironically, state that the metric system is less precise than the imperial system.

I have no clue what the origin is of this myth, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if Trump held this belief too.

New comment by c048 in "The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)"

c048 — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 12:24:54 +0000

Only in certain fields. For most interactions divide by 10 is far easier than divide by 12, and you'd end up with far, far more "eyeballed" measurements.

So no, as a human being, I'm fine with base 10.

New comment by c048 in "Lessons from interviews on deploying AI Agents in production"

c048 — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 14:47:45 +0000

I worked in a finance department for over a decade. That architect is a lunatic or a sheer idiot.

New comment by c048 in "Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall"

c048 — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 08:18:11 +0000

Considering how much this particular system has been linked to real life crime and gangs, you're not far off.

People downvoting you must either not be aware of this, or have a personal stake in it.

New comment by c048 in "Use singular nouns for database table names"

c048 — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 08:39:46 +0000

I agree.

It is better to be consistent but wrong, than inconsistent but correct.

Consistent and correct might seem ideal, but merely the fact that what is 'correct' is in the eye of the beholder most of the time, making it basically unobtainable.

But being consistent is at least something that is far less subjective.

New comment by c048 in "OpenAI's new GPT-5 models announced early by GitHub"

c048 — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 09:45:10 +0000

This is why I don't listen at all to the fearmongers that say programmers will disappear. At most, our jobs will slightly change.

There will always be people that describe a problem, and you'll always need people actually figuring out what's actually wrong.

New comment by c048 in "Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition"

c048 — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 21:09:04 +0000

It should be, but you can't be picky.

New comment by c048 in "I Deleted My Steam Account After 20 Years"

c048 — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 08:08:42 +0000

Am I reading this wrong? He complaints that Valve deleted items and posts, despite them promising that it would not happen... only for the quote he provided to state that "they might not delete everything".

"Might" is not "will".

New comment by c048 in "LLMs as Compilers"

c048 — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 06:18:21 +0000

I've thought of this too.

But I always end up in a scenario where, in order to make the LLM spit out consistent and as precise as possible code, we end up with a very simple and tight syntax.

For example we'll be using less and less complete human sentences, because they leave too much open to interpretation, and end up with keywords like "if", "else" and "foreach". When we eventually do end up at that utopia, the first person to present this at a conference will be hailed as a revolutionist.

Only for the LLM to have a resolve clash and, while 'hallucinating', flip a boolean check.

New comment by c048 in "Material Theme has been pulled from VS Code's marketplace"

c048 — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 10:55:39 +0000

Thank you

New comment by c048 in "Why aren't we losing our minds over the plastic in our brains?"

c048 — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 21:19:14 +0000

I don't really see what that has to do with what I posted, as it completely misses the point.

This is not about eating fast food vs eating healthy. This is about groups of people eating the same food, only that one is labeled 'bio/organic' and the other isn't.

When these people were subjected to tests, and the foods themselves were tested, it was quantifiably proven to be less healthy.

New comment by c048 in "Why aren't we losing our minds over the plastic in our brains?"

c048 — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 20:20:11 +0000

https://www.belganewsagency.eu/study-finds-that-young-people...