Hacker News: cagatayk

New comment by cagatayk in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

cagatayk — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 02:57:58 +0000

Code agents built by tech companies have very different cost functions than the users of those tools. For engineers working on Claude Code, tokens are practically free, unlike you and me. They probably count on tackling increasing complexity of a grotesquely large code base with better models.

It ends up being a race, where you build something ugly that makes money directly (subscriptions) and indirectly (hype -> investors throwing money at you), you use that money to hire people, who build scarier/better models, which you then use (and this is the new thing) to directly improve the ugly thing more, hoping to make it less ugly and better at making money faster than you are spending it.

It sounds exhausting to me, but it probably feels exhilarating to the people in the middle of it.

New comment by cagatayk in "Borges and AI"

cagatayk — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 21:25:04 +0000

> Neither truth nor intention plays a role in the operation of a perfect language model. The machine merely follows the narrative demands of the evolving story. As the dialogue between the human and the machine progresses, these demands are coloured by the convictions and the aspirations of the human, the only visible dialog participant who possesses agency.

This is a really good way of thinking about these models. It reminds me of the recent-ish story where a reporter got really creeped out Bing's OpenAI powered chatbot (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-m...). Reading that, I had thought the bot was relatively easily led into a narrative the reporter had been setting up. In a conversation between actual people who have their own will and agency, you don't get to see one leading the other around by the nose so completely.

Reframing the problem as one of picking through the many threads of potential fictions to evolve a story makes it easier to explain what happened in that particular case.

New comment by cagatayk in "Lion removes Java?"

cagatayk — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:39:08 +0000

The developer package you download from connect.apple.com is a full JDK in its own right, there's no need to link the sources to the JRE under /System. You just need to let Eclipse know that there's a new JDK in '/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/' and make that the default in your Eclipse execution environment settings for 1.6; all your projects for that environment will pick up the new JDK along with the sources and docs. I link the specific JDK to 'latest' under the JavaVirtualMachines' and use that in Eclipse; that way I can just recreate the symlink after upgrading to a newer JDK and my IDE doesn't have to care.

New comment by cagatayk in "The Azul Garbage Collector"

cagatayk — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 22:21:00 +0000

The linked article is naive as to GC algorithms used in current Java VM's. These go to a lot of trouble to avoid tracing or scanning the heap. Card marking (http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp11253/#2...) is one way to avoid this cost. As to building something like memcached, you can use native memory directly using direct byte buffers in Java; this is essentially what Terracota BigMemory (http://www.terracotta.org/bigmemory) does.

New comment by cagatayk in "Solar Panel Maker Moves Work to China"

cagatayk — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 18:25:14 +0000

So we're loaning the finance industry trillion dollars at essentially zero interest rate just so they can lend it back to federal government by buying treasuries and pocket the difference (and thus "recover from the crisis"), while China lends tens of billions dollars more than US does to solar energy companies. I hope I'm not the only one who finds the implications scary.