<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: carpo</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=carpo</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:12:28 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=carpo" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "LLMs are a 400-year-long confidence trick"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But saying it's a confidence trick is saying it's a con. That they're trying to sell someone something that doesn't work. Th op is saying it makes then 10x more productive, so how is that a con?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Jan 2026 10:56:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614580</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614580</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46614580</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Affinity Studio now free"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's not true. I've paid for a one time license for software before and received updates until the next major release.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:57:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45767240</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45767240</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45767240</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "What do we do if SETI is successful?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Man I love that story.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2025 22:51:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662735</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662735</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662735</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Peter Thiel's antichrist lectures reveal more about him than Armageddon"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Reading your comment made me think of the Roman generals returning to a triumph and someone constantly following them saying "memento mori", reminding them they are not a god. Now, instead of humility it would just be seen as a challenge.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Oct 2025 07:29:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45547343</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45547343</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45547343</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Ask HN: What's a good 3D Printer for sub $1000?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>An AMS is useful just so you can have 4 different filaments ready to go at any time. Doesn't need to be for multi material models. I have an A1 with the AMS lite and a Prusa mk3s, and manually changing materials is a chore.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Sep 2025 20:59:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45281333</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45281333</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45281333</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think you'd have to manufacture a culture, with rituals and habits designed to keep people focused so that the meaning of their lives was tied to the end-goal. It would make a good story :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Sep 2025 01:31:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45154530</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45154530</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45154530</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "The Universe Within 12.5 Light Years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Would you really? when it's the only thing you've ever known you'd probably just accept it as normal.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Sep 2025 03:54:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146458</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146458</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146458</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, the app lets you configure which whisper model to use and then downloads it on first load. Whisper blows me away too. Ive only got a 2080 and use the medium model and it's surprisingly good and relatively fast.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2025 04:53:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45123710</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45123710</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45123710</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe developers are using it in a less visible way? In the past 6 months I've used AI for a lot of different things. Some highlights:<p>- Built a windows desktop app that scans local folders for videos and automatically transcribes the audio, summarises the content into a structured JSON format based on screenshots and subtitles, and automatically categorises each video. I used it on my PC to scan a couple of TB of videos. Has a relatively nice interface for browsing videos and searching and stores everything locally in SQLite. Did this in C# & Avalonia -  which I've never used before. AI wrote about 75% of the code (about 28k LOC now).<p>- Built a custom throw-away migration tool to export a customers data from one CRM to import into another. Windows app with basic interface.<p>- Developed an AI process for updating a webform system that uses XML to update the form structure. This one felt like magic and I initially didn't think it would work, but it only took a minute to try. Some background - years ago I built a custom webform/checklist app for a customer. They update the forms very rarely so we never built an interface for making updates but we did write 2 stored procs to update forms - one outputs the current form as XML and another takes the same XML and runs updates across multiple tables to create a new version of the form. For changes, the customer sends me a spreadsheet with all the current form questions in one column and their changes in another. It's normally just wording changes so I go through and manually update the XML and import it, but this time they had a lot of changes - removing questions, adding new ones, combining others. They had a column with the label changes and another with a description of what they wanted (i.e. "New Question", "Update label", "Combine this with q1, q2 and q3", "remove this question"). The form has about 100 questions and the XML file is about 2500 lines long and defines each form field, section layout, conditional logic, grid display, task creation based on incorrect answers etc, so it's time consuming to make a lot of little changes like this. With no expectation of it working, I took a screenshot of the spreadsheet and the exported XML file and prompted the LLM to modify the XML based on the instructions in the spreadsheet and some basic guidelines. It did it close to perfect, even fixing the spelling mistakes the customer had missed while writing their new questions.<p>- Along with using it on a daily basis across multiple projects.<p>I've seen the stat that says developers "...thought AI was making them 20% faster, but it was actually making them 19% slower". Maybe I'm hoodwinking myself somehow, but it's been transformative for me in multiple ways.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2025 02:50:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45122967</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45122967</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45122967</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Is the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS alien technology? [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Unless that's where they want to put their base of operations.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 Aug 2025 01:08:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44793238</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44793238</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44793238</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Swearing as a Response to Pain: Assessing Effects of Novel Swear Words"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When my kids were younger I tried to to replace my swearing by saying "sugarplum fairies". It was fairly successful in becoming a natural replacement. However, the other day I kicked my toe really badly and instinctively yelled "sugarplum FUCKING fairies" and my kids (now early teen) found it extremely funny.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2025 23:53:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44439028</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44439028</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44439028</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Show HN: The Roman Industrial Revolution that could have been"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is great. Can see you put a lot of work into it. I like it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:49:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255434</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255434</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44255434</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Why agents are bad pair programmers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Same. I use /ask in Aider so I can read what it's planning, ask follow-up questions, get it to change things, then after a few iterations I can type "Make it so" while sitting back to sip on my Earl Grey.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2025 04:07:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44232386</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44232386</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44232386</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "There should be no Computer Art (1971)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>He's talking about provenance. The NFT just proves who the actual owner is, so when people were right-click downloading and saying "I own this now" you can very easily prove that they don't actually own it, the holder of the NFT does.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:01:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44176031</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44176031</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44176031</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think they just meant it hit an inflection point. Some people were copying pasting to ChatGPT and saying it was crap and others were using agents that could see the context of the code and worked much, much better. It's the workflow used not just the specific LLM.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Jun 2025 00:26:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164905</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164905</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44164905</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, it's probably too expensive and complicated to send all the frames to an LLM. I only send about 30 images at 576x324 which is around 15000 tokens a video, and comes to  about $0.045 per video. First I save one frame every second and then loop through them comparing each to find the differences, and send just screenshots which have changed significantly, up to a max of 30. Claude only allows 100 images per API call, so it would be a bit fiddly and costly to handle 7000 frames.<p>Though, now that I'm thinking about it, you could probably do this locally and just look at the part of the image that has the current score, do some local OCR on it to check if the score has changed each frame, if it has, store the timestamp and then use ffmpeg to extract the correct parts. Probably wouldn't need an LLM at all.<p>As for editing, one thing I do in my videos is audio keywords so my app can do specific things. For example, I can say "AI, mark what I just said as important." Then when it transcribes the audio and the LLM processes it, it will mark that part as a Distinct Moment with a start and end timestamp, a title and description that will show in my app as a clickable link to that part of the video. I'm thinking of adding more commands for more complex editing too.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 30 May 2025 23:55:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44140846</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44140846</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44140846</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks! I have been thinking about opening it up, but not sure, as I've never done any open source stuff and don't know how useful others would find it - there's some clunky bits!<p>I also have the whole Aider/Claude prompt history in the repo too, as I started this on a platform & framework I'd never used, and used the AI to scaffold much of the app at the beginning. Thought that might be useful to go back and see what worked the best when AI programming.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 26 May 2025 03:17:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44093660</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44093660</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44093660</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ive almost finished the first version of a desktop video library app I've been writing for myself. I had the idea last year, but the cost of sending images to an LLM made it too expensive (to run over about 1500 videos), but now it's fairly reasonable.<p>In the app you pick a folder with videos in it and it stores the path, metadata, extracts frames as images, uses a local whisper model to transcribe the audio into subtitles, then sends a selection of the snapshots and the subtitles to an LLM to be summarised. The LLM sends back an XML document with a bunch of details about the video, including a title, detailed summary and information on objects, text, people, animals, locations, distinct moments etc. Some of these are also timestamped and most have relationships (i.e this object belongs to this location, this text was on this object etc). I store all that in a local SQLLite database and then do another LLM call with this summary asking for categories and tags, then store them in the DB against each video. The App UI is essentially tags you can click to narrow down returned videos.<p>I plan on adding a natural language search (Maybe RAG -- need to look into the latest best way), have half added Projects so I can group videos after finding the ones I want, and have a bunch of other ideas for this too. I've been programming this with some early help from Aider and Claude Sonnet. It's getting a bit complex now, so I do the majority of code changes, though the AI has done a fair bit. It's been heaps of fun, and I'm using it now in "production" (haha - on my PC)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 May 2025 23:16:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44092195</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44092195</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44092195</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Only Teslas exempt from new auto tariffs thanks to 85% domestic content rule"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not one event that destroys a republic, but a series of little ones that slowly erode the norms, until all of sudden there's someone willing to cross the Rubicon. You've got 44 months of erosion to go.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2025 22:34:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43838840</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43838840</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43838840</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by carpo in "Only Teslas exempt from new auto tariffs thanks to 85% domestic content rule"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, I think we should try to separate his business acumen from his nut-case personality. He can be a successful businessman AND a fucking prick.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 29 Apr 2025 22:29:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43838793</link><dc:creator>carpo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43838793</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43838793</guid></item></channel></rss>