Hacker News: cronin101

New comment by cronin101 in "Claude Opus 5.5"

cronin101 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:32:32 +0000

It certainly _seams_ that way

New comment by cronin101 in "AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You"

cronin101 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:15:27 +0000

This isn't true, there's a limit to how much feed-forward processes can correct themselves and well-poisoning of context is far too common.

Try using an LLM to rewrite an LLM output without the slop (vs asking for no slop to begin with) or sandboxed subagents that critique a parent's draft.

There is absolutely a step-function improvement in quality but: 1) not everyone wants to explode their cost by adding extra calls 2) this can't just be "trained in" to a system as obviously they have attempted this but the technique still provides an uplift.

New comment by cronin101 in "AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You"

cronin101 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:52:46 +0000

You pay someone and give them the explicit responsibility for code quality in your system, empowering them to gate check-in with any static analysis and adversarial agent review they feel like. It’s not a silver bullet but you absolutely can do better than just giving up.

New comment by cronin101 in "EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'"

cronin101 — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 11:04:07 +0000

Is this the path to a Bizarro World future where the Commonwealth realms become associate members of the EU to slowly unBrexit?

I don't hate the idea

New comment by cronin101 in "I accidentally turned LLM memory into program analysis"

cronin101 — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:34:16 +0000

Really (in your example) the timeframe is the only difference.

You can endure as long as you want to, but we're all going to erode eventually.

New comment by cronin101 in "Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions"

cronin101 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:02:37 +0000

is 200 a lot of concurrent people? What is required from the server in order to render the demo, can't most of the work be pushed to the edge devices?

New comment by cronin101 in "A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare"

cronin101 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 15:17:40 +0000

Can you “just do this” or is there some preapproval you’re meant to get beforehand? Presumably the answer varies wildly by jurisdiction.

New comment by cronin101 in "Working with AI Feels More Like Leadership Than Coding"

cronin101 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 15:03:02 +0000

To me, working with AI feels a lot like the previous experiences of “working in a sprawling enterprise codebase spanning multiple systems each with emergent behavior”, except now I can outsource the introspection and validation loops to something that never gets bored instead of spending 2h hyping myself up to concentrate for a 3h stint.

New comment by cronin101 in "DeepSeek peak/off-peak pricing update"

cronin101 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 14:26:07 +0000

Irony of Manchurian Candidate models not lost here

New comment by cronin101 in "An Honest Review of AI Programming"

cronin101 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 13:41:30 +0000

I’ve specifically used Opus to diagnose and fix performance bottlenecks in parallel Rust code on multiple occasions (e.g improving NPS for a chess engine) and it works well.

I’ve done plenty of performance architecting in my day-job and rule #1 is generally “you can’t fix what you can’t see/measure”. I have a suspicion that many folks aren’t investing in letting AI actually introspect iterative execution via the appropriate harness, and are then acting surprised that it is no oracle.

New comment by cronin101 in "An Honest Review of AI Programming"

cronin101 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 13:26:56 +0000

Have you actually tried performance optimisation using an agent? With any programming language/framework that has quality profiling tooling (which is a prerequisite for most projects) I have had huge success with automated hotspot profiling where the LLM can propose theories, test the impact of fixes, convince you of which to pursue, etc.

High performance algorithms are quite well documented so it isn't unreasonable to expect an LLM to apply them appropriately when given the ability to "see" where they need to be applied.

New comment by cronin101 in "An Honest Review of AI Programming"

cronin101 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 13:05:09 +0000

At the risk of sharing an unpopular take, this reads a lot like someone who decided how they feel about LLM-driven engineering ~5 months ago and doesn’t seem to reflect the current reality.

(Or they’re working in an organization with lower budgets and not cranking the frontier models of today)

I fully agree about the cost/sustainability parts, but to suggest you can’t build a high quality coding/verifying/iterating loop for _most_ problems is disingenuous.

New comment by cronin101 in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

cronin101 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 08:38:31 +0000

My favourite interview question that I received was when I was asked to write code that would serialize/deserialize a binary tree and was told it was fine to use "any programming language".

They received a crash course in the power of Haskell ADT and `deriving (Show, Read)`.

New comment by cronin101 in "The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade"

cronin101 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:34:47 +0000

Net worth or net income? Being 40yo with only 200k of worth between two when you’re halfway through your working life and have had 10y of appreciation of assets isn’t very much to go forward with.

New comment by cronin101 in "Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone"

cronin101 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:56:13 +0000

Running with your ankle at an angle occasionally gives great strength/mobility benefits. You'd need to be putting out some serious racer pace for curb cuts to be impacting your experience in any way.

Just make sure you alternate which side of the road you are running on somewhat evenly so you are getting the benefit on both sides.

New comment by cronin101 in "Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness"

cronin101 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:22:54 +0000

Off topic (but helpfully hopeful to someone!): In the rare cases where I get motion sick I can usually "hack" my way out of it by closing my eyes and imagining myself skiing down a mountain avoiding obstacles in an erratic path that matches the patterns of motion I'm feeling (calculated JIT).

Presumably you have to have a lot of experience skiing for this to work, but there are probably isomorphic activities (weaving around a crowd? Playing dodgeball?) that can hack your brain in a similar way.

New comment by cronin101 in "Claude Fable 5"

cronin101 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:25:55 +0000

Not doubting this at all but could you (or someone else) break this down for the sake of my curiosity?

I understand pension contributions, but what are the other "hidden" costs that could equal the net salary?

New comment by cronin101 in "Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart"

cronin101 — Fri, 22 May 2026 09:34:45 +0000

Except you can actually “scan” a digital photo with a Polaroid quite effectively and it will look pretty much identical to a real Polaroid, so even that is security theatre.

New comment by cronin101 in "Was my $48K GPU server worth it?"

cronin101 — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:18:48 +0000

Nitpicking, but the worst case of spending $25k is unforeseen circumstances that write off the entire asset. I don’t think -$2000 is a conservative enough figure for standard depreciation either (a lot can happen in a year)

New comment by cronin101 in "UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system"

cronin101 — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:06:31 +0000

I'm not sure you are arguing against the point that the above poster is making. They aren't saying "giving money to foreign companies is bad". It's "in order to have a healthy domestic service economy, we should be investing it it wherever possible" combined with "investment in on-shore development is largely recaptured in income tax" (thus it can be worthwhile for the public even when slightly more expensive).

A free market is not a means to an end. Part of the reason that the USA was (until recently) doing so well was that the winner-takes-all mentality of the free-market benefits Silicon Valley, but that doesn't mean that other nation states have to submit to that philosophy.