Hacker News: dexwiz

New comment by dexwiz in "How to get better at guitar"

dexwiz — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:07:54 +0000

Maybe? This seems to be more aimed at procrastination. Making map or a tool is still doing a thing, just not the thing.

New comment by dexwiz in "How to get better at guitar"

dexwiz — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 21:20:29 +0000

There should be a saying like "A tool is not the task" similar to "A map is not the land." As professional tool makers it can be easy to replace the task with a tool in theory, but that's not reality.

In a similar vein I think that's why there are so many devs making game engines instead of games.

New comment by dexwiz in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

dexwiz — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:36:02 +0000

Because many people run on policies and then just don't follow up. Trump ran on "no more wars" and then started a war. Most people have such a team mindset they will choose denial over admitted they were duped, and then do it all again.

New comment by dexwiz in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

dexwiz — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:20:25 +0000

Because our government is not run for the workers but the owners. Full stop.

New comment by dexwiz in "Do your own writing"

dexwiz — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:55:39 +0000

Sometimes people just need something else to tell them their ideas are valid. Validation is a core principle of therapeutic care. Procrastination is tightly linked to fear of a negative outcome. LLMs can help with both of these. They can validate ideas in the now which can help overcome some of that anxiety.

Unfortunately they can also validate some really bad ideas.

New comment by dexwiz in "A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place"

dexwiz — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 15:49:40 +0000

This assumes you wake up and are given liberties. There are much worse fates. Waking up and owing your life to the company forever is pretty awful.

Worse even is never truly waking up but instead being replicated and turned into the brain for a servitor. If you believe the Roko Worshippers, you might be woken up just to be tortured.

New comment by dexwiz in "Ask HN: How do you prevent MCP agents from looping in production?"

dexwiz — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 03:33:19 +0000

What is wrong with a blunt tool? Almost every other system ends up with a hard cap of retries.

New comment by dexwiz in "Rendezvous with Rama"

dexwiz — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 22:24:50 +0000

I'd all the Southern Reach trilogy (quadrilogy? now) to this list. It's more on the cosmic/eldritch side, but similar sense of unknowable.

SPOILER WARNING

My interruption is that Area X/The Crawler is a probe built to study and build a bridge back to its creator. Area X is expanding because it's the inside of a wormhole. But whatever is on the other side is long dead, and the probe is acting on instinct.

New comment by dexwiz in "Neural Boids"

dexwiz — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 21:47:50 +0000

Boids are little lovely simulations. This just looks like a boring force directed graph. I wonder if there is any correlation between the blandness of LLMs and weight based models.

New comment by dexwiz in "Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software"

dexwiz — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 20:40:26 +0000

I've worked in tech support. I get that 25-50% of the cases appear to be "read the docs to me." But the majority of those is because docs are poorly written, are overwhelming for new users, or they don't understand them and won't admit that directly.

New comment by dexwiz in "Log messages are mostly for the people operating your software"

dexwiz — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:20:39 +0000

That question is more likely how do I install, not what to install.

New comment by dexwiz in "TSA leaves passenger needing surgery after illegally forcing her through scanner"

dexwiz — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 21:51:00 +0000

It's a job program. And mostly theater to dehumanize you. Most VIPs get to skip it all together.

New comment by dexwiz in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

dexwiz — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:45:45 +0000

Thanks for the follow up. I am always hesitant to believe things that sound too Gladwellian.

New comment by dexwiz in "Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging"

dexwiz — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 01:05:55 +0000

You're right. 8 year olds would call you ancient and 80 year olds would call you a baby. Middle age is relative and unless you're over 45 you don't admit to it, and then hold on to it for too long.

New comment by dexwiz in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

dexwiz — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:56:00 +0000

I once heard a linguistic explanation for this.

European languages have a future tense, which means people have different ideas of themselves in the present and future. You can even hear this in phrases like "that's a problem for future me."

While Chinese lacks the European styled future tense, ignoring time phrases, auxiliary verbs, etc. So people more clearly conceptualize their present and future selves as the same. Leading to things like increased saving.

This of course is rooted in linguist psychology, a very soft science. But still an interesting idea.

New comment by dexwiz in "Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging"

dexwiz — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:49:52 +0000

Something I've never seen in these analyses is drinking. Millennials are heavy drinkers. Both craft brews and cocktails were defining generational traits. Not everyone is a drinker but it appears they are heavy drinkers compared to other generations.

The theory behind the ultra marathoners is that extreme distance running disrupts the epithelial layer and microbiome in the gut. Wouldn't drinking have similar effects?

New comment by dexwiz in "The PaaS Graveyard: Why Platforms Keep Dying and Developers Keep Migrating"

dexwiz — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:48:37 +0000

I wonder how many of these companies burned cash to acquire customers, thinking they could jack up rates to improve profit. At the first sign of this, people jumped ship. Also any significantly large client will migrate to a lower layer to save cost. This means your business is effectively locked into SMB, because the enterprise market is just not there.

New comment by dexwiz in "America has a tungsten problem"

dexwiz — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 23:11:30 +0000

Very small, high precision spheres are hard to make. Ball bearings also fall into this category. Many modern machines depend on this. I never see it "recreate society manuals," but they should be.

New comment by dexwiz in "Curating a Show on My Ineffable Mother, Ursula K. Le Guin"

dexwiz — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:09:21 +0000

I think a lot of Asimov stories fall into the same category. When you shape a genre, looking back it all seems so obvious. I do think Le Guin wrote much better characters than Asimov.

New comment by dexwiz in "Software factories and the agentic moment"

dexwiz — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 21:32:51 +0000

Growth will be proportional to spend. You can cut waste later and celebrate efficiency. So when growing there isn't much incentive to do it efficiently. You are just robbing yourself of a potential future victory. Also it's legitimately difficult to maximize growth while prioritizing efficiency. It's like how a body builder cycles between bulking and cutting. For mid to long term outlooks it's probably the best strategy.