Hacker News: dgritsko

New comment by dgritsko in "I'm building a Space Cadet Pinball Machine! [video]"

dgritsko — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:20:22 +0000

This sounds fascinating, are you documenting this in any public way for those of us that are inevitably curious on the details?

New comment by dgritsko in "Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity"

dgritsko — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:43:05 +0000

What a brilliantly written piece. Maintaining one's integrity is unfortunately rare enough that it makes Watterson's story so remarkable. I completely respect and admire his dedication to doing something for its own sake, for holding himself to the highest standards imaginable, and from walking away from it all for his own reasons - even if selfishly I'd rather him keep writing so that there would be more to enjoy. Time to go pull some old volumes of Calvin & Hobbes off the shelf for the hundredth time, I suppose.

New comment by dgritsko in "If AI has a bright future, why does AI think it doesn't?"

dgritsko — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:31:29 +0000

Exactly. LLMs at their core are just fancy autocomplete. Extremely fancy, to be sure, and the output that they predict can be very useful - but people who anthropomorphize them or ascribe higher significance to the generated output seem to be missing this.

New comment by dgritsko in "The happiest I've ever been"

dgritsko — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:17:38 +0000

These blog posts are fascinating to read. I don't have a personal blog, but if I did I'm sure I would've written a very similar post as I've been wrestling with similar thoughts over the last few weeks. I have the distinct sense that I will look back on February 2026 as an inflection point, where AI crossed over from being an interesting parlor trick to something that fundamentally and irreversibly altered what I do day-to-day. It's bittersweet, for sure - it feels inevitable that the craft of software development that I've loved for years will be seen as an archaic relic at some point in the not too distant future. It may be several years yet before the impact is broadly felt (the full impact of today's frontier models has yet to be felt by the general public - to say nothing of models that will be released in the next few years) but this train doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon. This post was a helpful reminder that who I am is not defined by the code I write (or don't write) - there's so much more to life than code.

New comment by dgritsko in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

dgritsko — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:35:50 +0000

I'm genuinely curious as to what the key differences are (especially those that would cause someone to switch), as someone who is pretty tech savvy but whose use of Linux as a daily driver is admittedly pretty weak.

New comment by dgritsko in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"

dgritsko — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:25:57 +0000

What made you switch from Pop OS? I just installed it on a couple of old PCs I had lying around for my kids to play around with/learn from.

New comment by dgritsko in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

dgritsko — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:40:19 +0000

Surely there's gotta be a better term for this. Recency bias?

New comment by dgritsko in "The lazy Git UI you didn't know you need"

dgritsko — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 13:19:29 +0000

Fellow SourceTree apologist here. It remains one of the first things I install on a new machine. I'll do simple stuff directly in the CLI, but stick with SourceTree for anything moderately complicated (as you've mentioned).

New comment by dgritsko in "Show HN: Conductor, a Mac app that lets you run a bunch of Claude Codes at once"

dgritsko — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 18:59:45 +0000

FWIW, this is what I wound up with - keeps the original branch name but ensures that it's based on the latest from the "dev" branch:

orig_branch=$(git branch --show-current) && git checkout dev && git pull && git branch -D "$orig_branch" && git checkout -b "$orig_branch"

New comment by dgritsko in "Show HN: Conductor, a Mac app that lets you run a bunch of Claude Codes at once"

dgritsko — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 18:29:18 +0000

Ah, excellent - appreciate the help! I'm already getting a ton of value out of this tool, thanks for sharing!

New comment by dgritsko in "Show HN: Conductor, a Mac app that lets you run a bunch of Claude Codes at once"

dgritsko — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 17:33:31 +0000

At the moment it's mostly Cursor or VS Code, but I was actually thinking of SourceTree. I'd like to look at the pending changes and manage the commits myself, and I could do that if I could add "open -a SourceTree ." as a custom command. I didn't see a place to edit a setup script, is that just on the filesystem?

New comment by dgritsko in "Show HN: Conductor, a Mac app that lets you run a bunch of Claude Codes at once"

dgritsko — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 16:26:58 +0000

This is awesome. A couple of suggestions:

- It'd be great to change the default branch used for creating new workspaces.

- I'd like the ability to add custom tools to the "Open in..." menu.

New comment by dgritsko in "Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?"

dgritsko — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 14:36:51 +0000

And if you're one of today's lucky 10,000 and haven't heard of the concept of "lucky 10,000", you can read the relevant XKCD here: https://xkcd.com/1053/

New comment by dgritsko in "Expanding AI Overviews and Introducing AI Mode"

dgritsko — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 17:51:34 +0000

For me, it's the fact that content generated by an LLM is fundamentally different than content that comes directly from a search index, but displaying them alongside each other conflates the two. Most people don't know the difference, and place the same level of importance (or maybe even more importance) on AI-generated content. Yes, this content is convenient. However, if the content isn't accurate or correct (which it may or may not be, given that it's just a statistically likely sequence of tokens) then is it actually beneficial as a whole?

New comment by dgritsko in "OpenAI's o1 Playing Codenames"

dgritsko — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 15:54:36 +0000

That's a big part of what makes this game enjoyable - a clue that is very obvious to one person might not even cross the mind of someone else. To anyone reading this who hasn't played, it's definitely worth giving it a try.

New comment by dgritsko in "Better Living Through Algorithms (2023)"

dgritsko — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 19:59:50 +0000

Great short story. Several times while reading it, I wished that I could download Abelique on the app store and try it out - I guess I'll have to settle for picking up my sketchbook instead.

New comment by dgritsko in "Apple Vision Pro U.S. Sales Are All but Dead, Market Analysts Say"

dgritsko — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 19:44:05 +0000

Apple recently "pulled the plug" on their car project, apparently. https://www.npr.org/2024/02/27/1234315814/apple-cancels-elec...

New comment by dgritsko in "Ask HN: What was an interesting project you started and finished over a weekend?"

dgritsko — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 13:44:24 +0000

Was out to dinner with the family, and my kids were enthralled with the "word search" that was on the kid's menu. I thought it'd be cool to build a custom word search generator - given an arbitrary list of words, it'd spit out a grid containing them. The part that made it fun was trying to figure out a layout for an arbitrary list of words that would be as compact as reasonably possible. I was able to get something working in just a couple of hours, and my kids loved being able to do word searches with stuff that was relevant to them, like names of family members. Of course, there are tons of similar generators freely available online, but it was very satisfying to figure it out for myself and come up with something that the kids enjoyed.

New comment by dgritsko in "Baltimore's Key Bridge struck by cargo ship, collapses"

dgritsko — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 13:25:04 +0000

Was watching CNN around 6AM EDT, they had a reporter on scene who mentioned wind "whipping across" the harbor. This was in reference to the potential survivability of the freezing cold water, but it seems likely it could have been a factor in pushing the ship off course as well.

New comment by dgritsko in "Advice for new software devs who've read all those other advice essays"

dgritsko — Wed, 20 Dec 2023 14:40:03 +0000

Looks like this might be what you want at least for Node.js: https://nodejs.org/docs/latest-v17.x/api/all.html