Hacker News: dinkumthinkum

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "Good Culture Is the Biggest Productivity Hack, Not AI"

dinkumthinkum — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 08:54:40 +0000

The "Luddite zeitgeist"? :) Be careful what you wish for, you may just get it.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

dinkumthinkum — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 07:50:37 +0000

Do you realize that there is software out there that are not simple React apps? The models are clearly advanced but I think the world is a lot more complex than you seem to think.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

dinkumthinkum — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 07:36:30 +0000

If you a degree already, you don't necessarily have to go for four years for another degree, you will have to take the courses for your major and a small amount of additional requirements versus a first degree.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

dinkumthinkum — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 07:32:13 +0000

What are you talking about? Why do you call out "Western world," this seems like the reflexive idea of the left that the West is some brutish downtrodden hellhole. What's weird is what you are describing is the opposite. It is much more common in the West to be able to change your career than in the East, by an enormous margin. In many places in the East, a tremendous amount of career possibilities are removed from kids from tests they take having barely begun puberty. How many Adam Steltzner's do you think there are outside of the West? What are we talking about? As far as your specific situation with 2012, I have no idea but this is not laid at the feet of the Western world.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "Don't be a meat proxy"

dinkumthinkum — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:42:38 +0000

I feel like this post unironically proves the point.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork"

dinkumthinkum — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 06:44:05 +0000

Maybe you should ask AI to review your statistics and reasoning. A large amount of 16-22 year old kids are in school. And retirees 80+ are retired. I don't see how any of this is relevant to the idea of what would happen to the economy if there is an employment collapse. I don't know that this would also seem like a utopian dream to someone in the 1800s; I'm not sure what that means. I think someone from the 1800s would be surprised by a great many things and that statistic would probably be low on their list.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "The Art of 64-bit Assembly"

dinkumthinkum — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:39:05 +0000

Are you a programmer because this doesn't logically follow. An LLM can be trained on a book but that doesn't mean it will perfectly implement the principles "learned" in in that book for all future prompts and problems. Also, I think what is more fundamentally being said here is more about you as the potential reader, yes you can prompt the AI for something and it will give you a response but it will likely not give you a complete enough of a response that would confer upon you an equivalent level of understanding as an expert for your use-case.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "The Art of 64-bit Assembly"

dinkumthinkum — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:21:41 +0000

Volume 1 is actually a really good book. Randall Hyde is a great author on this subject. HN has changed a lot from what it once was. It's just filled with a lot of this kind of snark and nonsense. What else would you expect when the most common take on AI on HN is this insane idea that "LLMs are just like a compiler was?" But, its not everyone. If you're interested in this topic then I think it will be worth working through.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "So you want to learn physics (second edition, 2021)"

dinkumthinkum — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 01:55:03 +0000

I think there is more in this world than is dreamt of in your philosophy. The crowd on HN now is very different than it used to be rest assured there are many people self-teach themselves the equivalent of a university curriculum. I mean, nerds actually exists, they're not all humdrum corpo worker bees trying the maximize their employers' value and then just hiking or whatever.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "Open source AI must win"

dinkumthinkum — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:56:47 +0000

huh? You think using it to advertise to us is worse than taking our jobs? Why would anyone advertise to jobless people. How is what you seem to be trivializing not the central problem? I don't think controlling is high on Dario's list. But he is absolutely gleeful, he cannot even hide his arousal in his interviews in which he never looks anyone in the eye about taking people's jobs and destroy our future ... but yes, oh the agony of advertising ...

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "Open source AI must win"

dinkumthinkum — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 07:53:07 +0000

If any AI wins, how can that be good for humans? It's high minded but if any AI wins, why would any of "The ability to study, build, repair, deploy, audit, adapt, teach, preserve" be important? Is the real problem to be solved something else, if you want those things?

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

dinkumthinkum — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:52:50 +0000

I'm just being honest but the parent said "production," is that your idea of what that means?

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

dinkumthinkum — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:20:35 +0000

If you go by percentage of Americans, well consider the percentage of Americans that are actually net taxpayers.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

dinkumthinkum — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 09:00:57 +0000

So, this is a complete nonsense take. Why do people keep making this kind of comparison? Is there really such a lack of critical thinking being taught these days?

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "Google Declaring War on the Web"

dinkumthinkum — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:25:51 +0000

Is that so? What do janitors? They clean offices, right? What's in offices? Oh people. If no people are office workers, no offices need cleaning, no need for janitors. I think the economy is more complex than people think. It's not like "just be a plumber" is going help anyone.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI"

dinkumthinkum — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:15:42 +0000

Maybe its because in the UK, you are basically just giving all of your money to the government so there is nothing to work out.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI"

dinkumthinkum — Thu, 21 May 2026 06:09:22 +0000

Has anyone in these comments ever heard of QuickBooks?

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "Cisco workforce reductions"

dinkumthinkum — Fri, 15 May 2026 09:05:50 +0000

Most tech companies give paternity/maternity leave. There is the WARN act and most companies provide severance. Are the packages always great? No, but I don't think equivalent in Europe are that much better. Public transport? That's your preference and lifestyle, I don't think that factors in here. Most tech companies provide decent insurance and don't require being part of some socialized wait-list system. And the salaries are quite a bit higher and without the Byzantine level of taxes. I think you might want to analyze it a little more.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints"

dinkumthinkum — Fri, 15 May 2026 08:57:38 +0000

I hear you. It is impressive technically but as far as finding flaws, I will just say this. This looks like something aliens would create in a dystopian simulation based on very odd understanding of old movies. I found it quite unsettling. Do you really think this would replace films with real actors and real writers (assuming they left the millennial talk and "modern audience" stuff)? I think the memes and parodies for AI video is more interesting than this kind of thing.

New comment by dinkumthinkum in "Cisco workforce reductions"

dinkumthinkum — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:56:40 +0000

Yeah, but compare the salaries to the US and then factor in taxes.