Hacker News: doug_durham

New comment by doug_durham in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

doug_durham — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:56:20 +0000

As has been pointed out elsewhere, DMA isn't a privacy regulation. It is simply about competition. You can be in 100% compliance with DMA and poor privacy protections. This is the crux of the problem. How do you preserve the privacy of your customers while complying with regulations where the simplest path is to compromise your customer's privacy?

New comment by doug_durham in "Mouseless – keyboard-driven control of macOS/Linux/Windows"

doug_durham — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:33:18 +0000

I have to lift up my hand and move my arm around to use it. With a trackpad all I need to do is move my hand over and flick my fingers for gestures. My wrist never moves.

New comment by doug_durham in "C++: The Documentary"

doug_durham — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:31:53 +0000

Rust, Python, Java, Ruby, Scala, Swift to start with. These are languages with very wide adoption. Objective-C is very Smalltalk-like, but it is being phased out for Swift.

New comment by doug_durham in "Transformers are inherently succinct"

doug_durham — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:30:02 +0000

This is a truly important paper. It formalizes the intuition that many in the field have. We can stop wasting time doing formal analysis of LLMs. If you have a problem that requires formal verification, don't use an LLM. You can use an LLM to help you build such a system, but the LLM can't be the system.

New comment by doug_durham in "C++: The Documentary"

doug_durham — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:35:56 +0000

You think that LISP and Smalltalk aren't widely used is because they weren't easy to implement in the late 1980's? There have been many languages that have risen to prominence in the 40 years since, yet LISP and Smalltalk remain niche languages.

New comment by doug_durham in "Mouseless – keyboard-driven control of macOS/Linux/Windows"

doug_durham — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:30:37 +0000

I use a trackpad to avoid virtually all of the issues created by a mouse. The trackpad gestures in macOS are magical.

New comment by doug_durham in "They’re made out of weights"

doug_durham — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 17:49:54 +0000

Work has never been about "discovering the world". There have been a handful of privileged folks who had the time to "discover the world". Work has traditionally been "let's find enough food for my family". If you want to think of a future of abundance then perhaps we can discover the world.

New comment by doug_durham in "Why Janet? (2023)"

doug_durham — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:30:20 +0000

DSLs. Creating a language that only you know that will double the learning curve for the folks coming after you. It's fine for personal projects, but almost always an anti-pattern.

New comment by doug_durham in "The dead economy theory"

doug_durham — Sat, 30 May 2026 04:21:57 +0000

There is nothing original in this article. This could’ve been written by an AI just scraping one month of posts to hacker news. This article is a critique of autonomously repackaging existing ideas by autonomously repackaging existing ideas. The irony is not lost on me.

New comment by doug_durham in "Please Use AI"

doug_durham — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:19:44 +0000

It really depends on your goal. If your goal is to spend the evening coming up with funny things to say with your friends, then you shouldn't use AI. If your goal is to finish the t-shirts so that you can move on to the next topic in organizing a very complex event like a marathon, then perhaps you should use tools. Using AI tools isn't a problem. It's lack of care and thoughtlessness. That is the problem. That's always been the problem. AI didn't create it, nor is it making it worse.

New comment by doug_durham in "Please Use AI"

doug_durham — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:16:37 +0000

I find these kinds of posts to be elitist and self-important. They draw a false dichotomy between tool use and lifestyle. I'm glad the poster has a lifestyle that works for them personally. This post really has nothing to do with AI. It's really just saying, spend more time talking to the people in your life. It seems to be written for the purposes of gaining clicks and engagement by using the phrase AI.

New comment by doug_durham in "I am retiring from tech to live offline"

doug_durham — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:10:31 +0000

Why is it a sacred journey? They are quitting a job at Sentry and taking one a Home Depot. As much as I value the role that Home Depot plays in society I'd never use the word "sacred" to describe the work, nor the work at any other job.

New comment by doug_durham in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

doug_durham — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:53:24 +0000

GLM-5.1 isn't just as good. It is no match for Opus running in Claude Code. Please try it yourself. Open source models are about a year behind at least.

New comment by doug_durham in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

doug_durham — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:47:55 +0000

Open source models that you can run locally are much more than 3 to 6 months behind. 6 months was the November inflection for Claude. No open source model is as good as Claude Opus 4.6.

New comment by doug_durham in "All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes"

doug_durham — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:54:42 +0000

The space of palatable human food is small. There are only a few thousand ingredients and a few thousand preparation techniques. This could easily be compressed at high fidelity into a model.

New comment by doug_durham in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

doug_durham — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:51:02 +0000

I'm sorry what do you expect? Did you expect people to not use Google search prior to AI tools? People don't know the answer to your question and they are trying to be helpful. Not everyone is effective at using AI tools at this point. They presumed you might not be.

New comment by doug_durham in "Magnifica Humanitas"

doug_durham — Mon, 25 May 2026 14:48:51 +0000

Yes but... No one living today knows what direction AI technology will take humanity. If we have an algorithm breakthrough then we may avoid building new data centers. If the abilities of the technology plateau then there might not be large impacts on employment. Builders need to focus on the impact of their next steps. Don't put polluting natural gas generators in neighborhoods today. Don't make unemploying folks the goal of your tool, today. Don't make decisions that harm people and the environment today.

New comment by doug_durham in "The Art of Money Getting"

doug_durham — Sat, 23 May 2026 17:04:52 +0000

What do you find yourself gravitating to? What part of your job comes easiest? That things are easy to you that other’s find difficult? What do you spend time learning more about even when you don’t have to? Those are directional. For me the first time I started writing code I knew that’s what I’d need to do for a living.

New comment by doug_durham in "Bun support is now limited and deprecated"

doug_durham — Sat, 23 May 2026 06:08:31 +0000

So transcoding doesn't work unless every line of code is read? That's not how transcoding is done in practice.

New comment by doug_durham in "Bun support is now limited and deprecated"

doug_durham — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:41:51 +0000

Really?? So you base your engineer in "speculation". The Bun team has a deep track record of delivering a high quality product. What makes you think that is going to stop?