Hacker News: durumu

New comment by durumu in "Sora 2"

durumu — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 12:53:19 +0000

I think that short film is AI generated. I only watched like 30 seconds of an office scene in the middle but it spontaneously changed from daytime to nighttime with zero explanation.

New comment by durumu in "Gemini 2.5 Deep Think"

durumu — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 12:39:02 +0000

Even if most of the code you write is solving repetitive plumbing tasks, today's models are incredibly bad at API design taste. IMO designing software in a way that minimizes side effects and is easy to change and test is more than 1% of software engineering.

Lately most of the code I write has been through LLMs and I find them an enormous productivity booster overall, but despite the benchmarks they're not expert human level quite yet, and they need a LOT of coaxing to produce production quality code.

As far as things LLMs are bad at, I think it's mainly the long tail. I'm not sure there's one singular thing that >1% of programmers work on that LLMs suck at, but I think there are thousands of different weird sub-specialties that almost no one is working on and very little public code exists for, thus LLMs are not good at them yet.

New comment by durumu in "LLM Inevitabilism"

durumu — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 13:27:31 +0000

Yes, LLMs are currently useful and are improving rapidly so they are likely to become even more useful in the future. I think inevitable is a pretty strong word but barring government intervention or geopolitical turmoil I don't see signs of LLM progress stopping.

New comment by durumu in "LLM Inevitabilism"

durumu — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 12:32:11 +0000

I think that's more reflective of the deteriorating relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft than an true lack of demand for datacenters. If a major model provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI) were to see a dip in available funding or stop focusing on training more powerful models, that would convince me we may be in a bubble about to pop, but there are no signs of that as far as I can see.

New comment by durumu in "Amazon’s delivery drones are grounded in College Station, Texas"

durumu — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 15:40:13 +0000

I like those vehicles, honestly -- delivery trucks are going to park in the bike lane regardless and these are much smaller and safer to maneuver around. I want to see more of them and hope it leads to more bike lanes being built in NYC.

New comment by durumu in "Augment.vim: AI Chat and completion in Vim and Neovim"

durumu — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 13:14:44 +0000

Neovim is fully backwards compatible, no? I'm not sure what the downside of switching is.

New comment by durumu in "Interview with DeepSeek Founder: We're Done Following. It's Time to Lead"

durumu — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 14:30:00 +0000

Most LLMs do this due to the proliferation of ChatGPT-generated content in the training data.

New comment by durumu in "Ask HN: Is there an equivalent of Cursor for Vim?"

durumu — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 23:00:16 +0000

I doubt there is a service that bundles a bunch of API access for one subscription fee and works with vim. But there are a few plugins that provide cursor like functionality and let you bring your own API key. Avante and code-companion are the most widely used ones. Magenta.nvim looks promising.

New comment by durumu in "Google "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI" (2023)"

durumu — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 20:45:32 +0000

I think AI capabilities perception in general is being greatly damaged by the Google search AI summary. Whatever model they use is so cheap and crappy, yet I can't opt out of it or even get my eyes to skip the box... Claude or Perplexity or whatever can comfortably and concisely answer questions about Auckland holidays without hallucinating, yet the Google search AI thinks you can eat rocks and put glue on pizza, and I see people trot similar examples out all the time to prove that "AI is dumb".

New comment by durumu in "NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker"

durumu — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 15:17:21 +0000

In Manhattan ebike access is excellent -- there are tons of bike lanes and bikeshare stations. They are typically as fast as Ubers for getting around the city since traffic is so bad here, and much cheaper. The main issue is that it's not very safe. Probably this does not generalize to most other US cities.

New comment by durumu in "NYC Congestion Pricing Tracker"

durumu — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 15:06:15 +0000

I agree NYC is not wisely spending its $100 billion per year, but I think the congestion tax makes sense as a way of pricing in externalities. As a non-car-owner in lower Manhattan I dislike passenger cars -- they make it much less safe for me to bike around, and less pleasant for me to walk around. I think most people here benefit if we have way fewer large vehicles in the city, so the limited spots should be reserved for people who get immense economic value from them, like truckers or movers, not random people from the suburbs who want to have dinner in the city.

New comment by durumu in "Every board game rulebook is awful [pdf]"

durumu — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 20:07:35 +0000

Reminds me of competitive programming, a la Codeforces or IOI, where you solve incredibly challenging algorithmic problems that are wrapped in some silly story about a cow in a garden or something. (In my opinion, that is part of the challenge and fun!)

New comment by durumu in "IMG_0416"

durumu — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 22:52:44 +0000

I believe Reddit in particular actually has gotten much more optimized in the past 15 years. I don't think this is rose colored glasses, the content really is much more engaging and addictive, with more short form videos and content that can be understood immediately at a glance.

New comment by durumu in "IMG_0416"

durumu — Sun, 10 Nov 2024 22:50:05 +0000

I think that has more to do with being a kid vs being an adult. Kids are probably still buying gfs on Roblox and Minecraft today (disclaimer: I have no idea what kids play these days lol)

New comment by durumu in "The Coming Technological Singularity (1993)"

durumu — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 12:42:32 +0000

Sure, but the current 2-3% annual growth rate is probably not going to hold if we invent actually powerful AI in the next decade. I imagine a step change in the exponent.

New comment by durumu in "Care Doesn't Scale"

durumu — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 11:56:41 +0000

I agree the average tutor is better than the average lecturer. But if I watch a YouTube lecture, then I might have access to the best lecturer in the world, or at least a 99%ile lecturer, e.g 3blue1brown. This only works because of the scale -- it wouldn't be possible for millions to get access to tutors this good 1 on 1.

New comment by durumu in "Huawei makes divorce from Android official with HarmonyOS NEXT launch"

durumu — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 15:10:29 +0000

I think it's not clear which way that effect goes -- the Cold War was also the closest humanity has ever come to destroying itself. If all nations depend on each other, there's less nuclear conflict risk and less risk of war in general.

New comment by durumu in "A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending"

durumu — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 12:02:53 +0000

I feel like this comes up with me in programming too! Like if I write some really beautiful function as part of solving a problem, I will be a lot sadder if it doesn't make it in, sometimes to my detriment. Similar energy to "cattle not pets".

New comment by durumu in "A dictionary of single-letter variable names"

durumu — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 15:36:04 +0000

IMO using a lowercase l as a numeric variable is cursed. It is way too easy to read it as 1 in many monospace fonts.

New comment by durumu in "Lessons learned from profiling an algorithm in Rust"

durumu — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 15:25:34 +0000

I think it's i & 32. Agreed on that being more readable.