Hacker News: dwb

New comment by dwb in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"

dwb — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:19:37 +0000

Absolutely.

> it takes a lot of work for a number to mean anything and we largely aren’t doing it

https://desystemize.substack.com/p/desystemize-1

New comment by dwb in "Celld: Self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects"

dwb — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 07:59:57 +0000

> The bucket is the coordinator — no membership protocol, no failure detector, no consensus.

Sorry, but for me, even being a heavy user of coding agents at work, LLM-isms like this on your home page make me less trusting in the care gone into the project.

New comment by dwb in "Why do we assume everyone should be working?"

dwb — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:01:22 +0000

Socialists want to seize the means of production in order to democratise it and move towards communism, which is exactly a post-scarcity post-state destruction of the [capitalist] economy. It is entirely compatible with giving everyone AI and a replicator - the free association of producers and all that. Marx would disagree that you can skip the state part on your way to communism, sure, and I think he’s probably right, but maybe not.

New comment by dwb in "Show HN: Fuse – statically typed functional programming language"

dwb — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:54:52 +0000

I actually can't think of any functional languages that use < > for type variables (I'm sure there's one or two, but it can't be common)

New comment by dwb in "On the non-use of AI in my writing process"

dwb — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:46:11 +0000

Yeah, techno-religious types scare me. They're profoundly anti-human and seem capable of some heinous shit.

You've written a lot of words to say "humans are flawed, let's create a machine that's better", but trying to dress it up in flowery, lofty language. I'm not impressed by that. You have the programmer's disease of over-abstraction and over-active pattern recognition. You try to blur the line between essentially human, biological medicine, and technological development. They are not the same thing; they have completely different philosophies and aims.

I'll answer my rhetorical question: at the moment, and for the foreseeable future, people like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are directing a lot of this. I do not want this. Enclaves of profit-seeking technologists are more-or-less the last people I want doing... well, anything, actually, but certainly not something that gets people like you in a religious fervour.

New comment by dwb in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

dwb — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:54:54 +0000

So condescending. “Can’t psychologically cope”? Can you hear yourself? There’s some advances, but we’re losing a lot too. Don’t get dazzled by the hype.

New comment by dwb in "On the non-use of AI in my writing process"

dwb — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:28:36 +0000

There are many mysteries of the universe, but who we are, to the extent that I am rejecting the comment I replied to, is not one of them. I would love to see how humans explore reality and being (if we survive!) as time goes on and we figure more out, but I hope we do so as a whole species and not through the designs of a handful of zealots.

New comment by dwb in "On the non-use of AI in my writing process"

dwb — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:56:01 +0000

Sure, we're cyborgs, but still very much of the flesh, and I think we have to draw a line somewhere.

New comment by dwb in "On the non-use of AI in my writing process"

dwb — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:00:05 +0000

I think attitudes like this are traitorous to the human species. You’re not talking about a transcendence, or at least, not one that I recognise. Our biology is an innate part of us - to improve, to fix, sure, but not to cast off. Who is directing this “transcendence”, and who benefits? I absolutely do not want a religious tone to any of this. Awful vibes.

New comment by dwb in "I Championed Prediction Markets. Look What They've Become"

dwb — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:12:38 +0000

If you ever thought “prediction markets” were a good idea, you should leave economic judgement to other people. Go take up gardening or something instead. It’s a hack reference at this point I know, but it’s Idiocracy-level stuff.

New comment by dwb in "Politician reads AI prompt during assembly"

dwb — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:55:29 +0000

I really hope you’re joking, but it’s hard to tell on here!

New comment by dwb in "The startup's Postgres survival guide"

dwb — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 19:48:12 +0000

I can certainly see the appeal of number four, but on more than a couple of systems I've worked on, it would have blown up the amount of data stored in a fair proportion of tables for very questionable benefit. It's a good technique to call out, but is it really right to dictate it for everything?

And what is people's opinion of the reverse: source-of-truth in traditionally-modelled mutable relational tables, with a change log written out with triggers?

New comment by dwb in "$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol"

dwb — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:33:35 +0000

Your dislike of music videos in general has meant that you haven’t had the interest to discern the good from the bad. There are plenty of high quality music videos. It’s like someone saying “I’m not really into classical music, it sounds all the same to me”. If they had an interest they’d know that it doesn’t sound all the same. So what’s the point in saying so?

New comment by dwb in "Ring-Zero: Scaling Zero RL to a Trillion Parameters for Emergent Reasoning"

dwb — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 07:31:09 +0000

I mean yes, cars are absurdly inefficient for a lot of trips. America’s addiction to cars is kind of funny.

New comment by dwb in "StubHub, CEO hit with ‘deceptive practices’ class action over mass scalping"

dwb — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 21:25:39 +0000

Certainly where I live, rents are many times that, yes. If landlords really were just charging cost plus a modest profit (despite that I really object to any profit on housing) I wouldn’t be outraged.

New comment by dwb in "StubHub, CEO hit with ‘deceptive practices’ class action over mass scalping"

dwb — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 07:22:04 +0000

No, too reductive. Rent-seeking is when people manipulate a situation to charge money without providing value themselves. Landlords are rent-seekers to the extent that they don’t do much, they mostly just own property - typical rent is many, many times the value of someone looking after the maintenance and building insurance for you (and anything else you want to argue a landlord does). The housing supply is naturally quite limited so the market doesn’t self-correct.

And anyway, if enough people don’t like the things people are doing with money, we can stop them from happening! So a pretty odd gotcha, to me.

New comment by dwb in "Modern decor may be straining people's brains"

dwb — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:36:31 +0000

Why do you think that? What knowledge/leaning do you have that would add weight to your opinion?

New comment by dwb in "Ergo: Long Form Philosophy Lectures"

dwb — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 06:48:32 +0000

They appear to be “coming soon”. While I’m sure there’s a lot of interesting stuff they say, I too hope that the exclusively male and white selection of lecturers (and presumably philosophies!) is an artefact of how young the site is.

New comment by dwb in "Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms"

dwb — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:19:08 +0000

The author meant “wary”. You would never say “I’m weary of…”

New comment by dwb in "Acronym Fatigue Series Introduction: why I'm wary of acronyms"

dwb — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 07:07:53 +0000

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wary