Hacker News: encomiast

New comment by encomiast in "Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised"

encomiast — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:42:44 +0000

If you are really talking about dependencies, I’m not sure you’ve really thought this all the way through. Are you inspecting every line of the Python interpreter and its dependencies before running? Are you reading the compiler that built the Python interpreter?

New comment by encomiast in "301M Records Exposed: The HIPAA Breach Epidemic"

encomiast — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:40:09 +0000

This optimism in the face of the current state of government made me chuckle-sob.

New comment by encomiast in "The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines"

encomiast — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:50:02 +0000

It's you.

New comment by encomiast in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

encomiast — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 18:48:40 +0000

I think this is a useful way to look at things. We often point out that LLMs are not conscious because of x, but we tend to forget that we don't really know what consciousness is, nor do we really know what intelligence is beyond the Justice Potter Stewart definition. It's helpful to occasionally remind ourselves how much uncertainty is involved here.

New comment by encomiast in "What AI coding costs you"

encomiast — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 16:12:04 +0000

Point taken. Still, isn’t an activity like learning a new library, language, or platform a fundamental part of being a software developer? Haven’t we all complained at some point about companies hiring react developers because we all know the real skill is the ability to pick up new things. And to be clear, this isn’t moral panic, it’s a concern that we may end up in a future where people don’t know how systems work anymore and we are dependent on two or three companies and their data center moats to maintain any technology.

New comment by encomiast in "What AI coding costs you"

encomiast — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 15:41:48 +0000

It was meant metaphorically. It gives you something, but it asks for something in return.

New comment by encomiast in "What AI coding costs you"

encomiast — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 15:21:47 +0000

uh...okay. The legend of Faust is the classic work where a person sells his soul to the devil for power/knowledge/pleasure. Goethe has Faust make a wager with the Mephistopheles: show me the good life (pleasure, power, knowledge, whatever) it will never be enough to make me stop striving, to make me want to linger. If you can do that my soul is yours. To me it reads a _lot_ like our contract with AI.

New comment by encomiast in "What AI coding costs you"

encomiast — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:47:01 +0000

Goethe answered this in Faust. The answer is always: your soul.

New comment by encomiast in "What AI coding costs you"

encomiast — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:45:13 +0000

"so as long as I maintain my ability to reason about code…what’s the issue?"

It seems like that is the open question. The article suggests that people don't maintain this ability:

"The AI group scored 17% lower on conceptual understanding, debugging, and code reading. The largest gap was in debugging, the exact skill you need to catch what AI gets wrong. One hour of passive AI-assisted work produced measurable skill erosion."

From my own (anecdotal) experience I am seeing a lot more cases of what I call developer bullshit where developers can't even talk about the work they are vibe-coding on in a coherent way. Management doesn't notice this since it's all techno-bable to them and sounds fancy, but other developers do.

New comment by encomiast in "Global Intelligence Crisis"

encomiast — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 22:23:43 +0000

I think domestic servitude is probably an understatement. We are looking at serfdom.

New comment by encomiast in "Rendering the Visible Spectrum"

encomiast — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:58:47 +0000

One thing peculiar about the final image is how desaturated it is. It doesn't actually represent the spectrum, which is by definition the pure, fully saturated colors. It's rather a gradient of a bunch of desaturated hues. For example, where is pure yellow on this gradient?

New comment by encomiast in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

encomiast — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 17:59:47 +0000

I've tried this approach with Lowes when I buy 2x4s. About as effective.

New comment by encomiast in "Eat Real Food"

encomiast — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 02:34:25 +0000

Agreed. This is one of the worst mobile sites I’ve used in a while. Blown away (in the sense I’m never coming back).

New comment by encomiast in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

encomiast — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 13:23:23 +0000

I would be curious about the logic that allows you to call intellectual property a nonsense term while still allowing other property to make sense. Both are social constructs.

New comment by encomiast in "Tell HN: Merry Christmas"

encomiast — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:52:18 +0000

May you have a perfectly balanced Christmas

                 h
            _____|______
          /             \
         r               t
       /   \           /   \
      e     .         i     a
     / \   / \       / \   / \
    M   r y   C     r   s m   s

New comment by encomiast in "OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race"

encomiast — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 23:30:55 +0000

I’m not sure what ‘successfully’ means in this context. If it means training a model that is noticeably better than previous models, it’s not hard to see how that is challenging.

New comment by encomiast in "Silicon Valley's man in the White House is benefiting himself and his friends"

encomiast — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 07:33:59 +0000

Who said anything about parties? And who said anything about it being okay to fire IGs (especially illegally).

Which IG did anyone say it was okay to fire? The article you posted to support this idea wasn’t even fired! He’s still in the job.

It seems that you are primarily interested in polarizing this discussion. I’ll leave you to that. I’m out.

New comment by encomiast in "Silicon Valley's man in the White House is benefiting himself and his friends"

encomiast — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:05:32 +0000

The article you posted is about a truly damning investigation into Joseph Cuffari.

Cuffari is STILL the IG at DHS. He was not fired -- sheesh:

https://www.oig.dhs.gov/about/MeetTheIG

New comment by encomiast in "Silicon Valley's man in the White House is benefiting himself and his friends"

encomiast — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 06:32:51 +0000

Here’s a small example. There are more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_dismissals_of_U.S._inspec...

New comment by encomiast in "Don't push AI down our throats"

encomiast — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 21:32:33 +0000

I'm hoping "degoogle" is the 2026 word of the year.