Hacker News: enneff

New comment by enneff in "“I just chose words carefully”"

enneff — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:03:20 +0000

Have you considered that by adhering to the arbitrary rules of grammar you are forgoing a realm of poetic opportunity?

New comment by enneff in "“I just chose words carefully”"

enneff — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 13:54:20 +0000

What does OK stand for?

New comment by enneff in "Compression is prediction"

enneff — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:28:37 +0000

I think the point is that tremendous complexity can arise from relatively simple mechanisms. That is what life is, at many levels. I’m not at all convinced that the current LLM approach will yield something we can broadly call consciousness but saying that it’s a simple concept and therefore won’t support consciousness is a specious argument imo.

New comment by enneff in "The case for MUDs in modern times (2018)"

enneff — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:15:23 +0000

What’s the point of books? Can’t you just watch a movie?

New comment by enneff in "Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?"

enneff — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:13:34 +0000

The equation is different if the life saving surgery couldn’t be performed otherwise. Still pretty crazy and I don’t know how comfortable I’d be with it if I were the patient.

New comment by enneff in "Ask HN: Are systems ready for the first negative leap second?"

enneff — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:22:18 +0000

I’m horrified to imagine a blood pump or any life support system being network connected, or to rely on the precise time of day in order to function correctly. Accurate time keeping for anything in this realm can and should be done without a network.

New comment by enneff in "Exapunks (2018)"

enneff — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:41:27 +0000

I had a great evening with a friend playing through TIS-100 together. We plugged in two keyboards and mice so we didn't have to pass them back and forth.

New comment by enneff in "An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy"

enneff — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 02:16:48 +0000

I used to run tomsrtbt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomsrtbt) from a floppy on an old 486 hooked up to a monitor and keyboard for use as a terminal. Was nice and silent, pretty convenient to be able to just turn the screen on to check irc or whatever.

New comment by enneff in "Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids"

enneff — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:14:56 +0000

I don’t understand why you wouldn’t like raisins? They’re pretty much just sugar.

New comment by enneff in "Mercedes‑Benz starts large‑scale production of electric axial flux motor"

enneff — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:30:01 +0000

Or you could dump the power into a realllly loud horn

New comment by enneff in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

enneff — Tue, 12 May 2026 02:12:43 +0000

For one thing it’s statically typed and has many fewer foot guns than Python, so the llm-produced code is more likely to do what you expect.

New comment by enneff in "Inkscape 1.4.4"

enneff — Thu, 07 May 2026 00:22:45 +0000

Haha thank you! This had been mildly bothering me for a while actually.

New comment by enneff in "A desktop made for one"

enneff — Mon, 04 May 2026 11:47:22 +0000

I have been writing my own custom software for myself for over 30 years. But in the last six months I have written a lot more of it because the language models make it so much faster and easier to do so.

New comment by enneff in "Ti-84 Evo"

enneff — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:48:46 +0000

It’s not that the calculator was more than what students need, it’s that even for what it was the TI83/84 was way overpriced. It could have been like $20 at the scale they were produced.

New comment by enneff in "Ti-84 Evo"

enneff — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:47:30 +0000

This is why you have modern circuit breakers.

New comment by enneff in "FastCGI: 30 years old and still the better protocol for reverse proxies"

enneff — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:03:27 +0000

I think perhaps I was unclear. I don’t mean the entire dev environment should mirror prod (although it’s great if you can do this for end to end testing). I just mean it’s desirable if the process you’re working on operates the same way in dev as in prod.

New comment by enneff in "FastCGI: 30 years old and still the better protocol for reverse proxies"

enneff — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 23:13:09 +0000

In my experience having different serving paths for dev vs production is a recipe for annoying issues. I try to make dev as similar to prod as possible.

I’m not sure, I don’t dismiss fcgi outright here, I find the arguments for it compelling (not a huge fan of http for many reasons) but it has to be really worth it to break the consistency of using http everywhere.

New comment by enneff in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

enneff — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:29:44 +0000

I think it’s helpful to try to use words that more precisely describe how the LLM works. For instance, “intent” ascribes a will to the process. Instead I’d say an LLM has an “orientation”, in that through prompting you point it in a particular direction in which it’s most likely to continue.

New comment by enneff in "Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving"

enneff — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:38:55 +0000

Presumably you’re also using a browser to view this web page. There have also been vulnerabilities in that. You have to draw a line somewhere.

New comment by enneff in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

enneff — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 23:57:22 +0000

Yes and if they copy and paste code they don’t understand then they should disclose that in the commit message too!