Hacker News: ergonaught

New comment by ergonaught in "You could have invented transformers from memory"

ergonaught — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 23:00:57 +0000

I see plenty of things shared here that don’t fit your preconception of what is a fit for a site you don’t operate.

New comment by ergonaught in "CFTC Staff Were Told to Retract Analysis of Suspicious Oil Trades"

ergonaught — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:06:33 +0000

This regime, as others like it, poses the constant question, “What are you going to do about it?”

And the answer is, largely, nothing.

It’s a shame, really.

New comment by ergonaught in "Music Theory for Programmers"

ergonaught — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 06:28:19 +0000

I want to read it, because it’s interesting. And yet.

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...

New comment by ergonaught in "Aphantasia Beginner's Guide"

ergonaught — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 23:29:25 +0000

It exists. You're wrong. Update. Thanks.

New comment by ergonaught in "The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)"

ergonaught — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 23:43:43 +0000

In ancient days, I printed out the original and hung it on the wall by my computer.

This one I'd regret wasting space in my trash.

New comment by ergonaught in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"

ergonaught — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:27:41 +0000

While it would certainly help, you perhaps underestimate the numbers of young people who would vote in support of continued irreparable damage.

New comment by ergonaught in "I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64"

ergonaught — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:28:33 +0000

Similarish trajectory, and I bought the "new" C64 as soon as it was available and display it proudly. I started with a Vic 20 first (and Gorf), and I learned assembly as soon as I could finish entering all the damn numbers (ie: LADS, via Machine Language for Beginners by Richard Mansfield, the Compute! book), but alllllmost everything in my life is downstream of that Vic 20 and C64.

Loved the ads. Such memories.

New comment by ergonaught in "Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?"

ergonaught — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 15:56:16 +0000

It's a well done and thought-provoking article.

The reality is that most humans do very little actual thinking of their own anyway, and, if you believe that what LLMs produce constitutes a form of intelligence, it does seem "more intelligent" than most humans.

So: is outsourcing thinking a net improvement for a majority of users?

I use several models, daily, and they seem "reasonably conditioned" that they are only input to my thinking and not "my thinking". I correct them constantly; they are wrong (in reasoning/logic, in actual facts) frequently. They are demonstrably "not smarter" than I am. And yet I know many people who can "do more" with them as a "thinking" tool. I can say that "the problem" is they can't spot the errors, but they can't or won't do that in their ordinary lives, either, so, again, is it a net improvement for them?

Interesting times and all that.

New comment by ergonaught in "The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous"

ergonaught — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:56:37 +0000

I asked it a question about indoor carbon dioxide levels (wholly innocuous question), which it flagged as involving biology, therefore downgraded to Opus.

It's a pretty good strategy if they're hoping to fail as a business, I guess.

New comment by ergonaught in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

ergonaught — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 03:22:36 +0000

emacs -nw takes about 2 seconds on my mac. I don't use server/daemon, and those 2 seconds are processing my startup elisp files (it's ready nearly instantly without prepping my junk).

New comment by ergonaught in "Did Anthropic ask for this?"

ergonaught — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:53:27 +0000

A government sign off on release potentially reduces liability/exposure if the models can do what it says on the box. I’m sure Anthro wants this applied to everyone and not only them, but there is a potential benefit to them.

New comment by ergonaught in "Mmorpg World of ClaudeCraft, vibe coded with Fable 5"

ergonaught — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:16:51 +0000

I'm sure that's a fine take if you decide that "Massively Multiplayer" doesn't mean "Massively Multiplayer".

New comment by ergonaught in "Mmorpg World of ClaudeCraft, vibe coded with Fable 5"

ergonaught — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:44:58 +0000

I guess we'll just call anything MMO now.

New comment by ergonaught in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

ergonaught — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:49:59 +0000

> Users don’t care

Suppose one proved that a sizable mass of people don't care whether they eat dog food.

There are people who won't feed them dog food even so.

There are people who will see ways to extract more profits.

> just a means to an end?

Indeed.

Which means?

Which end?

There are as many unthinking raving fans as there are unthinking raging haters. The reality is that the decision-making power-wielding bunch will make dumb, uncaring, probably some form of "evil", people-harming decisions via AI. Because that is what they do. Almost invariably, until forced to do something else.

So, again, which means? Which end?

This weird "my perspective is universal" thing is among the worst features of humanity in general.

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

ergonaught — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:49:25 +0000

It still amuses me, but Andrei's books were the "last straw" that pushed me away from C++ for many years. Great books, truly, and they helped cement the notion that I wanted to move on to a different language. (Go, at the time.)

New comment by ergonaught in "Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler"

ergonaught — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:24:53 +0000

The GPL, unlike the BSD and such, intends to prevent the closing of distributed derivative works. LLMs trained on GPL code can produce derivative works without any enforcement mechanism.

You may be fine with that, but the GPL is not a public domain license, and LLM training treats all things as if they were public domain.

New comment by ergonaught in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

ergonaught — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:24:37 +0000

I've bought (and cracked open) more programming books in the past year than I had in the previous 10. I'm nobody?

New comment by ergonaught in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

ergonaught — Sun, 17 May 2026 01:35:42 +0000

You could have just said “No”, if you had to say anything at all, rather than continuing the behavior.

Actively rude.

New comment by ergonaught in "Have a Coherent AI Policy"

ergonaught — Fri, 15 May 2026 00:38:55 +0000

If you can't do the job without AI, you can't do the job.

Spoiler alert: if you can't do the job, you're not going to be doing the job much longer.

New comment by ergonaught in "I’ve banned query strings"

ergonaught — Sat, 09 May 2026 18:26:12 +0000

Adding your own garbage to someone else's URLs is in fact the problem. Could they handle your garbage better? Sure. Is your garbage still a problem? Yes.