Hacker News: fapjacks

New comment by fapjacks in "Writing seen in PHerc. 306B, for the first time in 2000 years"

fapjacks — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 10:10:21 +0000

I was a member of ASP (American Society of Papyrologists) and their journal is phenomenal, for anyone interested. Anyway, an important piece of information about this effort is that it's conceived that there is a second, "main" library yet to be excavated, and that the library that was found was merely a fore-room to this, which fits with the design and location of the library and that the owner of the villa was a patron of epicurean authors, which constitute the bulk of the contents of the known library. Italian authorities have refused to allow any further excavations, and I seem to remember that one of the stipulations of authorizing any such work is that it becomes possible to read the existing papyri non-destructively. So this is very cool and important work.

New comment by fapjacks in "How I use AI (Oct 2026)"

fapjacks — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 09:09:12 +0000

Your experience is aligned almost perfectly with mine. But to be fair, all those tests that are green, are tests that it wrote. :3

New comment by fapjacks in "How I use AI (Oct 2026)"

fapjacks — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 09:02:54 +0000

On the one hand, I like this post: Like developing a personal Mission Statement (one of the best pieces of advice a mentor gave me long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away). But on the other, this sounds like the beginning of AI psychosis, or somebody that got really drunk one night and decided to blog about how amazing compilers are: "I love you, man!"

That being said, I agree with this statement: "I believe they are the greatest teachers humanity has ever created." LLMs are exceedingly powerful at accelerating the learning process.

New comment by fapjacks in "Postman silently auto-installs AI plugins and attempts to share all API data"

fapjacks — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 08:43:40 +0000

From their website: "We're a global company headquartered in San Francisco—with offices in Bangalore (where the company was founded) and Japan—and distributed team members on multiple continents."

... for.... .... postman?

New comment by fapjacks in "Fujifilm to boost tape production 5x as AI fuels archiving demand"

fapjacks — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 08:13:14 +0000

Anecdotally, I worked in a large (American) state university computing center with many VAXen and an Amdahl mainframe for a few years. Graveyard shift, when all the batch jobs ran. Good times. I'm not sure where our experiences with this technology diverge, but I almost never ran into problems with tapes, and we had a library with rows and rows and rows. Tens of thousands of tapes. Some tapes hadn't left their drives in years. Others sat on their shelves for decades. It was extremely rare for us to encounter an error with the tape, the drive, or something in between. To be fair, I've always heard about problems with tapes, just never ran into them in an environment saturated with them.

New comment by fapjacks in "US Government is hiding a secret court ruling about how it spies on Americans"

fapjacks — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 08:20:30 +0000

Exactly my instinct, as well.

New comment by fapjacks in "Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics"

fapjacks — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:05:31 +0000

The difference, of course, is that people don't care if their spreadsheet is written by an artisanal human programmer or just some stupid, swarthy Idea Guy banging on a keyboard. It seems that a lot of people do however care if the music they listen to or the art on their living room wall is made by a human or by a machine. Maybe it's about "positioning" but I don't think so. Most people want to pretend they are creatures of finer taste than everyone else around them. In this regard, I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop on AI in (for example) music, and there being kind of lip-syncing scandals with popular musicians.

New comment by fapjacks in "CS240 AI Cheating Retrospective"

fapjacks — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:00:07 +0000

Haha calling the fire marshal ahead of time "to ensure we remained within the capacity constraints for the facility" is an amazing touch!

New comment by fapjacks in "Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos"

fapjacks — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 15:42:25 +0000

A video about exiting vim, however...

New comment by fapjacks in "Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera"

fapjacks — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:42:26 +0000

Many moons ago, I was involved in the technical side of volunteer work for domestic violence victims escaping abusive relationships with e.g. law enforcement (cops), who even fifteen years ago had sweeping powers to track and stalk their victims. Things like actual anonymous burner phones and the ability to e.g. create new email accounts without government identification were critical to the process of getting these people out safely, or alive, without fear of retaliation.

I can't even imagine how difficult this job must be nowadays, with bullshit like Flock spanning hundreds of police departments participating in their nationally-linked database. I have zero sources for what I'm about to say, but my instinct is that the political machines (expanding powers hidden behind "think of the children") behind how technology is evolving today has gotten people killed.

New comment by fapjacks in "The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative"

fapjacks — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:25:11 +0000

The worst thing about AI is that it's camouflage for stupid people. And it often gets combined with utter confidence in some position because they're too stupid to know the machine is confidently wrong.

New comment by fapjacks in "Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs"

fapjacks — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:26:44 +0000

Or a huge software company where you only get the end operating system, but none of its source code.

Buy the Neiman Marcus cookies and feel entitled to the recipe?

Lots of secret sauce in the world.

New comment by fapjacks in "Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important"

fapjacks — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:56:02 +0000

No, I actually like this reply, because it's true in its essentials. You can find someone to tell you what you want to hear, but it's not going to pay the rent. And actual help needs to come from within, and no one has a magic wand or a one-weird-trick to actually help you. In the meantime, you have to pay the rent. Work sucks to varying degrees, and we all need coping mechanisms. Waving a flag with some acronym is not, at the end of the day, going to pay the rent. Find coping mechanisms.

New comment by fapjacks in "Jerry's Map"

fapjacks — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:24:05 +0000

Boring old programmer. Honestly I gave up rules-lawyering in D&D some time ago, because it just makes things a slog. Which, while fun for me sometimes (I play Dwarf Fortress), isn't as fun for anyone else.

New comment by fapjacks in "Jerry's Map"

fapjacks — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 08:56:09 +0000

In grade school I kept meticulous, tedious logbooks of ships entering and leaving an imaginary port for tax purposes.

New comment by fapjacks in "Tech CEOs are apparently suffering from AI psychosis"

fapjacks — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:18:10 +0000

Not to sound like a codger, but we even said in the 90s that computers are just very fast idiots.

New comment by fapjacks in "Incident with Pull Requests, Issues, Git Operations and API Requests"

fapjacks — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:08:09 +0000

This is smart but also hilarious.

New comment by fapjacks in "Incident with Pull Requests, Issues, Git Operations and API Requests"

fapjacks — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:00:10 +0000

Imagine if we did this for countries.

New comment by fapjacks in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

fapjacks — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:32:43 +0000

I dunno. Is AI less than forty years old?

New comment by fapjacks in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

fapjacks — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:21:29 +0000

Huge second to zachtronics.