Hacker News: feintruled

New comment by feintruled in "Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989"

feintruled — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:12:18 +0000

> The Aga chipset of the 1200/4000 stupidly only added 2 more bitplanes. The CD32 chip actually had byte-per-pixel (chunky) graphics modes but the omission from the 1200 was fatal.

The intention was good, but the Akiko chip was functionally almost useless. It was soon surpassed by CPU chunky to planar algorithms. I don't think it was ever even used in any serious way by any released games (though it might have been used to help with FMV).

New comment by feintruled in "Show HN: I speak 5 languages. Common apps taught me none. So I built lairner"

feintruled — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:42:35 +0000

I was impressed to see Irish was included, but it soon became clear it's all LLM generated. That's not enough to write it off on its own (ChatGPT can be surprisingly good when explaining Irish sentences) but I spotted so many mistakes in the demo questions alone I can't imagine this is going to help anyone learn anything.

I would start to enumerate the mistakes, but it's not even worth it. It's really terrible. Can't sugar coat it at all, sorry.

New comment by feintruled in "How wolves became dogs"

feintruled — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:38:14 +0000

Interesting article, though is there really much new there? Also it discounts the alternative hypothesis of some bright spark acquiring wolf pups and doing it purposefully because that would take 'weeks'. Weeks, you say?

Surely some enterprising hunter-gatherer had sufficient time on their hands. I can't help but think strutting around with a feared predator at your beck and call would have been the ultimate status symbol, and once you saw it would have to be the must have accessory for the self-respecting hunter. Aficionados would no doubt breed their stock amongst themselves to save the hassle of having to abduct more wolf cubs, which would naturally tend to the more suited specimens (friendliness being one trait as you don't want them eating the kids). Once it was realised what an incredible force multiplier they are in hunting and their utility in defence, any time investment would pay for itself many times over.

I find this no less as unlikely as thinking humans would let wolves help themselves to their excess food. Fascinating subject all round, no matter the reason. I hope they can figure out more.

New comment by feintruled in "A Remarkable Assertion from A16Z"

feintruled — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 16:34:34 +0000

Reminds me of Werner Herzog's autobiography. In the introduction, he muses on a life being cut short by a snipers bullet, and when he sees a bird flying past his window as he is writing his book makes him imagine it is a bullet and he thinks it would be a nice device to cut his final chapter short at that exact moment, so he is giving fair warning that the book will end abruptly.

And so it does, but in a totally Herzog moment he then almost immediately intones afterwards "and that is the end of the book as I indicated in the foreword".

New comment by feintruled in "Why I'm Learning Sumerian"

feintruled — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 11:05:31 +0000

I dunno, man. You get to work for months to completion on a deeply fulfilling project, get well compensated, and then the plug gets pulled before it goes to production? That's living the software engineering dream!

Jokes aside, the article resonated with me (before the LLM vibes got overpowering) as I am learning Irish as my own personal challenge, which as a minority language is similarly derided by some as useless (there is essentialy no Irish speaker that does not also speak English) but which I have found tremendously intellectually invigorating and the most pumped I have been for a project in a long while. So it rang true for me before half way through a distinct "linkedin parable" nature started to come to fore. So alas I rather doubt the author is learning Sumerian at all. Cynical perhaps.

New comment by feintruled in "Developers are choosing older AI models"

feintruled — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 13:11:21 +0000

Some missing context (pun intended) is that Augment code has recently switched to a per-token instead of per-message pricing model. This hasn't gone down particularly well, but that's another story. But it may well be that users drop back to older models in the expectation it will use less tokens.

Personally, I stopped using GPT-5 as it would just be tool call after tool call without ever stopping to tell you what the hell it was doing. Sonnet 4.5 much better in this regard. Albeit it's too verbose for the new token based world ('let me just summarise that in a report')

New comment by feintruled in "Tokens are getting more expensive"

feintruled — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 09:22:55 +0000

I was wondering if it was a way to 'flaunt' his avoidance of LLMs. Could be in future genuine human conversation will be so rare that we will seize upon mistakes and typos like finding a shiny jewel in mud.

(But then I saw he used the formation - 'Honestly?' which made me think he WAS using LLMs!)

New comment by feintruled in "Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent"

feintruled — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 15:55:58 +0000

Interesting. Though it seems they are themselves building Agentic AI tooling. It's vibe coding all the way down - when's something real going to pop out the bottom?

New comment by feintruled in "Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model"

feintruled — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 09:56:34 +0000

Inspired by the recent post to describe relativity in words of 4 letters or less, I asked ChatGPT to do it for other things like Gravity. It couldn't help but throw in a couple 5 letter words (usually plurals). Same with Claude. So this could be a good one?

New comment by feintruled in "Fixing the Loading in Myst IV: Revelation"

feintruled — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 11:52:26 +0000

I think any software engineer can identify with the feeling you get at the moment you do the first run of the solution you have implemented that you are 100% sure has to fix it only to find nothing has changed.

New comment by feintruled in "Tesla Robotaxi"

feintruled — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 08:08:15 +0000

My father grew up in a somewhat rural Irish village and there was one farmer who would take his horse and cart to the pub (fairly anachronistic even in his day) in the knowledge that no matter how passed-out drunk he got the other patrons would load him into the cart and the horse would take him home. Take that, self-driving cars!

New comment by feintruled in "'Kafkaesque': bank blocks cash transfer, saying it could be an AI scam"

feintruled — Sat, 17 Aug 2024 11:59:27 +0000

I read that as him trying to move his money to another bank that would allow him to make the transfer. His current bank suspected this and wouldn't let him even close his account. So they confiscated his money to prevent someone else supposedly stealing his money - pretty Kafkaesque I think

New comment by feintruled in "Count Binface"

feintruled — Thu, 02 May 2024 08:10:01 +0000

Memorably lampooned by Monty Python : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=666OKm08fRA

New comment by feintruled in "When did dogs become our best friends?"

feintruled — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 08:51:11 +0000

Again we are in the realms of speculation upon speculation, but Neanderthals didn't have sclera (whites of the eyes) which according to the co-operative eye hypothesis as regards to domesticated hunting dogs allows them to follow our gaze. It does seem odd that Neanderthals didn't try to domesticate them too - surely the first reaction on seeing humans and dogs bring down a mammoth or corral large deer would be 'got to get us some of that', but as sibling comments say we don't know much about them really.

New comment by feintruled in "When did dogs become our best friends?"

feintruled — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 14:46:56 +0000

It's a bit of a fringe theory but there's a suggestion that the human 'alliance' with wolves gave us the edge over Neanderthals and other predators and ensured that it was us who ultimately survived as a species. It's a nice thought for a dog lover.

New comment by feintruled in "OpenAI GPT-4 vs. Groq Mistral-8x7B"

feintruled — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 10:20:24 +0000

Brave new world, where our machines are sometimes wrong but by gum they are quick about it.

New comment by feintruled in "Ask HN: Slow thinkers, how do you compensate for your lack of quick-wittedness?"

feintruled — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 13:18:19 +0000

I had an idea like this for helping introverts with icebreaking small talk. Flash style cards for each person, with info on what you spoke about last time, and a pre-prepared opener for the next time you bump into them. With the card info being updated each time you meet them.

Top result on a Google search for Delta Airlines help is a Scammer

feintruled — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 11:25:21 +0000

Article URL: https://old.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1advv2x/fake_airline_number_on_google/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39188808

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by feintruled in "Show HN: Kindllm – LLM chat optimized for Kindle e-readers"

feintruled — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 12:43:43 +0000

Thanks for the tip on ReadWise, that looks interesting!

New comment by feintruled in "Show HN: Kindllm – LLM chat optimized for Kindle e-readers"

feintruled — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 14:24:43 +0000

Very cool. I've no idea if this is possible without rooting the Kindle, but I wonder would it be possible to highlight sections of text in a book and send it to something like this with a request to summarise/explain?