Hacker News: foobarbecue

New comment by foobarbecue in "Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb"

foobarbecue — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:41:57 +0000

Ah, thanks for the explanation. I didn't realize you were sharing the actual prompt.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb"

foobarbecue — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 04:15:52 +0000

By "decompress," "eliminate deictic language," etc. are you trying to say "speak simply and clearly?"

Eschew obfuscation...

New comment by foobarbecue in "My server is a phone now"

foobarbecue — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:17:22 +0000

Of course it's clear which is more likely in this specific case, but from the semantic structure I read (present tense) it the other way around. It actually struck me as a grammatical error when I first read (past tense) it.

If I said "my water is ice now," one would assume freezing rather than melting.

So in this case one would assume a server became a phone, when actually a phone became a server.

(English is my first language.)

New comment by foobarbecue in "Logic for Programmers"

foobarbecue — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 09:19:27 +0000

Trying to buy this on Amazon seems to trigger a bug.

If I do "buy now," I get a strange text-only "out of stock" page.

If I add to cart and try to check out, I'm redirected to the "switch account" page, where only my currently logged-in account is listed.

I buy things on amazon ask the time and have never seen this before.

EDIT: whatever that was, it's fixed now. I was able to purchase the print book.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Is surveillance risk chilling your online speech?"

foobarbecue — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 05:01:21 +0000

Not at all. I for one welcome our new overlords.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Codex scraped the ICM website and discovered 2026 Fields Medal winner list"

foobarbecue — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:29:09 +0000

Holy crap I hope that's not true. I've also had unguessable pages indexed, though, and don't have an explanation.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Why Vanilla JavaScript"

foobarbecue — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 02:56:23 +0000

I think the complaints attenuated in the last in the last 10-15 years because javascript itself became a much better language. Things really started to change with ES5. The introduction of let / const, modules, async, .?, template strings, etc. transformed it from an ugly kludge to a really capable language.

Of course, if you use old syntax you still deal with weird scoping and casting, but you don't have to any more.

Also, I think the framework churn has slowed considerably in the last 5 years.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected"

foobarbecue — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:00:40 +0000

Ah. I was expecting some technical jargon. You do you, man...

New comment by foobarbecue in "Zuckerberg says AI agent development going slower than expected"

foobarbecue — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:03:17 +0000

Ok, I'll bite. What's "foxwork"?

New comment by foobarbecue in "The bottleneck might be the air in the room"

foobarbecue — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 12:20:58 +0000

Interesting, the linked article does say that.

Pretty sure I learned the effect was the opposite (high CO2 --> slower respiration). Note that that was ~15 years ago when I would have read that. Maybe I just misunderstood, or thinking has changed.

edit: reading now I see I was wrong about this. Thanks for the correction!

New comment by foobarbecue in "The bottleneck might be the air in the room"

foobarbecue — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 11:50:03 +0000

EDIT: ignore this; I was confused / misinformed

It's about pH. CO2 creates carbonic acid when it dissolves in water. Your blood pH, in turn, controls how much you feel like you need to breathe. So with high CO2, your respiration rate slows down, and that can lead to low oxygen levels.

Note that the physiology and biochemistry of this is complicated (e.g. blood is a very good pH buffer and it's actively regulated by kidneys etc) and it's very much a nascent field of research, so I think AI will be overconfident and hallucination-prone.

Source: I worked in high-co2 caves for my PhD so have read about this a lot. I always carried a CO2 monitor. Our rule was to get out if we saw 20,000 ppm or greater. I spent thousands of hours above 10,000ppm.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Agentic coding notes from Galapagos Island"

foobarbecue — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 05:51:14 +0000

Aaand now OP has fixed it in the HN post title. Still wrong in the linked article.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Agentic coding notes from Galapagos Island"

foobarbecue — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 05:50:28 +0000

Argh, autocorrect got me. Thanks, fixed.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Agentic coding notes"

foobarbecue — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 05:40:36 +0000

It's "Galapagos" or "Galápagos," not "Galapogos."

New comment by foobarbecue in "Why Switzerland has 25 gbit internet and America doesn't"

foobarbecue — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 05:14:12 +0000

"This article is ... spellchecked with AI" ???

Why on Earth world you use an LLM for that instead of a spell checker???

New comment by foobarbecue in "The case for physical media ownership"

foobarbecue — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 17:19:12 +0000

There is actually no legally available English version of this ebook now, so if you want the ebook piracy is the only option. Presumably Amazon still has the rights to sell it, but due to a technical glitch and disinterest, they aren't.

New comment by foobarbecue in "The case for physical media ownership"

foobarbecue — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 13:16:47 +0000

I bought a Kindle copy of Steven Baxter's novel Ring. One day, I decided to re-read it and downloaded it to a new device.

It had changed from the English edition to the German translation!

Amazon eventually admitted that this was some kind of glitch, but they were uninterested in fixing it. I got a refund, but there was no way for me to read the book.

New comment by foobarbecue in "A man was gifted his dream car by Kevin Mitnick, who he helped put in prison"

foobarbecue — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 04:05:42 +0000

Except actually real whereas Frank Abagnale fabricated all of his supposed cons (read The Greatest Hoax).

New comment by foobarbecue in "Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place"

foobarbecue — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:38:53 +0000

Contains unwarned spoilers for The Good Place.

New comment by foobarbecue in "Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks"

foobarbecue — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 05:18:18 +0000

I don't think this reductionist view of colleagues (dividing them into categories rather than discerning individual strengths and weaknesses, team-building, empowering) is very success-oriented.