Hacker News: forgetfulness

New comment by forgetfulness in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

forgetfulness — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:54:18 +0000

It's hard to imagine how making insurance sales cheaper for the brokers, churning out astrology apps faster, AI boyfriend bots or running ad campaigns with fewer and lower paid designers is going to drive 10% GDP growth in developed and middle income countries, that's the sort of figures you see when very poor countries finish rolling out electrification, sanitation and transportation.

New comment by forgetfulness in "Corporations can vote in some Delaware elections, judge says"

forgetfulness — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:50:32 +0000

Also what constitutes ownership here? Couldn't some Enterprising Individuals open 100 shell companies, pool together resources and form the Legalize Asbestos Consortium, the Consortium buys a plot of land and then each stakeholder of the Consortium counts as an owner of the plot of land?

New comment by forgetfulness in "Taste in the age of AI and LLMs"

forgetfulness — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:26:06 +0000

Also a lot of middle managers. Many organizations enthusiastically adopting AI are doing so because they want to appeal to the authority of the bots and bludgeon colleagues with it.

New comment by forgetfulness in "Diverse perspectives on AI from Rust contributors and maintainers"

forgetfulness — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 23:23:34 +0000

LLMs are very easy to pick up, the point of them for their makers is to commoditize skill and knowledge, you can't be left behind in learning to use them, AI providers don't have economic incentives to make them into anything other than appliances.

The people more at risk of being left behind are the ones that don't learn when not to trust their output.

New comment by forgetfulness in "What Young Workers Are Doing to AI-Proof Themselves"

forgetfulness — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:16:55 +0000

Right, bridging the gap of knowledge by getting closer to that of the clerical workers of the company, because pure software knowledge is no longer as valuable. That will probably make your salary closer to theirs, and that'll be a pretty big adjustment.

New comment by forgetfulness in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

forgetfulness — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:18:58 +0000

Lots of organizations don't want to accept that their velocity issues are quality issues. It's often a view held by an old guard that was there when the business experienced growth by adding features, while not having to bear any maintenance burden. The people who remain are either also oblivious to this, or simply have stopped caring.

LLM-generated code hits all the right notes, it's done fast, in great volumes, and it even features what the naysayers were asking for. Each PR has 20 pages of documentation and adds some bulk to the stuff in the tests folder, that can sit there looking pretty. How wonderful! Hell, you can even do now that "code review" that some nerd was always complaining about, just ask the bot to review it and hit that merge button.

Then you ask the bot to generate the commands again for the deploy (what CI pipeline?) and bam! New features customers will love. And maybe data corruption.

New comment by forgetfulness in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

forgetfulness — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:55:56 +0000

My uncle leads IT support teams, the org is measuring AI use in writing reports and tickets. The org has very poorly structured and obsolete processes (he's trying to straighten them up as he goes), AI will probably amplify the lack of structure, by making it easier for the work to _look_ as if someone carefully reviewed the issues and followed procedure.

A friend is a team lead in an org that's mandating vibecoding via "Devin", a lesser known player an "architect" chose after shallow review. The company also has endemic process issues and simply can't do deployments reliably, it's behind the times in methodology in every other respect. Higher ups are placing their trust in a B-list agentic tool instead of fixing the problems.

Anyway, I wouldn't be caught dead working at either of those two shops even before the AI rollout, but this is what's going on in the IT underworld.

New comment by forgetfulness in "New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers"

forgetfulness — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:17:48 +0000

I'm behind the times! That's what it used to be until Windows XP, the last Windows version I used on a daily basis was Windows 2000 up to 2005.

New comment by forgetfulness in "New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers"

forgetfulness — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:45:51 +0000

It brings up the Task Manager, that lets you forcibly stop processes, and this is a way for the (NY State) Government to take control of your printer, the analogy isn't bad.

New comment by forgetfulness in "My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it"

forgetfulness — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 20:34:42 +0000

Plenty of people will tell you that they enjoy solving business problems.

Well, I'll have to take their word for it that they're passionate about maximizing shareholder value by improving key performance indicators, I know I personally didn't sign up for being in meetings all day to leverage cross functional synergies with the goal of increasing user retention in sales funnels, or something along those lines.

I'm not passionate about either that or mandatory HR training videos.

New comment by forgetfulness in "Nicolas Guillou, French ICC judge sanctioned by the US and “debanked”"

forgetfulness — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 16:42:33 +0000

Many countries were also "biased" against Apartheid South Africa, the bias was disapproval of apartheid, much like the one enacted on the West Bank and Gaza.

New comment by forgetfulness in "Gimp Source Code"

forgetfulness — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 14:22:51 +0000

It used to lack non-destructive editing ("adjustment layers" in Photoshop parlance) until recently, it's a core foundation of editing workflows for designers and photographers, it lets you layer transformations of over immutable rasters. This was in Photoshop since 2005.

New comment by forgetfulness in "Adobe Photoshop 1.0 Source Code (1990)"

forgetfulness — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 14:07:58 +0000

It was going to be the future of Software Engineering in the 2000s, Software Architects laying out boxes for Software Bricklayers to implement as dictated, code generation tools were going to make programming trivial.

For trivial CRUD apps, and maintaining modified versions of the generated code was a nightmare.

New comment by forgetfulness in "Graphite is joining Cursor"

forgetfulness — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 18:58:21 +0000

https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

New comment by forgetfulness in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

forgetfulness — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:42:43 +0000

Google PMs must not be incentivized to launch new products the way they were, renaming and relaunching the chat app was a regular occurrence.

New comment by forgetfulness in "30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness"

forgetfulness — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:01:57 +0000

The game's campaign being what it was made it so people never warmed up to it, the big hero-focused storylines and then mishandling of said characters (Kerrigan's abortive humanization and then rushed redemption, the Protoss being framed in entirely the wrong tone, the half baked epilogue) just made it so that the campaign didn't stick as Brod War's did, even if the gameplay was superior.

New comment by forgetfulness in "Bad Dye Job"

forgetfulness — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 13:43:54 +0000

The man left prior to Apple facing, and losing, a class action lawsuit over his favored keyboard design. Screens also died left and right in designs approved by him, and his next great innovation would be the Touch Bar.

It was a precipitous fall from grace

New comment by forgetfulness in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

forgetfulness — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 17:33:28 +0000

I can’t find it either. It may have been him, washing machines are the kind of alternating current appliances that he avoided in preparation for living in space

HN was so enamored with him when his deal was about hacking eating into being more productive by not having to chew

New comment by forgetfulness in "Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop"

forgetfulness — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 01:03:55 +0000

The author wants to buy a whole new computer every year or two max, instead of upgrading components

That’s an impressive, so to speak, level of consumerism, reminds me of a self-professed minimalist that made the rounds here years ago, he practiced detachment from worldly possessions by throwing away his clothes after use and buying new ones, instead of washing them

New comment by forgetfulness in "The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle"

forgetfulness — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 17:14:57 +0000

Reputation will only become more important as AI generated content permeates society, the name behind what you’ll read, watch or listen will be a bigger factor in whether anyone would commit minutes to hours to consuming what could be slop.

I think this erosion of trust will have far reaching consequences and people will become less open to ideas and experiences front strangers.

Running your brand into the ground in the early days will be costly.