Hacker News: fredley

New comment by fredley in "Teenagers Stayed Overnight at Their School and Found Hidden Ancient Roman Ruins"

fredley — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:57:09 +0000

> To William’s complete lack of surprise, the little cellar under the shed was much better built than the shed itself. But then, practically everywhere in Ankh-Morpork had cellars that were once the first or even second or third floors of ancient buildings, built at the time of one of the city’s empires when men thought that the future was going to last for ever. And then the river had flooded and brought mud with it, and walls had gone higher and, now, what Ankh-Morpork was built on was mostly Ankh-Morpork. People said that anyone with a good sense of direction and a pickaxe could cross the city underground by simply knocking holes in walls.

AI, Ashby Engineering, and the future

fredley — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:48:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ashbyhq.com/blog/engineering/ai-ashby-engineering-and-the-future

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48399528

Points: 62

# Comments: 55

New comment by fredley in "Private equity bought America's essential services"

fredley — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:59:30 +0000

The people behind these funds are playing Monopoly IRL, and this in particular makes me very angry.

The UK high street has been a notable victim. Gradually, over the past couple of decades, company after company has been snapped up by PE. Not just shops, but restaurants too. Suddenly you realise that the 5 or 6 high street chains that were competing are now owned by the same fund. Quality collapses, prices rise, not just at one chain but everywhere. People stop going, the chain collapses, another empty unit, the fund moves on. It's easy to point at Amazon and internet shopping as having degraded the British high street, but there are several other factors, and PE is a big one.

New comment by fredley in "Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing"

fredley — Mon, 25 May 2026 18:02:16 +0000

I think if local models catch up with current SOTA then that might not happen. Either way, I'm don't think the long-term for OAI, Anthropic etc. really holds up.

New comment by fredley in "Apparently Google hates us now"

fredley — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:53:15 +0000

Increasingly I see marketing as akin to LLM training. We are all being trained (by activating and reinforcing neural pathways in our meaty heads) to respond to certain stimuli in a certain way (e.g.: at the store, select _this_ brand of soap).

New comment by fredley in "Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users"

fredley — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:40:07 +0000

I don't want to learn how GIMP works. I want to edit photos.

New comment by fredley in "Photo GIMP – A Patch for GIMP 3 for Photoshop Users"

fredley — Tue, 19 May 2026 11:38:06 +0000

Some people do. I know my way around Photoshop very well, but do not use any advanced features. I tried using GIMP once and bounced off immediately, trying to do what I knew how to do in Photoshop was very hard, the learning curve felt very steep.

These days I use Photopea which meets my needs perfectly (but is not free software).

New comment by fredley in "How to make your text look futuristic (2016)"

fredley — Wed, 13 May 2026 09:46:18 +0000

Almost exactly the playbook I followed (unwittingly) when designing a logotype for my Playdate game recently:

https://play.date/games/hyper-vector/

Closure of Radio 4 on Long Wave

fredley — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:41:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.co.uk/reception/work-warning/news/radio4lw

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48073226

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance

fredley — Fri, 08 May 2026 10:26:53 +0000

Article URL: https://ai-project-website.github.io/AI-assistance-reduces-persistence/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48061150

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The Elephant in the Room

fredley — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:40:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/email/wham-launch-005-elephant-1-es/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47949948

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by fredley in "Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race"

fredley — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:52:04 +0000

He did his _last_ mile in 4.17. Insane.

New comment by fredley in "Hear your agent suffer through your code"

fredley — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:33:30 +0000

I need a version of this which swears loudly when an assumption it made turns out to be wrong, with the volume/passion/verbosity correlated with how many tokens it's burned on the incorrect approach.

New comment by fredley in "Musicians are manufacturing sold-out shows"

fredley — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:17:07 +0000

https://archive.is/92Xsy

New comment by fredley in "Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?"

fredley — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:15:08 +0000

Playdate games! Super constrained/lo-fi/retro and really a joy to program without AI.

Hyper Vector is dropping on Catalog next week!

New comment by fredley in "Apple Just Lost Me"

fredley — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:59:57 +0000

I had the UK Age verification popup today. It verified immediately based on the age of my Apple account, I didn't have to take any further action. I am much younger than the OP, and probably than their Apple account. I am surprised that this didn't happen for them.

AI toys for children misread emotions and respond inappropriately

fredley — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:44:06 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyg4wx6nxgo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362684

Points: 39

# Comments: 15

M2x2

fredley — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:04:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wattiv.nl/work/m2x2/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47334046

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by fredley in "Mac mini will be made at a new facility in Houston"

fredley — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 10:43:09 +0000

It's like the mastered Factorio and applied it to real life.

New comment by fredley in "Yes there is a right way to stack the dishwasher. Here are the 5 rules"

fredley — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:11:05 +0000

Brit here: It is very uncommon.