Hacker News: freshbreath

New comment by freshbreath in "Why I don't think AGI is imminent"

freshbreath — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 09:02:53 +0000

GWh

New comment by freshbreath in "I miss thinking hard"

freshbreath — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:27:05 +0000

"I don't want to have to write this for the umpteenth time" -- Don't let it even reach a -teenth. Automate it on the 2nd iteration. Or even the 1st if you know you'll need it again. LLMs can help with this.

Software engineers are lazy. The good ones are, anyway.

LLMs are extremely dangerous for us because it can easily become a "be lazy button". Press it whenever you want and get that dopamine hit -- you don't even have to dive into the weeds and get dirty!

There's a fine line between "smart autocomplete" and "be lazy button". Use it to generate a boilerplate class, sure. But save some tokens and fill that class in yourself. Especially if you don't want to (at your own discretion; deadlines are a thing). But get back in those weeds, get dirty, remember the pain.

We need to constantly remind ourselves of what we are doing and why we are doing it. Failing that, we forget the how, and eventually even the why. We become the reverse centaur.

And I don't think LLMs are the next layer of abstraction -- if anything, they're preventing it. But I think LLMs can help build that next layer... it just won't look anything like the weekly "here's the greatest `.claude/.skills/AGENTS.md` setup".

If you have to write a ton of boilerplate code, then abstract away the boilerplate in code (nondeterminism is so 2025). And then reuse that abstraction. Make it robust and thoroughly tested. Put it on github. Let others join in on the fun. Iterate on it. Improve it. Maybe it'll become part of the layers of abstraction for the next generation.

New comment by freshbreath in "Thoughts on thinking"

freshbreath — Sat, 17 May 2025 01:48:23 +0000

> disposing branches that don’t bear fruit

Disposing branches that the LLM convinces you won’t bear fruit.

The Next Big Thing doesn’t exist yet. At least not in any LLM models. If someone thinks of the NBT, asks LLM about it, and LLM’s model says “impossible”, this could squander innovation.

New comment by freshbreath in "Uncovering Hidden SSIDs Using Wireshark"

freshbreath — Sun, 14 Jun 2015 17:54:54 +0000

If there are no associated clients, you can brute-force the SSID with MDK3 http://www.backtrack-linux.org/forums/showthread.php?t=12360

And mahouse is correct: airodump-ng automatically detects when the SSID is broadcasted and displays it.

New comment by freshbreath in "The color of every photo on the internet blended together is orange"

freshbreath — Wed, 20 Aug 2014 23:39:10 +0000

I tried making a site to auto-blend images from Google Images…

https://github.com/derv82/ImageBlender

http://blen.derv.us

Last time I checked, it didn't work 100%, and was laggy.

But I learned bootstrap in the process, and some of the quirks associated with HTML5 canvas.

New comment by freshbreath in "How I cracked my neighbor's WiFi password without breaking a sweat"

freshbreath — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:09:32 +0000

That will install 'aircrack-ng', which can crack WEP ivs packets or a WPA/2 handshake.

You will need airodump-ng to actually capture the handshake. I don't think the entire aircrack suite has been ported in homebrew.

New comment by freshbreath in "Your Bash Prompt Needs This"

freshbreath — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 15:55:05 +0000

What if a program prints text without a newline at the end, then exits? It's possible and it would be confusing to not see that last line.

    cout >> "Hello world"; // with no endl.

Prepending the prompt with a new line might be a better idea than over-writing the current line.