Hacker News: fwlr

New comment by fwlr in "Discovery Loop"

fwlr — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:50:21 +0000

Because of the negative externalities. It’s the same reason you shouldn’t do any other thing that personally benefits you but imposes a greater cost on everyone.

New comment by fwlr in "When online commenters detect my art as AI"

fwlr — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:41:30 +0000

They’re not “drive-by yahoos”, they’re people who appreciate art, and they are necessarily and justifiably skeptical. They’re doing nothing wrong. In another world, many of them would be dedicated fans of the artist.

In this world, however, AI companies have been permitted to cause this massive tragedy of the commons, and they are the ones we should reserve our epithets for.

New comment by fwlr in "Haters (2020)"

fwlr — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:06:04 +0000

Haters are described as “losers in a very specific sense”: “some amount of talent” but “never achieved much”, “never will … do great work”.

Haters as “fanboys with the sign bit flipped” is a catchy assertion, but lacks either explanatory or predictive power (how? why? did they get hit by a cosmic ray?).

I think it could just as easily be that the haters are people who can sense that sign bit on the “great work” has been lost in some sort of unsafe bit-aliasing; the famous see their unsigned integers increasing, while the hater sees a large negative signed integer. Certainly this dynamic fits for the rogue’s gallery in the Thanks section.

New comment by fwlr in "AI-Generated Images Discourage Me from Reading Your Blog"

fwlr — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:57:46 +0000

“AI-generated images discourage me from reading” is a statement that’s true for me too, albeit for different reasons than offered in this post. For me, it’s the same kind of thing as “reading the text of your slides out loud”, or repeating the contention in both the introduction and conclusion.

The point of repetition is to reinforce understanding by approaching the same place from different directions, so the reader can pin down your idea at the intersection of these various thrusts. Multiple arrows from roughly the same place going in roughly the same direction don’t constrain the expressed idea, instead they just make it fuzzier.

New comment by fwlr in "Apple is getting this wrong"

fwlr — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:38:57 +0000

I guess there is something big about to happen and the Apple lawsuit situation needs to be visibly/publicly addressed in order to unblock it. And this thing is big enough that the objection “there is no good way to address the lawsuit” gets overruled with “then address it in a bad way”. So I guess it’s the IPO, closing a new funding round, or the hardware launch?

New comment by fwlr in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)"

fwlr — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 01:03:45 +0000

Location: Sydney, NSW, Australia

Remote: yes, prefer in-office

Willing to relocate: yes, within NSW

Technologies: JavaScript/TypeScript+React/Vue/htmx, Postgres, Rust, Zig, Lisp

Résumé/CV: on request

Email: scott@fwlr.io

Site: fwlr.io

Four years experience as founding/“first five” engineer at startups, both frontend and full stack. Capable generalist plus focused specialist (sometimes this is described as “T-shaped”). Polyglot, pick up new languages and frameworks very quickly; could be productive in e.g. Go, Elixir, any given frontend framework. I lean towards care and craftsmanship - trying to draw inspiration from figures like Rich Hickey, Casey Muratori, Bret Victor. Privately skeptical on AI-assisted development, but I’m a professional and can work with it.

New comment by fwlr in "Let the machines in"

fwlr — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 05:44:50 +0000

Kudos to the author for teaching me a new word for the first time in over a decade. I was beginning to believe I knew them all.

New comment by fwlr in "Show HN: Shitty – fast terminal. Memory-unsafe and faster than yours"

fwlr — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 04:48:54 +0000

Hmm. Sounds like it follows the letter of the law (although much of it is LLM-generated, and there’s obviously quite a legal cloud surrounding that), but it does feel a bit against the spirit to me. Overall, I am quite satisfied with the name you’ve given it.

New comment by fwlr in "Karpathy’s Pelican"

fwlr — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 02:47:54 +0000

So what if it is more profitable or valuable? It is still not better. Something being more profitable/valuable does not make it better, just like something being better does not make it more profitable/valuable. Sometimes, in some pursuits, for some outputs under some circumstances, the two are correlated. In others, the two are anti-correlated.

New comment by fwlr in "Karpathy’s Pelican"

fwlr — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:59:01 +0000

I really dislike this AI programming thing of “Mr LLM, go slam your face into the problem until there’s no problem left, then call me back”. (Not sure if it’s a recent trend or a fundamental nature.)

It always brings to my mind some words from Rich Hickey:

    I think we’re in this world I’d like to call “guardrail programming”. It’s really sad: we’re like, “I can make change because I have tests!”. Who does that? Who drives their car around, banging against the guardrails, saying “whoah, I’m so glad I have these guardrails so I can make it to the show on time!”

I don’t think I really have a point to make here, other than it just feels like someone’s released a bunch of carnival bumper cars onto the highways.

New comment by fwlr in "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"

fwlr — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 16:23:06 +0000

I mean, we are deep into reading tea leaves at this point, but what it seems to have identified is the source file that changed such that this issue can now occur. My gut instinct is that the changed code is still valid and correct, but it exercises the hardware in a different or a more intense way.

New comment by fwlr in "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"

fwlr — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 13:41:01 +0000

    The overflow would still overflow; the use-after-free would still use after free; a musl mask race would still race.

Hilarious. Apart from the computer poetry, the conclusion seems to be “it’s something in Linux 7.0 + musl 1.2.5”, although the only reproduction is still on the same physical Threadripper CPU and only sometimes when heavily exercised, so it hasn’t really ruled out a hardware issue.

New comment by fwlr in "Sam Altman is now talking to the White House about decelerating AI"

fwlr — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:42:34 +0000

    If OpenAI wanted to slow down their own research and/or releases they could do that without the government telling them to do that.

     If Anthropic and OpenAI both genuinely want deceleration, then just make a joint agreement to pause releases and stop trying to front-run the race.

No, in point of fact, they can not do this. To do so would be a breach of fiduciary duty to their shareholders and investors, exposing them to severe personal liability and in some jurisdictions also jail time.

New comment by fwlr in "1,741 "informed" consents with one click? GDPR complaint filed"

fwlr — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:27:29 +0000

I would have them make money by selling me products, rather than selling me as a product.

New comment by fwlr in "Pacing the frontier"

fwlr — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 05:16:11 +0000

Maybe I am too cynical, but this just sounds like a plea for the government to step in and save them from their investors.

New comment by fwlr in "Yudkowsky and Soares' Book Is Lacking (2025)"

fwlr — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 01:04:19 +0000

    So, they say, computers are not smart now, we don’t know what intelligence is, we don’t know how to make computers smart, but they certainly will be intelligent soon.

There is currently a trillion-dollar corporation whose valuation largely rests on their progress in solving this. It is beyond asinine to require it from a book, as though it were table stakes for discussion.

New comment by fwlr in "Show HN: I built a native macOS terminal with Git integration in 5 days"

fwlr — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:56:22 +0000

“ Built on libghostty. Ghostty's terminal core, embedded and hosted natively by kero “

Doubtful

New comment by fwlr in "OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened"

fwlr — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 22:47:21 +0000

Agreed that people claiming “marketing stunt” need to pull their heads out the sand, but likewise Simon needs to do some of his own beach-cranium-dislodging for laying the blame of constraints on the US govt. Before the export controls were ever floated, Glasswind found many thousands of exploits, and offered patches/fixes for approximately none of them. (perhaps their exploit capability far outstrips their remediation capability, or perhaps they’ve calculated that it somehow better suits their business model to find exploits but not remediations).

New comment by fwlr in "The AI hype is a mass psychosis echo chamber of incompetent individuals"

fwlr — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:29:51 +0000

You never hear anyone talking about “imposter syndrome” anymore, do you?

New comment by fwlr in "There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text"

fwlr — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:16:47 +0000

    An AI agent, 600k tokens into a feature that it just authored, understands the feature as well or better than I do.

On this, we are in complete agreement.