Hacker News: gampleman

New comment by gampleman in "My new obsession: A horse-racing board game of pure luck"

gampleman — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:20:43 +0000

As in: most popular modern board games combine both luck and skill. That would imply that like the parent, most people enjoy games that combine both rather than being purely skill xor luck based.

New comment by gampleman in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

gampleman — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:02:12 +0000

We're rather used to the idea of progress in most areas of human endeavor. It's fairly absurd to believe rolling back the last 200 years of progress would lead to measurably better outcomes is absurd in fields like medicine, industry, science, history, technology, cuisine, transportation, ...

That it seems to be that case in education seems to me to qualify for the label of surprising.

New comment by gampleman in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

gampleman — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:21:08 +0000

Plenty of places have relatively high teacher pay, relative high staffing (for instance 1 teacher + 1 assistant per 25 children is standard here - not quite 1/10 but pretty close). The educational outcomes are bad and getting worse.

New comment by gampleman in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

gampleman — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:12:10 +0000

This is basically why the classical education movement exists. The fact that you can have remarkably better results using thousand(s) year old teaching methods/ideas than using 'modern' educational approaches is actually rather surprising.

New comment by gampleman in "My new obsession: A horse-racing board game of pure luck"

gampleman — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:12:25 +0000

> But I seem to be in a minority

Given the design of nearly all popular modern board games, that seems very unlikely.

New comment by gampleman in "Use boring languages with LLMs"

gampleman — Tue, 26 May 2026 09:11:30 +0000

I do agentic Elm development every day (it's my job). I feel like what you describe was a problem with models perhaps two years ago. Today's models don't seem to struggle with it at all and in fact do seem to benefit from what the author describes.

AI, "Humanity", and Dr. Manhattan Syndrome

gampleman — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:18:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.personfamiliar.com/p/ai-humanity-and-dr-manhattan-syndrome

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184193

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by gampleman in "Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise"

gampleman — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:31:27 +0000

No. Large co I work at everyone is like running at least 3 concurrent Claude sessions all day every day. Talking to friends in other companies it seems the same.

Big difference between professional deployments and personal ones.

New comment by gampleman in "Cursing the government does not fix potholes. Spray-painting them does"

gampleman — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:42:29 +0000

I don't know if it will help fixing it, but it might help drivers avoid them more easily if they're painted in bright colors, which still sounds like a plus. Nobody wants to drive into a massive pothole at full speed unaware or try to dangerously dodge at the last moment.

New comment by gampleman in "The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying"

gampleman — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:16:25 +0000

Actually I think this is one of the more tragic outcomes of the LLM revolution: it was already hard to get funding for ergonomic advances in programming before. Funding a new PL ecosystem or major library was no mean feat. Despite that, there were a number of promising advances that could have significantly raised the level of abstraction.

However, LLMs destroy this economic incentive utterly. It now seems most productive to code in fairly low level TypeScript and let the machines spew tons of garbage code for you.

New comment by gampleman in "CIA suddenly stops publishing, removes archives of The World Factbook"

gampleman — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:37:57 +0000

I always thought if Orwell was quite prescient of the eastern block than surely Huxley was even more so about the western.

New comment by gampleman in "Heathrow scraps liquid container limit"

gampleman — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 10:27:01 +0000

I thought so too. But having talked to a few people who are generally afraid of flying, they absolutely do take re-assurance from the security theatre. They are very much not interested in having the ease of subverting this security explained to them.

New comment by gampleman in "Heathrow scraps liquid container limit"

gampleman — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 10:15:54 +0000

In Edinburgh the (small, we often need 2) luggage carts are now £2.

New comment by gampleman in "Apple, What Have You Done?"

gampleman — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:46:07 +0000

And also you are seeing serious criticism from the traditional Apple fan crowd, e.g. John Gruber has been panning it mercilessly.

New comment by gampleman in "Apple, What Have You Done?"

gampleman — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:38:49 +0000

Hm for me it's been a fairly steady state. The last 5 or so MacOS versions delivered features that got a solid meh from me:

- Big Sur did a redesign which wasn't really needed, but it wasn't that much of a downgrade. Wish they focused on fixing bugs rather.

- Monterey had live text, which has come in handy, otherwise I haven't used any of its headline features (such as shortcuts or universal control).

- Ventura: haven't used any headline features (Stage manager, continuity camera, Freeform)

- Sonoma: still nothing (Desktop widgets?, Game mode)

- Sequoia: Passwords app is cool, but have been using 1Password for a decade by this point, so had little interest in switching. (Everything else: Apple Intelligence was a joke, iPhone mirroring seems too clunky to be practical).

So nothing that exactly made me excited to upgrade, but at least things didn't get drastically worse.

But Tahoe seems like a disaster I don't want to touch. For one, it looks ridiculous. But also there seems to be a number of objectively bad design decisions all over the place. This is Apple - good design is what they got famous for. If they don't maintain an edge in UI design, then it's not the same company anymore as far as I'm concerned.

New comment by gampleman in "Apple, What Have You Done?"

gampleman — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 09:58:51 +0000

At this point I’m going to hold out on updating MacOS for a year. If things don’t improve or the direction doesn’t change significantly I’m going to seriously consider paying the switching costs.

New comment by gampleman in "Sync/Backup/Install AI Agent configs across machines"

gampleman — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 16:52:26 +0000

Aside: the name is fairly confusing since there is a relatively well known conference called Sync Conf (which well may be worth more attention than this)

New comment by gampleman in "Proton spam and the AI consent problem"

gampleman — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 14:11:08 +0000

I tend to have a policy: I will click on your unsubscribe button once, after that it's straight to 'report spam'. If that sinks your domain ratings, that's on you.

New comment by gampleman in "Influencers and OnlyFans models are dominating U.S. O-1 visa requests"

gampleman — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 19:36:57 +0000

Porn comes from pornē, Greek for prostitute. So at least etymologically (and arguably logically as both involve sex for money) porn is prostitution.

If that’s accepted, then I find it hard not to also accept OF as a form of prostitution.

New comment by gampleman in "Show HN: A Daily Bible Game"

gampleman — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 11:02:42 +0000

Are the verses random? If so perhaps add a filter to make sure the name of the book doesn't occur in the verse. For instance today's is trivial (or if it has "Job replied...", or "Jonah went..." it would make it too easy).

(Unless the name is John. Then it's kind of a good clue that the book isn't John).