Hacker News: gampleman

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).

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

gampleman — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:59:36 +0000

Cool project! I'd be interested in checking out your other projects, but the links seem not to be included in your post.

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

gampleman — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:58:12 +0000

Since you're from an Orthodox background, perhaps you can consider having the books from an actual Orthodox bible? For instance it is missing Wisdom of Solomon, Sirrah and others.

Edit: I'd also appreciate an RSS feed so that I can get notified when a new puzzle is released.

New comment by gampleman in "Shipmap.org"

gampleman — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:43:21 +0000

Turn on your sound. There is voice over narration.

New comment by gampleman in "Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment"

gampleman — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 10:05:20 +0000

Really makes me think that the justice system should have a wide margin for discretionary sentencing. I get that in some sense fraud is fraud, but there is one thing preying on people's greed, and another preying on compassion, charity and vulnerable children in desperate need. Scams based on greed (or other vices) are in some sense limited crimes, since their success punishes what is low, but scams based on what is best in us are much wider in their social impact, since they also disincentivize what is most noble.

New comment by gampleman in "No ARIA is better than bad ARIA"

gampleman — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 18:21:43 +0000

That does seem catastrophically misguided. I’m more curious about the more common case where tags are used as documented (and I really wish the documentation was better), but perhaps not completely. For instance we have a Finder like UI in our web app that conceptually is a treegrid, but we don’t support all of the keyboard interactions advised at the above website.

Should we remove the role attributes?

New comment by gampleman in "No ARIA is better than bad ARIA"

gampleman — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 10:27:40 +0000

Is this really true? Messaging like this will cause a lot of developers to just give up. Most places I've worked at did accessibility at best as a best effort sort of thing. After reading this, there will be no attempts made to improve the state of affairs.

Perhaps that will be an improvement? I don't know.

New comment by gampleman in "Meta's Child Sex-Trafficking Problem"

gampleman — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 10:21:02 +0000

And here I was thinking that my opinion of Meta as a company couldn't be any lower...

Why we allow this company to keep operating is beyond me.

New comment by gampleman in "OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030"

gampleman — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 19:50:19 +0000

That’s rather presupposing materialism (in the philosophy of mind sense) is correct. That seems to be the consensus theory, but it’s not be shown ‘definitely’ true.

New comment by gampleman in "Unison 1.0"

gampleman — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 20:15:01 +0000

Congratulations on the milestone. You are making one of the most radical PLs out there into something that is actually useable in an industry setting - that’s no mean feat.