Hacker News: gentooflux

New comment by gentooflux in "Identity verification on Claude"

gentooflux — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 10:04:54 +0000

You might not be able to afford to put up power lines or build a road, but that doesn't mean you physically cannot. By your logic there are no natural monopolies

New comment by gentooflux in "The Doom Justifies the Valuation"

gentooflux — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 05:14:36 +0000

Hell yes. More than a third of Americans would run their two and a half ton pickup trucks on burning copies of An Inconvenient Truth if it were at all possible

New comment by gentooflux in "Identity verification on Claude"

gentooflux — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 13:44:02 +0000

The number of AI companies there can be is absolutely hard-limited by infrastructure. The ones which exist currently are racing like hell to horizontally integrate everything from network to power and water for themselves

New comment by gentooflux in "Identity verification on Claude"

gentooflux — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 13:40:11 +0000

That is an inherent and unavoidable risk regardless, as things stand if you want access to frontier models you are at the mercy of their providers.

New comment by gentooflux in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

gentooflux — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:11:59 +0000

This stuff all looks great, I can't wait to upgrade to 31 and then forget about all of it and just keep using Emacs the same way I have been for the past 20 years, /again/

New comment by gentooflux in "Becoming a father shrinks your cerebrum (2022)"

gentooflux — Sat, 02 May 2026 14:31:05 +0000

Without all the oxytocin you get from hanging out with a newborn that would be awful

New comment by gentooflux in "The Mushroom That Makes People Have the Exact Same Hallucination"

gentooflux — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:39:29 +0000

That's an interesting question, but the answer probably isn't worth the trauma you'd inflict on a child by intentionally raising them to be completely unaware of the existence of hats.

New comment by gentooflux in "Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables"

gentooflux — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:37:36 +0000

Why is it "people are willing to pay" and not "corporations are brazen enough to charge"? These utilities are necessities and relatively few people have access to cheaper alternatives to them.

New comment by gentooflux in "Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English"

gentooflux — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:06:30 +0000

I usually invert those to reduce nesting

New comment by gentooflux in "The Tax Nerd Who Bet His Life Savings Against DOGE"

gentooflux — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:25:49 +0000

There's a difference between buying groceries for your family and losing that same amount of money on a hand of poker.

New comment by gentooflux in "The $200K Developer Dream Is Over – Here's the Reality in 2026"

gentooflux — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 12:56:31 +0000

I suppose I can't afford to become a "member" in order to read your article about it then.

New comment by gentooflux in "There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape"

gentooflux — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 09:53:34 +0000

The water from sewage might end up there after it's extracted and sanitized, but all the solids have to be disposed of too. Those solids, plus the leftover chemicals used to extract and sanitize the water, go to landfill.

New comment by gentooflux in "FOSS in times of war, scarcity and (adversarial) AI [video]"

gentooflux — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:15:43 +0000

AI is not humanity. Also many open source licenses have attribution clauses, which AI does not honor when it regurgitates.

New comment by gentooflux in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

gentooflux — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:27:03 +0000

That's not novel, it's still applying techniques it's already seen, just in a different platform. Moreover it has no way of knowing if it's approach is anywhere near idiomatic in that new platform.

New comment by gentooflux in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

gentooflux — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:12:08 +0000

It's a zero sum game. AI cannot innovate, it can only predictively generate code based on what it's already seen. If we get to a point where new code is mostly or only written by AI, nothing new emerges. No new libraries, no new techniques, no new approaches. Fewer and fewer real developers means less and less new code.

New comment by gentooflux in "Ask HN: How did you learn to code?"

gentooflux — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 08:34:13 +0000

Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel, and then The C Book by Mike Banahan, Declan Brady and Mark Doran. No clue why those books in that order, but they both proved to be decent choices.

Then I had a couple of jobs where I was given access to data and opportunities to go beyond my expected duties by doing things with that data, i.e. automation and reporting.

New comment by gentooflux in "The future of software development is software developers"

gentooflux — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 12:33:41 +0000

If it empirically works, then sure. If instead every single solution it provides beyond a few trivial lines falls somewhere between "just a little bit off" and "relies entirely on core library functionality that doesn't actually exist" then I'd say it does matter and it's only slightly better than an opaque box that spouts random nonsense (which will soon include ads).

New comment by gentooflux in "The future of software development is software developers"

gentooflux — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 09:24:50 +0000

LLMs generate the most likely code given the problem they're presented and everything they've been trained on, they don't actually understand how (or even if) it works. I only ever get away with that when I'm writing a parser.

New comment by gentooflux in "Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban"

gentooflux — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:48:00 +0000

I believe they're implying that there's an unhealthy amount of regulatory capture in favor of big tech

New comment by gentooflux in "Millions of Americans mess up their taxes, but a new law will help"

gentooflux — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 02:53:04 +0000

The German word for how complicated the tax code is is "die Steuerverfassungskomplexität"