Hacker News: gexla

New comment by gexla in "StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site"

gexla — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:05:06 +0000

I never had a desire to post questions there. Comments or answers only if it were something I felt a personal stake in (community that we were trying to bring up) or the rare case where I would come across something uncommon that was unanswered that I had recently ran into and figured out. It's not the users there who kept me away, I just that I like quiet (high signal to noise) developer spaces. ;)

I imagine a huge number of people were just browsing for quick answers and then bailed as I did.

New comment by gexla in "The ladder is missing rungs – Engineering Progression When AI Ate the Middle"

gexla — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 01:41:22 +0000

> I saw a LinkedIn post a week or two ago by a senior engineer with 25 years’ experience in the industry...

And how many years have we had capable AI? Maybe it's going to take a similar timeline for people to figure out how to be good with an AI assisted workflow (if not fully automated.)

New comment by gexla in "The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'"

gexla — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:34:52 +0000

Yeah, punk was a bit of a rejection of the polish of the big bands of the time. In a sense, the "horrible" was sort of the point. And for the shock value. But did that really mean they were horrible? Probably everyone kind of sucks at first. But it's hard not to improve your skills once you have got to a point where you have done a certain number of shows because you created a sustainable cash flow to support it.

New comment by gexla in "Why craft-lovers are losing their craft"

gexla — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:35:14 +0000

And you could say similar for the transition between painting and photography.

ETA: It's interesting how the bottleneck may reveal the real skill in the thing. Architecting the code. Having a eye for interestingness in creating an image / painting of something, etc.

New comment by gexla in "Why craft-lovers are losing their craft"

gexla — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:32:46 +0000

Is that what they're wagering on though? Everytime I open X, it's all about the first to some hand-wavy definition of AGI is going to win everything, and it's the only thing that can get us through the painful transition period from massive job loss to abundance.

New comment by gexla in "The Bovadium Fragments: Together with The Origin of Bovadium"

gexla — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:09:22 +0000

One of my favorite movies as a kid was Explorers (1985) where kids built a spaceship from a Tilt-A-Whirl and other parts. It was an inspiration. Like you, I enjoy programming, but I haven't built a spaceship yet. Hehe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorers_(film)

New comment by gexla in "Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI"

gexla — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:05:18 +0000

Global uncertainty

Tariffs

War in the Middle East

US economy that would likely be in recession if not for massive datacenter spend

Oil at ~$100

But we're laying people off because... AI

New comment by gexla in "Claude helped select targets for Iran strikes, possibly including school"

gexla — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 03:51:56 +0000

Didn't read the articles, but at least the planners know and understand a map.

SO... a map is static reference. A calculator is deterministic computation. An LLM is probabilistic generation

In high-stakes environments like military planning, tools that generate new claims rather than reference known data introduce a different class of risk.

Yes, everyone is responsible for their own decisions. But then circle back to risk. How can the planners be sure they aren't dealing with hallucinations, questionable data, differing outputs based on prompts, and a long list of other things...

New comment by gexla in "Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use"

gexla — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:14:06 +0000

Okay, I was mistaken. The tooling I was speaking of uses Claude Code rather than the SDK. One uses the Zed ACP protocol. I'm not sure about the other. I should have said Claude Code rather than the SDK. For example, I can run a session through one of the tools, and then access that session directly in Claude Code. It's still Claude though. It seems the important element is that you're not using OAuth tokens from a sub to use in a different tool. If you go through Claude Code, then Claude Code is handling everything and giving your tool the output. Thanks for the correction.

New comment by gexla in "Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use"

gexla — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 06:34:28 +0000

That should be fine, because it's still using their tooling. And this seems like the better way to go. I have a couple of tools that work like this. I think the issue is mostly 3rd party harnesses that seek to do the same as Claude Code. And it seems reasonable that Anthropic decides how you can use the subscription, because it's heavily subsidized. Get a Claude $200 sub and max out the usage limits, then compare that usage to the cost of using their API. The difference is significant, which is why people are getting multiple $200 subs rather than paying for API usage (and I have seen reports where they are cracking down on this as well.)

New comment by gexla in "TSMC to make advanced AI semiconductors in Japan"

gexla — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:22:45 +0000

I would argue the chips don't even matter (important, but not as a reason for defending Taiwan.) It's a strategically important location that is a stone's throw from Japanese islands. If Japan feels the need, then nukes may be on the table. If that were to happen, S. Korea may not be far behind. And the cycle spirals.

New comment by gexla in "Level S4 solar radiation event"

gexla — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 01:53:12 +0000

"Cool! What's G13 do?" - Bill Hicks

Looks like G5 is the highest level and the scale system is used by NOAA.

New comment by gexla in "Bubblewrap: A nimble way to prevent agents from accessing your .env files"

gexla — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 03:27:23 +0000

I believe this is also what Claude Code uses for the sandbox option.

New comment by gexla in "Scott Adams has died"

gexla — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 01:00:07 +0000

Do you though? I guess it depends on how you define family. There's family that you rarely see and you call them family because of the social (even if weak) ties. And then there's family you grew up knowing. The impact of family early in you, never goes away. Your family early in life shapes us in ways we probably can't comprehend. Reading Scott's work was a family ritual at the breakfast table. I'm sure his work had some part in shaping me in a way that I can't delete.

New comment by gexla in "Scott Adams has died"

gexla — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:55:33 +0000

At my age, he was about as close to family as you can get without being physically there. I grew up reading his comics in our newspaper while eating family breakfast. His work was a part of our family morning ritual. His work was part of pre-internet America when our channels were limited. Our thought and worldview were to some degree shaped by these limited channels.

New comment by gexla in "Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg"

gexla — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 23:37:43 +0000

Right, that seemed like a minor issue. There was also the minor issue of the increase of AI code PRs. Seems like the greater issue was a perception of deterioration of the platform (in their sites for years) and a reasonable path towards migration to another platform.

New comment by gexla in "AI has a deep understanding of how this code works"

gexla — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 12:32:30 +0000

> Why would you be unwilling to merge AI code at all?

Because structurally it's a flag for being highly likely to waste extremely scare time. It's sort of like avoiding bad neighborhoods,not because everyone is bad, but because there is enough bad there that it's not worth bothering with.

What sticks out for me in these cases is that the AI sticks out like a sore thumb. Go ahead and use AI, it's as if the low effort nature of AI sets users on a course of using low effort throughout the cycle of whatever it is they are trying to accomplish as an end game.

The AI shouldn't look like AI. The proposed contributions shouldn't stand out from the norm. This include the entire process, not just the provided code. It's just a bad aesthetic and for most people it screams "low effort."

New comment by gexla in "AI has a deep understanding of how this code works"

gexla — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:03:28 +0000

Their issue seemed to be the process. They're setup for a certain flow. Jamming that flow breaks it. Wouldn't matter if it were AI or a sudden surge of interested developers. So, it's not a question of accepting or not accepting AI generated code, but rather changing the process. That in itself is time-consuming and carries potential risk.

New comment by gexla in "The death of tech idealism and rise of the homeless in Northern California"

gexla — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 04:35:12 +0000

Right, it's an issue that requires intensive care to address mental health issues. The human resources required for this is always going to be a bottleneck. Much more so than housing shortages or funding for programs that are largely self service (if you can navigate the system, you may not be homeless for long.) Building, staffing, and funding such an institution seems like it would be extremely difficult.

New comment by gexla in "Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts"

gexla — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 01:20:00 +0000

Spitballing here. I always understood stuff like this as "the system doesn't care about you, it cares about the masses." If the result is overwhelmingly looking no better than a placebo, then the small number of people it actually helps is sort of irrelevant. The exception might be cases where people are willing to drop a bomb of cash for lifesaving drugs for rare diseases (Pharma Bro got a lot of flack for massively jacking up the price of one of these drugs.) I don't know what implications such a study may have in a complex space. I imagine the drug will still be available for those who want to try, but far less prescribed as a sort of safe default. I doubt drug companies will care much for this, since the patent has long expired.