Hacker News: godshatter

New comment by godshatter in "The desperation of NYTimes"

godshatter — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:23:26 +0000

It's possible to care about more than one thing at a time.

New comment by godshatter in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

godshatter — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:52:53 +0000

Seat belts aren't forced on you - if you want to not use them and face the risk of fines, you can do so. Media ratings systems are informational, you can choose to let your kids watch R rated movies or above. Are they going to let parents have a choice when it comes to parental controls? What about non-parents?

That's my gripe with the age verification systems I've seen, there is no room for parental choice and no consideration for people that are adults and don't have kids using their computer.

New comment by godshatter in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

godshatter — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:33:58 +0000

I kind of have a soft spot for the human race, I think it's worth the extra effort to try, at least.

New comment by godshatter in "Please Use AI"

godshatter — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:30:43 +0000

I was thinking along those lines when I wrote it. I do keep the thought in mind when interacting with an LLM that it could mislead me because they always sound so confident and yet get many things wrong, allowing me to damn myself if I'm not double checking things. I wouldn't put it past their creators to create them such that they handle certain prompts in a way that might benefit them, though, by maliciously misinterpreting prompts.

New comment by godshatter in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

godshatter — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:58:36 +0000

One more very minor step towards making the human race meteor-proof.

New comment by godshatter in "Please Use AI"

godshatter — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:52:14 +0000

I just use it as a "mentor". A captive demon that has to answer my questions, no matter how trivial. Writing the code is the fun part for me, searching for answers to questions can be fun but I'd rather just ask the AI. I even ask them to give me longer answers so I have more context, even with languages I've worked with for decades.

New comment by godshatter in "Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism"

godshatter — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:24:18 +0000

It happened to me, and I'm 60. I lived in a rural area, maybe that's why.

New comment by godshatter in "AI is making me dumb"

godshatter — Thu, 14 May 2026 23:09:10 +0000

I'd suggest going the route of having Claude teach you what you need to know. How do I uppercase this string? What's the best way to tackle this problem? Is there a standard way to do this thing? Then you learn along the way. You don't have to use it as a search engine, just ask it what you need to know in the moment. It will shake it's token chains and give you something that's useful, especially for a beginner in the language. This way you can implement your plan of growing your skills and then starting to delegate to it later.

I've been doing this, and it's a nice balance for me. Having Claude code things when you don't know how to evaluate it's code seems like madness to me, but I guess I'm in the minority on this.

New comment by godshatter in "They Live (1988) inspired Adblocker"

godshatter — Tue, 12 May 2026 14:54:55 +0000

Track down the short story it's inspired by, Eight O'Clock in the Morning by Ray Nelson. I had read the short story somewhere, maybe in a compilation, and was delighted when the movie turned out to be obviously inspired by it. Helped me get even more enjoyment out of an already wonderful movie.

New comment by godshatter in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

godshatter — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:42:25 +0000

I get a blank white screen in firefox on windows. I don't consider this to be blue, so I guess their blue is not my blue.

New comment by godshatter in "Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal"

godshatter — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:47:11 +0000

Do LLMs even learn? The companies that build them build new models based partly on the conversations the older models have had with people, but do they incorporate knowledge into their neural nets as they go along?

Can an LLM decide, without prompting or api calls, to text someone or go read about something or do anything at all except for waiting for the next prompt?

Do LLMs have any conceptual understanding of anything they output? Do they even have a mechanism for conceptual understanding?

LLMs are incredibly useful and I'm having a lot of fun working with them, but they are a long way from some kind of general intelligence, at least as far as I understand it.

New comment by godshatter in "Programming Used to Be Free"

godshatter — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 22:15:46 +0000

I'm starting to do this at home, but the instinct to just do a web search is still there. I'm only using Claude Code at work because they are paying for it, so why not use it. I think I've used maybe 5% of my tokens for any given day so far. I need to pick a free AI and make it my goto AI mentor for what I want to learn.

Once I build a few things at work I'll probably be asking Claude Code to look for problems with what I've written, but we're not being pushed too hard to get into AI coding yet, though the writing is on the wall. I'm mostly looking for ways to expand what I can do within our current constraints, and keep my sanity.

New comment by godshatter in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

godshatter — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:04:29 +0000

Also having the cursor show up in the proper place on a new form and having tab order work.

New comment by godshatter in "Programming Used to Be Free"

godshatter — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:43:44 +0000

> An interesting side effect might be that only people locked out from using LLMs will learn how to program in the future, as vide coding doesn't teach you the fundamentals.

This is the strange part for me. I'm one of those people that I assume are really common here on HN - I've been having fun coding on personal projects for a long time, somewhere circa 1978 iirc for me. Where I work we're starting to dip our toes into AI and vibecoding and I'm not a big fan. Even in my boring job the actual coding is the part I like the most. So I've taken a different tack. I've been prompting Claude to teach me how to do things, and that has worked out really well. Some basic info to start with, specific questions as needed, but I'm doing the work. I'm improving my productivity while still learning new things and having fun. Win-win for me.

New comment by godshatter in "Usenet Archives"

godshatter — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 15:22:04 +0000

So give it someone else's birthday instead.

New comment by godshatter in "Show HN: Channel Surfer – Watch YouTube like it’s cable TV"

godshatter — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:30:54 +0000

Or take it one step further:

  1. curate a list of creators you like on a local html page
  2. follow a link into YT
  3. refuse to log in to avoid Google keeping even more data on you
  4. run uBlock Origin on Firefox to avoid ads

You still get recommendations and shorts, so you can still fall down rabbit holes, but they can also be used to find new creators to add to your list.

New comment by godshatter in "Show HN: Channel Surfer – Watch YouTube like it’s cable TV"

godshatter — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:21:34 +0000

> "Recommendations are off. Your watch history is off, and we rely on watch history to tailor your Shorts feed. You can change your setting at any time, or try searching for Shorts instead."

That's strange, because I don't even log in and I still get Shorts.

New comment by godshatter in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

godshatter — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:09:09 +0000

I'm 60, started with a Tandy Model I in junior high, learned 6809 assembly for my Color Computer, loved the fact we could put certain values in particular memory positions and change the video mode and put pixels to the screen. It's been decades of losing that level of control, but for me coding is the fun part. I've never lost that spark of enjoyment and really obsession I felt early on. I enjoy the supposedly boring job of writing SQL and C with embedded SQL and working with business concepts to produce solutions. Coding is the fun part for me, even now.

I got moved up the chain to management and later worked to get myself moved back down to a dev role because I missed it and because I was running into the Peter Principle. I use AI to learn new concepts, but mostly as a search engine. I love the tech behind it, but I don't want it coding for me any more than I want it playing my video games for me. I was hoping AI would show up as robots doing my laundry, not doing the thing I most enjoy.

New comment by godshatter in "TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe"

godshatter — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 20:43:17 +0000

I'm not a TikTok user, but I'm assuming the recommendation engine is there to keep eyeballs on more ads for longer. Maybe we should be regulating how often and how many ads can be shown on social media, especially to teens and kids.

New comment by godshatter in "AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was"

godshatter — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:42:18 +0000

I doubt they are all for locking people out of copyrighted works, but more for keeping their jobs. But maybe they are, who knows.