Hacker News: gumby

New comment by gumby in "Waymo CEO explains why Tesla’s camera-only self-driving falls short"

gumby — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:54:52 +0000

That’s because SpaceX is Gwynne Shotwell.

New comment by gumby in "Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iCloud email?"

gumby — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:11:29 +0000

I agree, though I don’t think it’s relevant to this post.

New comment by gumby in "Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iCloud email?"

gumby — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:09:20 +0000

Why would a local facility like handoff need to talk to the mother ship?

New comment by gumby in "Why does Mail app contact iCloud when sending a non-iCloud email?"

gumby — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:08:19 +0000

Office apps no longer autosave unless you have OneDrive installed. So no autosave for me! Instead I save compulsively lie the days of floppy disk PCs.

(Meanwhile Emacs has had autosave since at least 1977)

New comment by gumby in "Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop"

gumby — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:02:15 +0000

I’m not a criminal*, but I hope when I’m 76 I’ll still be sufficiently lithe and compos mentis to pull off a career in crime, should I so choose.

* Though wouldn’t a criminal say that?

New comment by gumby in "A Rant About “Technology” (2005)"

gumby — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 03:55:54 +0000

But that’s really the opposite of τέχνη, isn’t it? It’s an emergent phenomenon rather than one guided by teleology or at least by deliberation.

New comment by gumby in "A Rant About “Technology” (2005)"

gumby — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:08:06 +0000

Science fiction, even more than historical fiction, is always about the present, which is why SF novels rarely age well.

But good literature is good literature and she sure had the knack, which is why I believe her work will continue to be read for quite some time to come.

In her brief essay (more of a note), she uses the word “technology” to invoke its own root: τέχνη, just means practical art (hence artifact).

The inclined plane is as much technology as the lithographed transistor. Yet when I was on a school board 15 years ago the teachers and in particular the heads were quite concerned that the kids be tought “technology” by which they meant Word and PowerPoint, lest the kids be left behind in the technological future.

I’m sure those hours helped exactly zero of the students who could have spent the time on something useful, like mathematics, painting or recess. At least the classical Greeks understood that better than the pedagogues of today. Le Guin did too.

New comment by gumby in "A Rant About “Technology” (2005)"

gumby — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:58:18 +0000

A side point: when you say “Lewis” I assume you mean Charles Staple Lewis, not Sinclair Lewis. I find it hard to consider the former “foundational”. It was and is popular (much to the annoyance of his buddy Tolkien), but hardly influential in the way of JRRT (nobody writes poor pastiches on Narnia the way innumerable derivatives have been done on Middle Earth).

As for Asimov, well, one can argue about his long term influence but who can avoid calling it foundation-al?

Agree completely on Le Guin

New comment by gumby in "The time filter in Google Search broke a few days ago"

gumby — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:06:06 +0000

For quite a long time the company has been oriented around product managers who are paid for shipping something new, not for any sort of maintenance (occasionally posts appear on HN from people who got a poor performance review because they weren’t building visible new features and instead spent time fixing bugs). This is also why so many products are killed that it’s become a meme: the company’s incentives drive this behavior.

New comment by gumby in "RamenHaus"

gumby — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 23:46:39 +0000

MANY years ago I hopped into a cab in Manhattan and the driver in one smooth gesture pushed the flag down and shoved a paper at me, saying “test me!”

It was a US citizenship exam, I think 50 questions. We went through them a couple of times. I’m not a US citizen myself but I knew them answers and he didn’t know many. But if that was his goal I hope he made it.

New comment by gumby in "Scanning 7.6 Petabytes of HuggingFace Training Data for Secrets"

gumby — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:46:17 +0000

Ever read a book by Yuval Noah Harari? He seems to have been writing like this since before LLMs. Perhaps that’s where they got it from.

New comment by gumby in "Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search"

gumby — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:44:19 +0000

We need a new term.

To search for something is to believe you’ll probably find it. You’ll ignore anything that isn’t keys if you’re searching for your keys.

Fuzzy search is really the opposite: it will try to return something — anything — if it can’t find what you’re looking for (which it seemingly often doesn’t actually look for anyway). “I couldn’t find your keys, but here’s a pomegranate, a dried up dog turd, and a stray Cheeto from an inaccessible cabinet that hasn’t been opened since before you moved in”

New comment by gumby in "I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air"

gumby — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 09:52:26 +0000

I don’t understand the idea that the Air is a way to test reduced capabilities for a folding phone. If you’ve used any of the Chinese folding phones they have plenty of room for cameras, memory etc.

I’m not much of an Android fan but I do love my Xiaomi folding phone (not mentioning model number because I don’t want to sound like a shill). Outside China I stick to iOS and would definitely consider a folding iPhone…but I won’t be an early adopter.

New comment by gumby in "Design is compromise"

gumby — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:25:47 +0000

Even te business folks know this, at least those who read “The Innovator’s Dilemma”.

All the very successful-yet-failing companies were unable to understand these compromises, and each was overturned by a newcomer that could (usually due to necessity, of course)

New comment by gumby in "How AST-grep Rewrote Tree-sitter in Rust and Made It 30% Faster"

gumby — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:22:22 +0000

Even this AI generated article hs a hard on for rust. If all references to switching to rust were eliminated the article would be the same.

New comment by gumby in "How AST-grep Rewrote Tree-sitter in Rust and Made It 30% Faster"

gumby — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:21:24 +0000

The article explicitly says incremental parsing was not needed for this application (ingesting whole files for AI analysis).

New comment by gumby in "Em dashes are amazing"

gumby — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:33:38 +0000

LLMs use em- dashes because they appear in the training set. In other words, humans use them a lot. Such a weird issue to be adopted as an indicator of robot text.

New comment by gumby in "The IBM PC, Part 1: Arrival"

gumby — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:10:04 +0000

Having lived through that time I find this article extremely accurate and focused on the important stuff.

I didn’t pay much attention to the PC at that point (I was programming Lispms, Dorados and KL-20s) but it was impossible to ignore.

New comment by gumby in "Police removed prominent scientists from American Diabetes Association meeting"

gumby — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:36:26 +0000

Having lived in France, Germany, and Australia I can report that there’s a lot less bureaucracy in those systems than in the US system. Like telecom, the participants in the medical system put up tollbooths because they can.

New comment by gumby in "All 253 Patterns from Christopher Alexander's a Pattern Language Summarized"

gumby — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:30:24 +0000

Because the titles don’t always reflect the insight of the pattern so if you just have that tiny entry you can misunderstand