Hacker News: jbritton

New comment by jbritton in "Ear Training Practice Exercises"

jbritton — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:41:12 +0000

I never had a music class at any point in school in California.

New comment by jbritton in "Gooey: A GPU-accelerated UI framework for Zig"

jbritton — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:34:28 +0000

I wasn’t clear from the description if text rendering is GPU accelerated, or in my case drawing quads from an atlas of characters in a texture is probably more efficient.

New comment by jbritton in "The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Means"

jbritton — Tue, 19 May 2026 02:00:02 +0000

The very end of the article says “They can keep them for decoration but servers must generate their own random numbers.” I thought the lava lamps were for this purpose.

New comment by jbritton in "'Staggering' number of people believe unproven health claims"

jbritton — Mon, 04 May 2026 23:08:39 +0000

“vaccines are used for population control” Bill Gates has stated this is a goal, but in a different context. The idea is if you’re in a country with a large number of early deaths you are likely to have more children, and vaccines should help reverse this trend. So this is kind of an ambiguous question.

New comment by jbritton in "Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction"

jbritton — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:58:05 +0000

You misunderstand me. I was simply trying to find the two people who were saying such things.

New comment by jbritton in "Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction"

jbritton — Sun, 03 May 2026 06:58:28 +0000

I was trying to find a YouTube video I had seen previously. I ended up using Google to find it. There are two bio ethicists promoting the idea that we should make lone star ticks better at spreading alpha-gal and giving everyone meat allergies. So I guess “engineered” + “alpha-gal” is blocked. I find this idea beyond repulsive.

I asked how California guarantees election security and was told it could not answer that question. Upon further questioning it wouldn’t give specifics but it would give generalities, which ultimately turned into an interesting discussion.

New comment by jbritton in "Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction"

jbritton — Sat, 02 May 2026 21:14:23 +0000

I’m sick of LLM refusals. I think there are extremely few things they should refuse, like maybe making nuclear weapons or something along those lines. Once you put people in charge of deciding what you shouldn’t be allowed to see that list will grow and grow.

New comment by jbritton in "DeepSeek V4–almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price"

jbritton — Sat, 02 May 2026 16:19:42 +0000

This sounds great. I’m going to play with it.

New comment by jbritton in "Why hasn't AI improved design quality the way it improved dev speed?"

jbritton — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 06:27:03 +0000

Stitches pages on an infinite canvas is possibly the worst UI I have ever seen.

New comment by jbritton in "How can I keep from singing?"

jbritton — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:49:48 +0000

I believe I’m tone deaf. There is no test for this. I am color blind, but I have the most favorable form of red/green color blindness which means for the most part I see all colors, but I fail the tests. Likewise I hear tones, and can distinguish tones. I can play something and know if I have hit the wrong key. However, I have practiced long enough to know I’m tone deficient and that knowledge really affects one’s desire to practice. I see little kids on YouTube that already have more talent than I could ever achieve. I really don’t see myself ever being able to pick up anything complicated by ear. If it’s transcribed correctly then sure it’s doable with sufficient practice. I can’t hear a chord and know what chord it is. I have dabbled with my guitar for 30 years. I frequently struggle to know when frequency goes up vs down. I can’t sing in key. I can barely tune a guitar by ear. It’s usually off a little bit though and it takes me a very long time. The song “Back in Black” has this little bit at the beginning G E D B and then sort of an A bend. Whatever Angus does with that A note I just can’t figure out. I have tried it a thousand times.

New comment by jbritton in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"

jbritton — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 01:10:30 +0000

I wonder how often problems happen that the redundancy solves. Is radiation actually flipping bits and at what frequency. Can a sun flare cause all the computers to go haywire.

New comment by jbritton in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

jbritton — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:46:18 +0000

More complexity, no benefit. Human languages have lots of problems. I would simplify English if I knew how and had the power to make it so.

New comment by jbritton in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

jbritton — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:56:40 +0000

I strongly dislike flexible input like __Unambiguous___, *Unambiguous*

I’m reminded of the time Microsoft allowed mistakes in html writing. They attempted to parse a wide variety of common user errors. The effect of this was no standard and nobody else able to write a Microsoft compatible parser.

I dislike Nim lang because of this. At least Nim defined the specification. Still though I think it creates more cognitive load learning every legal variation and it makes searching more difficult.

I think to authors point if Markdown actually had a strict simple definition with one way to do it and no embedded html we would be better off.

New comment by jbritton in "Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager"

jbritton — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:28:04 +0000

On X11, the window manager handles the window decorations. So splitting them is going to involve some possibly non-trivial messaging and config.

New comment by jbritton in "Bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux Devices"

jbritton — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 03:33:05 +0000

I’m developing on an Nvidia Orin which requires Ubuntu 22.04. Snaps are broken on this platform. I used an alternative ppa that provided a chromium.deb.

New comment by jbritton in "Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?"

jbritton — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 05:00:22 +0000

Also true of specifications. Anything not explicitly stated will be decided by the implementer, maybe to your liking or maybe not.

New comment by jbritton in "Can you instruct a robot to make a PBJ sandwich?"

jbritton — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 04:54:32 +0000

It’s kind of interesting relating this to LLMs. A chef in a kitchen you can just say you want PB&J. With a robot, does it know where things are, once it knows that, does it know how to retrieve them, open and close them. It’s always a mystery what you get back from an LLM.

New comment by jbritton in "Kotlin creator's new language: a formal way to talk to LLMs instead of English"

jbritton — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:54:28 +0000

I find dark mode much easier to read and far less eye strain. I guess it just shows that users should be the ones to set the preference. There are studies on monkeys showing light mode leading to myopia. Although lately I have come to learn there are lots of poorly done studies.

New comment by jbritton in "Kotlin creator's new language: a formal way to talk to LLMs instead of English"

jbritton — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 19:41:54 +0000

I tried this recently with what I thought was a simple layout, but probably uncommon for CSS. It took an extremely long back and forth to nail it down. It seemingly had no understanding how to achieve what I wanted. A couple sentences would have been clear to a person. Sometimes LLMs are fantastic and sometimes they are brain dead.

New comment by jbritton in "My “grand vision” for Rust"

jbritton — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 01:50:57 +0000

It appears the error message has been improved.