Hacker News: jhrmnn

New comment by jhrmnn in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

jhrmnn — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:21:04 +0000

When no work is safe from mechanization, surely the value of labor wrt capital must fall, and the societal pressure on redistribution will rise. The ultimate outcome of technological progress is either extreme inequality or massive redistribution

New comment by jhrmnn in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

jhrmnn — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:16:48 +0000

This can’t be sustainable, there must be a limit in human biology as to how complex jobs we can handle. More and more people will fall under that threshold.

New comment by jhrmnn in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

jhrmnn — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:36:21 +0000

Is this a different route to the universal basic income scenario?

New comment by jhrmnn in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

jhrmnn — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:12:33 +0000

Nothing, it’s that same story again. Industrialization turned peasants to blue collar workers by mechanizing agriculture. Then blue collar workers were turned to white collar workers by mechanizing all manual labor. Now AI is coming for white collar workers by mechanizing intellectual labor. The big question is what will white collar workers turn into.

New comment by jhrmnn in "Claude mixes up who said what and that's not OK"

jhrmnn — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:36:37 +0000

So most training data would be grey and a little bit coloured? Ok, that sounds plausible. But then maybe they tried and the current models get it already right 99.99% of the time, so observing any improvement is very hard.

New comment by jhrmnn in "Claude mixes up who said what and that's not OK"

jhrmnn — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:25:24 +0000

Because then the training data would have to be coloured

New comment by jhrmnn in "AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart"

jhrmnn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 10:54:23 +0000

Interesting. The debate about whether the artist matters in perceiving a piece of art is very old. You don’t seem to consider the possibility that the artist’s intent matters when listening to music. For me it absolutely does. As the AI has no intent (agency), the AI music is void of any value to me.

New comment by jhrmnn in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

jhrmnn — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:27:07 +0000

Forget the government, what about your fellow humans? Is defending your country an obligation towards your government or towards your neighbor?

New comment by jhrmnn in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

jhrmnn — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:33:22 +0000

It’s interesting to read the discussion here through the lens of obligations vs rights. It would seem the rights are definitely winning.

New comment by jhrmnn in "Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw"

jhrmnn — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 06:45:44 +0000

The cooperative and competitive sides of our soul fighting it out in a single situation

New comment by jhrmnn in "GitHub backs down, kills Copilot pull-request ads after backlash"

jhrmnn — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:14:51 +0000

I find it sad that while technological progress is seen almost as a given by virtually everyone, moral progress is often not even an aspiration

New comment by jhrmnn in "Personal Encyclopedias"

jhrmnn — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:41:26 +0000

Think of a woodworking project. Compare doing everything old-school by hand vs using modern tools to go faster. Think about the end product being just an item with a function vs it having some design value or even craftsmanship value. Does the parallel work?

New comment by jhrmnn in "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory"

jhrmnn — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:31:17 +0000

But individual behavior is not about preventing climate change, it’s about doing what’s right. It’s wrong to pollute the environment, one way or another. A single person not stealing won’t reduce the crime rate in a country yet it is the right thing to do.

New comment by jhrmnn in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

jhrmnn — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 10:59:56 +0000

This depends very much on what "practical purposes" are. For almost all conceivable technology, relativistic quantum mechanics for electrons and light, ie QED, is sufficient fundamental theory. This is unlike before quantum mechanics, when we basically didn't have fundamental laws for chemistry and solid-state physics.

New comment by jhrmnn in "In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels"

jhrmnn — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:54:27 +0000

Europe was a bit customer for Russia energy, and Russia invaded an EU neighbor nonetheless. After which it stopped being the customer. So it seems like that incentive didn't really work.

New comment by jhrmnn in "In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels"

jhrmnn — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:50:51 +0000

Now, let's aim at total energy consumption, not just electricity generation.

New comment by jhrmnn in "Is beef tallow making a comeback?"

jhrmnn — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 14:59:29 +0000

Is it perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismogenesis?

New comment by jhrmnn in "If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?"

jhrmnn — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 12:26:32 +0000

It certainly engages the brain in a similar way. I agree that the forums of old were proto-social media.

New comment by jhrmnn in "If You Quit Social Media, Will You Read More Books?"

jhrmnn — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 12:18:52 +0000

Same here. And while I may be on HN for a long time, I would fall asleep within minutes of a (good) book. Which tells me something about these two modes of entertainment

New comment by jhrmnn in "Lawmakers want to ban VPNs"

jhrmnn — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 13:18:17 +0000

Can you name some examples?