Hacker News: jolt42

New comment by jolt42 in "After AI takes everything"

jolt42 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:32:07 +0000

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." - Blaise Pascal

New comment by jolt42 in "The history of butterfly swimming"

jolt42 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:25:56 +0000

Agreed. Wasn't track barefoot back in the day? I mean even shoes are an advantage. Swimming sped up after goggles and swimcaps were accepted. I think it's all just where do you decide to draw the line? I've thought badminton is an odd sport, the shuttlecock is so slow anyone can (normally) play it - it's very inefficient. And don't get me started on equestrian if grandpa can win it then shouldn't the horse get the medal?

New comment by jolt42 in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

jolt42 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 02:51:50 +0000

Eh, I like MacBooks because they've been bulletproof. Any PC I suspect it might just go kaput whenever it feels like it, except for maybe a ThinkPad, but they cost more than a MacBook.

New comment by jolt42 in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

jolt42 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:18:53 +0000

I suppose you could chalk this up to an oversight. I don't see how Meta gained from this. They've been purposeful about collecting user data and lying about it, eg: 2025 Android Tracking Incident. Shouldn't just be an embarrassment, should be much worse than that.

New comment by jolt42 in "Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'"

jolt42 — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:17:14 +0000

I like the qualification of "large-ish". When someone says code is not the bottleneck, I assume they work for a large company. To be fair, at a start-up developers think they code at least 4 hours a day, but it never averages that either.

New comment by jolt42 in "What Do Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems Mean?"

jolt42 — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:02:07 +0000

We really want to believe that we can understand everything, yet we know we cannot.

New comment by jolt42 in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

jolt42 — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:52:03 +0000

When we have AGI, we'll have self-driving cars. We aren't getting either in a year's time. The need for white-collar jobs in areas will shrink (not disappear), possibly to expand elsewhere.

New comment by jolt42 in "Google changes its search box"

jolt42 — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:23:32 +0000

Yep, really advanced Google searches were never that good. LLM, yeah, it halucinates, it's never spot on but as sure as heck it knows what I'm trying to ask. It doesn't give me arborists if I say something like "list tree searches".

New comment by jolt42 in "Venom and hot peppers offer a key to killing resistant bacteria"

jolt42 — Tue, 12 May 2026 22:04:02 +0000

"The universe is rarely so lazy"

New comment by jolt42 in "Venom and hot peppers offer a key to killing resistant bacteria"

jolt42 — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:02:13 +0000

That wouldn't prevent the caduceus from being based on the story.

New comment by jolt42 in "Venom and hot peppers offer a key to killing resistant bacteria"

jolt42 — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:40:04 +0000

And yet the similarities can't be coincidental. Rod + Snake = Life Saving.

New comment by jolt42 in "Venom and hot peppers offer a key to killing resistant bacteria"

jolt42 — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:58:16 +0000

I always assumed what I felt was obvious: Numbers 21:4-9, where God instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent and place it on a pole to heal Israelites dying from poisonous snake bites.

New comment by jolt42 in "ClojureScript Gets Async/Await"

jolt42 — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:19:45 +0000

The logical conclusion is to use "a Haskell" typed language that will ensure every path is considered to guard against AI mistakes. OTOH, clojure repl, expressibility, immutability, and data-driven nature has its own advantages. Tacking on malli (runtime type checking) or spec (types/contracts) helps LLMs avoid type problems altogether or at least confront problems during testing.

New comment by jolt42 in "The bottleneck was never the code"

jolt42 — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:59:22 +0000

Sometimes code is the bottleneck, other times it's not. Large company, not a bottleneck, fixing bugs or individual app developer, more so.

New comment by jolt42 in "Bugs Rust won't catch"

jolt42 — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 04:41:26 +0000

I wonder if Rust becomes more popular with AI as Rust can help catch what AI misses, but then if that's the case then what about Haskell, or Lean, or?

New comment by jolt42 in "Laws of Software Engineering"

jolt42 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:40:21 +0000

I'll propose this as the only unbreakable law: "everything in moderation", which I feel implies any law is breakable, which now this is sounding like the barber's paradox. What else does anyone propose as unbreakable?

New comment by jolt42 in "AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing"

jolt42 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:52:31 +0000

It's easy to chalk it up to "fear of the unknown", when in reality it's both good and bad depending on who's wielding it. It can be used to tear down or build up, solve problem or create problems just like every advance before it. So while I'm generally excited with where it can go, I guess I don't mind being reminded there can be downsides.

New comment by jolt42 in "AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing"

jolt42 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:47:29 +0000

Anecdotally, I was just there and ran into a couple of anti-AI people and it's not like I was bringing it up. All I got was they were worried about the water and the heat produced. I wonder if someone has done an analysis of old-search vs AI-search, I most definitely get the info quicker that I want with AI, does that make up for the LLM cost, I have no idea.

New comment by jolt42 in "Allbirds, Inc. Announces Expansion into AI Compute Infrastructure"

jolt42 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:36:56 +0000

Ridiculous? Tandy (leather originally) became a large computer company for a while. So who's to say really.

New comment by jolt42 in "DIY Soft Drinks"

jolt42 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:47:55 +0000

Why? Is it just not put caramel coloring in it? It didn't taste like actual Pepsi to me, which I suppose might be more difficult?