Hacker News: jonners00

New comment by jonners00 in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

jonners00 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:17:20 +0000

Enterprise software CEO here. I'm so pissed off that I didn't think of this rule, but so, so happy to be adopting it org-wide on Monday.

Fed up with what used to be short memos now being mini-whitepapers, with maddeningly low information density.

New comment by jonners00 in "So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe"

jonners00 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:48:33 +0000

If I forget to pause my VPN before going to Amazon's website, I can't log in with just username and password, I get a page telling me they've sent a code to WhatsApp (which I don't have) with a button to click if I want an SMS instead. Clicking that button never works (error message that I've 'requested too many OTPs') but opening the Amazon app on my phone shows a modal saying 'someone who knows your password is trying to log in... etc' and asking me to approve. They're definitely trying to use WhatsApp by default for sending verification codes.

New comment by jonners00 in "Qwen 3.8"

jonners00 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:24:51 +0000

I have to use both big mobile OSs for work and have since 2009. As a result I have been able to be a bit of a gadfly and switch between phone OSs a few times for personal use. I have switched three times to iOS for a year or so, cause I liked the iteration of the iPhone at the time. 4, 6s, X. I have always gone back to Android because it seemed so much better and now I don't plan to switch again. As an end user, Samsung's flavour of Android always seemed better than iOS. I don't know how they compare from an engineer's perspective just from a user perspective. One of my issues with Apple though was hating all their attempts to lock me in, and the lowest common denominator UX (I'm not a power user, but some flexibility is always good). If you're happy with the defaults/a willing hostage, that might make a big difference I guess. Still feel like it's always had feature/spec parity with iOS and iOS devices, and sometimes been ahead. What makes you say Android has only briefly been competitive?

New comment by jonners00 in "Count Binface"

jonners00 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 06:56:02 +0000

Nigel Farage was subject to at least two parliamentary standards enquiries about big, undisclosed personal payments he received from crypto-bros around the time he decided to stand to be the Member of Parliament (MP) for Clacton. Because he then lobbied the Bank of England as the leader of one of the parliamentary parties to drop their digital pound plans (which would undermine Tether's value proposition, and one of the donations, £5m/$6.75m, came from a Tether cofounder), the press were suggesting he is guilty of outright corruption.

By standing down as an MP, rather than letting the enquiry proceed, he hopes he has removed the parliamentary authorities' powers to look into his affairs too closely, but to avoid embarrassment, he's asserted in public that he stood down (and then immediately put himself forward as a candidate to stand in the special election that results) as a way to thwart the deep state's efforts to tarnish his reputation and to take away the power of the establishment to try him unfairly, and handed the power to determine his fate to the good people of Clacton (who now won't get the chance to find out if their local MP is corrupt, thanks to the parliamentary enquiry being halted).

In all honesty, it doesn't look like he knows what he's doing, but there was some suspicion that he was planning to drop out of the special election for personal reasons in due course, avoiding a return to parliament and the related scrutiny, and letting his seat fall to the Conservatives or Restore UK - but all the other parties refused to put up candidates, so now he's up against one comedy candidate and is probably going to win the seat regardless, unless he drops out and leaves the poor people of Clacton with a fiasco of some sort on their hands.

New comment by jonners00 in "Om Malik has died"

jonners00 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:33:26 +0000

I wasn't expecting anything so beautiful, just some competent, twee photography.

(Never mind, it's all in the training data now, will result in some competent, twee, but uncanny, slop).

New comment by jonners00 in "Who Does What? Team Topologies for the Agentic Platform"

jonners00 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:25:24 +0000

I just came here to post that I couldn't read past 'The complexity was real, but distributed'. I can get past these LLM constructions when Claude uses them in chat. They seriously undermine the credibility of comment pieces or guides like this one when I encounter them. I absolutely hate it when I get them in a lengthy response to a simple question to a colleague about why we're going to do something a particular way.

New comment by jonners00 in "The Wholesale Plagiarism of Obscure Sorrows"

jonners00 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 19:03:28 +0000

I can't tell you how many times a week claude opus 4.8 high effort has to apologise for being wrong when I'm asking it about something narrow and specific that i want it to research but it blurts out broad context from its training material and incorrect conclusions/assumptions. This is happening all the time. Someone needs to create a repository of its apologies to remind us all of its limitations.

New comment by jonners00 in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"

jonners00 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:04:55 +0000

There's a huge difference between say, weilding a hatchet on a camping trip, and trying to get the hang of a splitting axe, with a 3ft or longer handle, when you're a kid. Getting a long, sweeping arc that comes down in the right spot isn't easy and if the axe head's centrifugal force pulls it away from you, you clunk the handle down on the wood. I definitely recall my hands ringing and numb from those kinds of impact. I don't remember ruining a handle, but if it had been my chore, I think I could've come close.

New comment by jonners00 in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

jonners00 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:29:36 +0000

> Its still a bunch of instructions.

No, it's not a bunch of instructions, it's a colossal array of vectors that are the outcome of many thousands of lifetimes' worth of stimuli and reinforcement - not dissimilar in (very) abstract terms to the neurons in our brains.

New comment by jonners00 in "Rothko for your current weather conditions"

jonners00 — Sat, 30 May 2026 02:27:43 +0000

Yes, me too.

New comment by jonners00 in "The dead economy theory"

jonners00 — Sat, 30 May 2026 02:24:55 +0000

I just meant that if I value, say, the security afforded by land that's been cleared of humans, and between them my owned AIs can deliver this as a 'surplus' outcome, just by processing resources available at low or no cost (sunlight, atmospheric gases, processed carcasses, etc.) then letting them run amuck is still 'economically valuable' to me, but doesn't require any human input, or a human counterparty. Very reductive example, but you can imagine a much more complex economy where a multitude of similar arrangements interact/compete to deliver outcomes of this type.

New comment by jonners00 in "The dead economy theory"

jonners00 — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:51:26 +0000

You couldn't have. Mechanical machines couldn't organise themselves into human-free supply chains that are economically productive for the owners of capital. AIs could.

New comment by jonners00 in "The dead economy theory"

jonners00 — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:48:09 +0000

In theory breakeven demand, but ecosystens are basically economies, so termites are break even demand, and that's not good news.

New comment by jonners00 in "A successful Japanese trial of a ramjet engine designed for Mach‑5 aircraft"

jonners00 — Mon, 25 May 2026 23:38:10 +0000

And the time wasted on transfers. I used to regularly fly from airports in NY, London, SF, Singapore, LA, Sydney, etc. I would block out the opportunities to work or rest, and the reality was that only the plane time was valuable for either. It was painful to see all the other blocks of non productive time, particularly the allowances for congestion and disruption between downtown and the airports. I would have paid thousands a flight to be able to check in/clear security at my hotel and then get driven to a holding bay at the airport, and then on to the gate, in a vehicle suitable for both work and rest.

New comment by jonners00 in "The Art of Money Getting"

jonners00 — Sat, 23 May 2026 17:10:53 +0000

I love this book, but its authority is somewhat undermined by the infamous Steve Jobs passage...

New comment by jonners00 in "Oura says it gets government demands for user data"

jonners00 — Sat, 23 May 2026 16:38:09 +0000

No one seems to care anymore, but a big issue that people were concerned about in the 2000s was the switch from 'I know more about me than the blob (corps, gov, etc) does' to, 'I need the blob to remind me where the hell I was that day'. Heart rate and blood oxygen data are hard to exploit data points but not impossible(1), but facing an accusation from someone who knows more about your movements than you do is an uncomfortable scenario. Of course right now, if you're facing an acusation of this type, odds are it's legitimate, or if not, defenseable, but that was the case 15 years ago in Türkiye, but isn't now. Things change.

(Note 1:"Dr. Bootlicker, the defendant wants the court to believe that she calmly placed herself between the agent and the minor he was trying to apprehend, and asserts that the agent's claim, that the defendant's actions constitute assault, is, in her words, 'ridiculous'. But am I correct in understanding that you view minutes 8 and 9 of the biometric data submitted to the court as characteristic of significant physical exertion that might be similar to that undergone by an assailant while commiting an assault?")

New comment by jonners00 in "Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold"

jonners00 — Tue, 05 May 2026 12:18:49 +0000

A couple of years ago Odeon turned our nearest theatre into a 'luxe' theatre (adult tickets £20), and the next nearest theatre was left as it was, but all tickets £5 each (tickets at both theatres where about £14 previously). I think it was an experiment to see which model was most economic: major investment in tech and comfort/£100+ for a family of four to watch a film with snacks and beverages/fewer tickets sold as a result OR minimal capex/far more affordable to attend/loads more tickets sold. The £5 tickets for all showings have stopped, but you can still get them a lot of the time (they have surge pricing for blockbuster releases,and some upgraded premium seating now). I think they've found a way to be affordable to the masses and fill seats, but still extract max revenue from better off families, by having half their theatres follow one model and half follow the other.

New comment by jonners00 in "Empty Screenings – Finds AMC movie screenings with few or no tickets sold"

jonners00 — Tue, 05 May 2026 11:34:32 +0000

This is a bit off topic, but I occasionally used to sleep on the sofa in our first floor office in an old Georgian building in Fitzrovia. One occasion when I did that, I woke up at about 3.30 am with intense red light flooding through all the rear windows and the sound of loads of people chattering in the street out front, which seemed as busy as it normally would be in the daytime. I rushed to the front windows and looked down onto a street full of people, but all in 60s get up. I was still half asleep and panicked by the red light and it was totally disorientating to see a busy street of retro Londoners. I actually felt briefly nauseous but I went to the back windows and shaded my eyes, from the crazy glare from two arrays of red spotlights, which it turned out Edgar Wright was using to bounce light off our building, onto the cobbles below ...and began to understand what was going on. Was a relief to get a full explanation, for what had briefly felt like a weird time leap, when I went downstairs and chatted to the extras hanging around out front. The few seconds of woozy, confusion I spent in 1960s london seemed particularly appropriate when I saw Last Night in Soho a year or so later.

New comment by jonners00 in "Mike: open-source legal AI"

jonners00 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:14:14 +0000

This is great on this topic: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/gatekeepers-of-law-inside...

New comment by jonners00 in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

jonners00 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:52:12 +0000

My wife used Apple Maps for a while here in the UK and driving in Europe. The results varied between amusing and traumatic. No issues ever with Google Maps since she swapped (but I know from experience it's not perfect). Apple maps would send her over tertiary roads through mountain passes that were snowed out, instead of salted/gritted primary roads, would show major highway junctions wildly (dangerously) inaccurately and showed areas that had lots of properly mettled roads as open countryside with no thoroughfares at all.