Hacker News: jovial_cavalier

New comment by jovial_cavalier in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

jovial_cavalier — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:58:08 +0000

You don't even need to argue that you're better than the AI. The point is that the client could have uploaded it to ChatGPT too. Perhaps they even did, and they didn't like the answer they got. They are sending it to a human because they want a human to do the work. If you were to send back ChatGPT output, that would be fraud.

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "Lines of code got a better publicist"

jovial_cavalier — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 13:56:05 +0000

The kloc fallacy never actually disappeared. Project and engineering managers got wise to the fact that it was only loosely correlated with shipping features, and stopped emphasizing it. Most everyone else has carried on silently believing it without really thinking about it. And of course engineers themselves have always believed it. How many times have you heard some guy talk about how he wrote 10kloc over the weekend as a brag?

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "I manage teams without a single call"

jovial_cavalier — Mon, 25 May 2026 16:30:31 +0000

The problem is literacy. Even if you can read and write, that does not mean you can reduce a complicated idea into text. It also doesn't mean you can decode ambiguously worded and poorly structured writing. A meeting is often needed; not because the relevant people can't be bothered to write their thoughts down, but because they literally are not capable of doing it.

I've seen many grotesque misunderstandings go through 30 iterations of confusion across teams because nobody is good at communicating clearly. Then one 20 minute in person meeting clears it up.

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "Explore Wikipedia Like a Windows XP Desktop"

jovial_cavalier — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:38:40 +0000

I really want a linux virtual filesystem that does this.

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "Fragnesia Made Public as Latest Linux Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability"

jovial_cavalier — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:18:13 +0000

Yes, lots of little web services and such run as unprivileged users, not root. I personally run a bunch of stuff as very restricted users in containers, with the threat model being that e.g. an RCE exploit in one of them will only affect the service, not the broader system.

Windows quality update: Progress we've made since March

jovial_cavalier — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:02:04 +0000

Article URL: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2026/05/01/windows-quality-update-progress-weve-made-since-march/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47980279

Points: 177

# Comments: 530

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "CJIT: C, Just in Time"

jovial_cavalier — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 23:47:27 +0000

probably because the shell on TempleOS is actually a HolyC REPL, and HolyC is JIT compiled.

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "Acetaminophen vs. ibuprofen"

jovial_cavalier — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:06:14 +0000

Frankly, very few people should be taking either of these drugs. Sometimes I forget how often people pop these things, it's really crazy. Consider just having a headache and dealing with it.

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock"

jovial_cavalier — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:22:30 +0000

a cop works for "the state," but he's definitely not a "state-level actor."

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "Microsoft's "Fix" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating"

jovial_cavalier — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 12:31:22 +0000

Until they talk about being able to remove Edge, they aren't serious.

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

jovial_cavalier — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 22:35:47 +0000

If Microsoft leadership thinks that they took a wrong turn in the last few years, they are in for a rude awakening (I hope). They took a wrong turn in the late 90s. Probably earlier than that. They have managed to stave off all user feedback for 30 years through litigious bullying and strict vendor lock-in. This isn't about the taskbar, man. This isn't even about Copilot.

The pushback which you are only now starting to perceive is being caused by an entire generation of Microsoft intentionally and actively positioning itself in conflict with its customers.

I understand that once you have a million customers, you can't really treat them right anymore. But Microsoft has not given a single shit about customer feedback, even in aggregate for decades now.

As I read this, all I can think is "too little, too late." I have watched in my workplace Windows go from being a product that we are happy to purchase to yet another piece of technology that we would simply replace were we not yoked to it.

I guess even now they probably still don't care. Microsoft will continue printing money until the sun burns out.

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "iPhone 17e"

jovial_cavalier — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:05:28 +0000

https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-max

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "Ghostty – Terminal Emulator"

jovial_cavalier — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 22:20:59 +0000

why does everyone freak out about this terminal whenever it's posted?

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "Why Is the American Diet So Deadly? (2025)"

jovial_cavalier — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:43:26 +0000

So the chefs are preparing food that has the same macros as ultraprocessed meals (I assume like tv dinners or something?) Why do they keep referring to the freshly-prepared food as "ultraprocessed"?

    “Is this processed or unprocessed?” I asked.

    Kozlosky smiled. “Ultra-processed,” she said. “Lots of participants can’t tell the difference.”

If the term has any meaning, you could tell very easily. Go look at a freshly fried tortilla chip, and compare it to a tostito. You know which one is which instinctively.

I thought I understood the study but now I'm not sure. I thought the idea was to take the exact same thing you'd get in a tv dinner and make it fresh, so no freeze drying, no preservatives, etc. Then if that food on its own causes the same pattern of health issues, we know it's simply a diet problem. It sounds like they replicated that effect. So they got evidence that ultraprocessing doesn't actually matter all that much?

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "AVX2 is slower than SSE2-4.x under Windows ARM emulation"

jovial_cavalier — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:24:56 +0000

I'd argue that those are actually very performance critical because if it takes 5 seconds to unlock your phone, you're going to get a new phone.

The point is taken, though, that seemingly the performance is fine as it is for these applications. My point was only that you don't need to be running state of the art LLMs to be using vector math with more than 4 dimensions.

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "AVX2 is slower than SSE2-4.x under Windows ARM emulation"

jovial_cavalier — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:53:53 +0000

A ton of vector math applications these days are high dimensional vector spaces. A good example of that for arm would I guess be something like fingerprint or face id.

Also, it doesn't just speed up vector math. Compilers these days with knowledge of these extensions can auto-vectorize your code, so it has the potential to speed up every for-loop you write.

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube"

jovial_cavalier — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 17:37:58 +0000

The BBC has also been posting classic Doctor Who episodes for free.

https://www.youtube.com/@ClassicDoctorWho

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "The missing digit of Stela C"

jovial_cavalier — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:20:09 +0000

The entire quoted section in the middle adds nothing. It just keeps repeating the same things over and over, and it doesn't answer the question of how we know the offset at all. Makes me think his "friend" is an LLM.

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "Bazzite Post-Mortem"

jovial_cavalier — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:04:34 +0000

https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/commits/main/?after=e49f...

New comment by jovial_cavalier in "Bazzite Post-Mortem"

jovial_cavalier — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:24:56 +0000

Antheas was the #1 most active developer, and responsible for almost all low level integrations.