Hacker News: jurgenaut23

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

jurgenaut23 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 05:59:23 +0000

I did it and achieved 69’400. English is a second language to me and I think this is quite overestimated, though. Mostly due to French being my first language and most of the advanced words in the tests were derived from French. Or some more academic use.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

jurgenaut23 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:39:05 +0000

Lots of people in this thread look at this as a pro/anti-nuclear debate. But few people consider the fact that the first election from the said nuclear plant will be produced 25 years from now in the very best case. Plus, nuclear plants have a huge cooling problem during summertime.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "Launch HN: Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD"

jurgenaut23 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:49:49 +0000

Who are your users? Are you working with professionals that use similar commercial products or hobbyists? I have a hard time imagining that seasoned industrial designers prefer text over sketches…

I suspect that your VLM might do a bad job at transcribing sketches into CADs, and you wrongly interpreted the adoption data as a preference for text-based interaction

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

jurgenaut23 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:46:22 +0000

Anyone who worked in tech long enough knows that tech-first marketing only works in summer very specific situations and for very specific segments. Most customers care only about whether the system solves their problem in the minimum amount of time/money/effort. Branding a specific solution to their problem is usually a sure way to get them to feel cheated.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "Only 16 Percent of Americans Think AI Will Have a Positive Impact on Society"

jurgenaut23 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:34:38 +0000

Not surprising and well deserved: our industry has done a remarkably poor job at balancing public and shareholder interests. Of course that isn’t the _only_ industry in this situation, but its deep intricacies into personal lives and psyches has made it particularly bad.

The boss of the main private TV channel in France famously said in 90s that his job consisted in “selling brain time to advertisers”. What was handicraft has been turned into a mass extraction business by the Google and Facebook of our world. AI is the cherry on the cake, really.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity"

jurgenaut23 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:28:37 +0000

I didn’t know Calvin and Hobbes so well until recently. My wife recently got me the integral of Calvin and Hobbes and I read it in full in a few weeks. What a masterpiece!

What struck me the most is the magical balance between humor, philosophical tale, and ode to childhood. I have two kids and it helped me numerous time approaching their silliness in a more constructive and patient way.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup"

jurgenaut23 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:42:17 +0000

I get it, but it is still more difficult to achieve differentiation from your less-skilled competitor in the short term, because they can simply slop their way through, at least until prospects realize that this is a bag of sh%t

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup"

jurgenaut23 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:22:45 +0000

If anything, AI has made it more difficult and challenging because every customer and investor is drowning in AI-generated collaterals, websites, etc. The situation is dire in the academic world, where both the applicants and the reviewers now rely so heavily on AI that both publishing and financing has turned into a lottery.

I am positive this will settle down at some point, but the difference will always remain about your own abilities, not that of AI.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "GLM 5.2 Is Out"

jurgenaut23 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:55:25 +0000

Ahah, it used to be as much a time sink as HN

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "Claude Fable 5"

jurgenaut23 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:43:09 +0000

True that

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)"

jurgenaut23 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:41:52 +0000

Fascinating comments on this post. I recommend everyone here to read a lesser known philosopher: Baruch Spinoza. It is one of the greatest thinker of our time, but it is unfortunately not the easiest read you will find in the library. Reminds me in some ways of Penrose’s Road to Reality, which is a life project in and of itself.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)"

jurgenaut23 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:26:25 +0000

Spinoza has a much deeper and more effective approach to this, I found.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

jurgenaut23 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:47:36 +0000

I understand your point, but this is a purely utilitarian view and it doesn’t account for the fact that, even if agents may do everything, it doesn’t mean they should, both in a normative and positive sense.

There is a vast range of scenarios in which being more or less independent from agents to perform cognitive tasks will be both desirable and necessary, at the individual, societal and economic level.

The question of how much territory we should give up to AI really is both philosophical and political. It isn’t going to be settled in mere one-sided arguments.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "Ask HN: European Tech Alternatives?"

jurgenaut23 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:04:12 +0000

No, satire would be “benefits of living in the USA”

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension"

jurgenaut23 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 16:49:08 +0000

I wonder when we will realize that we just don’t need more software, just better software.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "I miss thinking hard"

jurgenaut23 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:23:02 +0000

Something that people underestimate a lot is that we aren’t “brains in a jar” and the elevated states of consciousness, such as “flow”, require a deep involvement of the body. As such manual coding is much more likely to bring you into the zone than irregular interactions with an LLM.

I actually believe that there are much better ways to incorporate AI into software development than any of the mechanisms we’ve seen so far. For instance, it would make a lot more sense that you actually write the software manually and get the usual autocomplete suggestions, along with some on the fly reviews, an extension proposals, such as writing the body of a function that you’re calling from the core function you’re writing now.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "I miss thinking hard"

jurgenaut23 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 10:15:10 +0000

Man, this resonates SO MUCH with me. I have always loved being confronted with a truly difficult problem. And I always had that (obviously misguided, but utterly motivating) feeling that, with enough effort, no problem could ever resist me. That it was just a matter of grinding a bit further, a bit longer.

This is why I am so deeply opposed to using AI for problem solving I suppose: it just doesn’t play nice with this process.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "Students using “humanizer” programs to beat accusations of cheating with AI"

jurgenaut23 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 19:09:09 +0000

I used em dashes heavily 15 years ago when writing my PhD thesis.

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "We have ipinfo at home or how to geolocate IPs in your CLI using latency"

jurgenaut23 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:37:38 +0000

Maybe, but at least OP typed in the commit message by himself. That places you in the top percentile these days

New comment by jurgenaut23 in "Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out"

jurgenaut23 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 16:13:22 +0000

I wonder which prompt/models are used to produce such posts. This looks very misaligned… to say the least.

Probably some guys posting on behalf of its agent (easy to do). Maybe agents should develop a CAPTCHA for humans lol