Hacker News: kator

New comment by kator in "Building a serial and VGA "everything console""

kator — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 10:28:06 +0000

Might keep this in mind if you go to tindie:

> URGENT

> Tindie has not paid me for the last month. They take your money for your order and then require me to ship product to you, but they do not pay me. Temporarily, please place your order through the tattlersolutions.com website. See below

New comment by kator in "There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing"

kator — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 16:44:00 +0000

Next up, you must login to ID.me to use AI and providers will be required to retain every session for analysis.

New comment by kator in "Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware"

kator — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 16:42:55 +0000

Most security code scanning I am aware of does AST parsing of actual code before analysis; the comments won't even make it to the LLM. That said, embedded strings could cause this type of false denial, but even so, the errors would be raised in the pipeline for human-in-the-loop security analysis. If anything, it might get a faster reaction in some environments because it causes faults in the analysis pipeline.

New comment by kator in "There's still no point in gigabit broadband"

kator — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 12:28:25 +0000

Oh, and while you're at it, 640K ought to be enough for anybody.

New comment by kator in "Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler"

kator — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:20:24 +0000

oh good point got that backwards… OMG my fax brain didn’t even think about it.

New comment by kator in "Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler"

kator — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:19:17 +0000

The sad thing is I feel trapped on all sides of the debate, I wrote a book about LLMs and human creativity (spoiler Humans win for a long time) but I was going to do it as a blog series, instead I published https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GXCSY4W8 because I felt at least I might get a bit back for literally 100’s of hours of my life I poured into the book and my editor and friends who read and provided reviews.

And I push a lot of open source code including a ton for the SWGEmu project, but now I’m of mixed mind to stop pushing anything public. I can’t decide, am I talking out of both sides of my mouth, it’s a confusing time to navigate for sure.

New comment by kator in "Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler"

kator — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 10:34:37 +0000

> Yet, this shift made me re-evaluate the open source code publishing. Prior to that, I have been positive about free and open software, and considered this to be the default mode for work such as kefir. I did not require any justifications from myself to publish something. Now, however, I feel more and more that the main beneficiaries of my unpaid work are companies scraping the internet to train large language models. Currently accepted status quo in this area goes against my own intentions in licensing this work under GNU GPLv3. Publication has ceased to be the "null hypothesis" for me, and requires explicit mental justification which I am not able to provide.

I feel this pain, one of my small donation driven sites has been destroyed by crawlers who just ignore robots.txt and burn the site into the ground.

Sort of jokingly I proposed an update to the "spam fax" law:

https://www.karlbunch.com/random/website-protection-act/

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

kator — Sat, 23 May 2026 16:11:51 +0000

All this said I'm more concerned about Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) on smartTV you buy in the store and never even realize it's phoning home with everything you watch...

New comment by kator in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

kator — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:31:05 +0000

I recently had my donation-driven site ruined by bots, it's a constant battle. I (jokingly) proposed we should amend the fax spam law to take this into consideration:

https://www.karlbunch.com/random/website-protection-act/

555 gigabytes of bandwidth in a week! We're paying more for egress than compute and storage now. I've tried robots.txt and finally gave in and started setting up aggressive WAF rules.

New comment by kator in "The Third Hard Problem"

kator — Sun, 17 May 2026 00:50:50 +0000

I wonder whether the author deliberately avoided ontology? That's what comes to mind when I read this. The age-old debate between taxonomy and ontology.

Proposed Amendment to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991

kator — Sun, 10 May 2026 15:14:30 +0000

Article URL: https://www.karlbunch.com/random/website-protection-act/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084646

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by kator in "The Shadow Glass"

kator — Fri, 01 May 2026 23:45:22 +0000

I don't think the mirror is a warning. It could be the most valuable thing LLMs can do for us. I recently dug very deep into my own use of LLMs and why I was getting different results than a lot of my peers. I think the primary difference is I look at them as a tool that can extract what's below my verbal mind, deeper in my experience and intuition. Everyone points LLMs outward, "go build this", "go write that", but they miss the most valuable thing, "help me get this idea out of my head".

I recently wrote a book about this, turns out the mirror is more interesting when you stop looking past it and look into it. And even more when you realize LLMs are not humans, they have strengths, and weaknesses, but so do the humans using them. If used carefully you can achieve much more together than either part can alone.

New comment by kator in "SWE-bench Verified no longer measures frontier coding capabilities"

kator — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:08:25 +0000

> models that aren't over-optimized for it.

But how do you know the model was over-optimized for it or just really good?

New comment by kator in "SWE-bench Verified no longer measures frontier coding capabilities"

kator — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:05:22 +0000

Those who fail to study history (or live through it) are doomed to repeat it.

SPECint and SPECfp went through this exact movie: benchmark, saturate, retire, replace, repeat. The treadmill is the product.

I don't have the solution just noticing the pattern.

New comment by kator in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

kator — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:59:52 +0000

I tried tmux so many times, could not commit the sequences to memory, but then zellij was just out of the gate, easy to "discover," and then I started writing plugins (rust wasm), and I even submitted a PR which got accepted to support background colors in panes/tabs.

I am a monthly donor, I think it has the right balance of community plus the lead dev has a vision, opinionated but open to inputs, and focused.

New comment by kator in "Why meaningful days look like nothing while you are living them"

kator — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:18:44 +0000

Interesting, I just did this on some stuff I have personally handwritten, but the writing is about LLMs, and it says 25% AI generated, but because I used terms that are "x% likely AI" generated.

This is not a very useful test; it basically means a person has to "ban" terms like "user experience" and "tireless" etc. because these are "Nx more likely to appear in generated content".

New comment by kator in "I've sold out"

kator — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:29:20 +0000

I think it's a bit sad that we often say people "Sold out". Sometimes, I agree, but often, I point out that until the lady at the grocery store stops asking me for money when I walk up to check out, I need to pay my bills to eat.

I contribute to open source projects, but none of them to date could support me buying much more than a beer. If one took off such that I could "live" off it, I would be happy to leave my current job and dive all in. Until then, I just keep plodding along.

New comment by kator in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

kator — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:35:31 +0000

I put together a quick audit to check for "early landing" messages[1] using jq, ripgrep, and the messages[2] flagged in the stop guard script.

I have noticed a trend in these sessions asking more and more about calling it a day, "it's getting late," and other phrases. I sort of assumed it was some kind of "load shedding" on Anthropic's side.

My audit of 80 sessions was interesting. Sorry, I won't share details, but I recommend you do the same.

[1] https://gist.github.com/karlbunch/d52b538e6838f232d0a7977e7f...

[2] https://gist.github.com/benvanik/ee00bd1b6c9154d6545c63e06a3...

New comment by kator in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

kator — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 22:07:01 +0000

Fascinating, I thought I was losing my mind. Claude CLI has been telling me I should go to bed, or that it's late, let's call it here, etc, and then I look at the stop-phrase-guard.sh [1] and I'm seeing quite a few of these. I thought it was because I accidentally allowed Claude to know my deadline, and it started spitting out all sorts of things like "we only have N days left, let's put this aside for now," etc.

Just this morning I typed:

    STOP WORRYING ABOUT THE DEADLINE THAT IS MY JOB

[1] https://gist.github.com/benvanik/ee00bd1b6c9154d6545c63e06a3...

New comment by kator in "I'm Not Consulting an LLM"

kator — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:34:40 +0000

The "calculator ruined the world" argument was actually studied to death once the panic subsided. Large meta-analyses of 50 years of data show it was mostly a non-problem. Students using calculators generally developed better attitudes toward math and attempted more complex problems because the mechanical drudgery was gone.

The only real "catch" researchers found was timing. If you introduce them before a kid has "automaticity" (around 4th grade), they never develop a baseline number sense, which makes high-level math harder later on.

It's a pretty clean parallel for LLMs. The tool isn't the problem, but using it to bypass the "becoming" phase of a skill usually backfires. If you use an LLM before you know how to structure an argument or a block of code, you're just building on sand.