Hacker News: kokanee

New comment by kokanee in "Live: Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

kokanee — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:08:17 +0000

> the agency said it was confident that a change to the re-entry trajectory would be more than adequate to offset any spalling issues. Somewhat confusingly, they also announced their intention to switch to a new heat shield design, starting with Artemis III.

It's fine to be concerned, but this kind of take is why public agencies are damned no matter what they do. In the private sector, operating with the suboptimal resources you have while working on a better iteration is standard practice, even in industrial settings. But when you're a public organization, if anyone can find anything that is less than 100% optimal, the same people who complain about how slow the public sector is will complain that you're cutting corners, or that you're inept.

New comment by kokanee in "What Young Workers Are Doing to AI-Proof Themselves"

kokanee — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 21:15:35 +0000

But everyone at the company has that private domain knowledge. The only thing you're bringing to the table that anyone in any other role doesn't offer is the commoditized skill set.

New comment by kokanee in "MacBook Neo"

kokanee — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:34:46 +0000

YOU GUYS IT HAS A HEADPHONE JACK

New comment by kokanee in "Don't make me talk to your chatbot"

kokanee — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:51:15 +0000

I view the issue of inefficient communication as a problem that will wane as LLMs progress, and a bit idealistic about the efficiency of most human-to-human communication. I feel strongly that we shouldn't be forced to interact with chatbots for a much simpler reason: it's rude. It's dismissive of the time and attention of the person on the other end; it demonstrates laziness or an inability to succeed without cutting corners, and it is an affront to the value of human interaction (regardless of efficiency).

New comment by kokanee in "GPT‑5.3 Instant"

kokanee — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:40:33 +0000

LLMenthols

New comment by kokanee in "A simple web we own"

kokanee — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:16:12 +0000

There's also no hope of creating a web that is resistant to enshittification and power consolidation as long as it can technically support any form of economic transaction.

New comment by kokanee in "It's 2026, Just Use Postgres"

kokanee — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:55:03 +0000

I love postgres and it really is a supertool. But to get exactly what you need can require digging deep and really having control over the lowest levels. My experience after using timescale/tigerdata for the last couple years is that I really just wish RDS supported the timescale extension; TigerData's layers on top of that have caused as many problems as they've solved.

New comment by kokanee in "Proof of Corn"

kokanee — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 19:12:53 +0000

I started to write a logical rebuttal, but forget it. This is just so dumb. A guy is paying farmers to farm for him, and using a chatbot to Google everything he doesn't know about farming along the way. You're all brainwashed.

New comment by kokanee in "The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists"

kokanee — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:45:49 +0000

> These things are average text generation machines.

Funny... seems like about half of devs think AI writes good code, and half think it doesn't. When you consider that it is designed to replicate average output, that makes a lot of sense.

So, as insulting as OP's idea is, it would make sense that below-average devs are getting gains by using AI, and above-average devs aren't. In theory, this situation should raise the average output quality, but only if the training corpus isn't poisoned with AI output.

I have an anecdote that doesn't mean much on its own, but supports OP's thesis: there are two former coworkers in my linkedin feed who are heavy AI evangelists, and have drifted over the years from software engineering into senior business development roles at AI startups. Both of them are unquestionably in the top 5 worst coders I have ever worked with in 15 years, one of them having been fired for code quality and testing practices. Their coding ability, transition to less technical roles, and extremely vocal support for the power of vibe coding definitely would align with OP's uncharitable character evaluation.

New comment by kokanee in "Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well"

kokanee — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 23:46:25 +0000

I think both sides of this debate are conflating the tech and the market. First of all, there were forms of "AI" before modern Gen AI (machine learning, NLP, computer vision, predictive algorithms, etc) that were and are very valuable for specific use cases. Not much has changed there AFAICT, so it's fair that the broader conversation about Gen AI is focused on general use cases deployed across general populations. After all, Microsoft thinks it's a copilot company, so it's fair to talk about how copilots are doing.

On the pro-AI side, people are conflating technology success with product success. Look at crypto -- the technology supports decentralization, anonymity, and use as a currency; but in the marketplace it is centralized, subject to KYC, and used for speculation instead of transactions. The potential of the tech does not always align with the way the world decides to use it.

On the other side of the aisle, people are conflating the problematic socio-economics of AI with the state of the technology. I think you're correct to call it a failure of PMF, and that's a problem worth writing articles about. It just shouldn't be so hard to talk about the success of the technology and its failure in the marketplace in the same breath.

I feel insulted when an LLM answers the phone

kokanee — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:29:08 +0000

I recently called an upscale restaurant to order a pizza, and my call was answered by an LLM. There was no disclosure; it was just a young woman's voice saying "Hi you've reached , how can I help?" It wasn't until I noticed the unusual delays and ever-so-subtly robotic speech cadence that I realized I wasn't talking to a human.

This felt crappy. It felt like I was being tricked; that this company wanted me to think I was speaking with a human. To think you're speaking with a human when you aren't is embarrassing, and in the process of recognizing that the voice isn't real there is an inevitable moment of awkward self-consciousness when you aren't sure whether to speak as if there is another person listening or not.

If you don't want to pay people to answer your phones, use a phone tree. Don't insult your customers by trying to trick them into thinking they're getting real service.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46501819

Points: 7

# Comments: 4

New comment by kokanee in "OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race"

kokanee — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 16:42:44 +0000

I think it's a matter of public perception and user sentiment. You don't want to shove ads into a product that people are already complaining about. And you don't want the media asking questions like why you rolled out a "health assistant" at the same time you were scrambling to address major safety, reliability, and legal challenges.

New comment by kokanee in "Show HN: Stun LLMs with thousands of invisible Unicode characters"

kokanee — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:06:51 +0000

Anyone who runs ads on their website has a financial incentive to publish content publicly while blocking LLM trainers

New comment by kokanee in "Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web"

kokanee — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 22:19:44 +0000

Seems to me that the obvious business model here is that they will need to have their AI inject their own ads into the DOM. Overall though, this feels like a feature, not a business.

New comment by kokanee in "OpenAI acquires Sky.app"

kokanee — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 13:54:25 +0000

That's what I was gonna say. All of these companies are desperate to make Clippy work.

New comment by kokanee in "Tesla is heading into multi-billion-dollar iceberg of its own making"

kokanee — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 12:04:07 +0000

You're neglecting the fact that the affected customers paid for FSD and never got it.

New comment by kokanee in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

kokanee — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 11:46:35 +0000

We're getting awfully close to that scenario. Like frogs in a warming kettle.

New comment by kokanee in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

kokanee — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 23:03:47 +0000

If it goes red, we aren't alive to see it

New comment by kokanee in "AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1"

kokanee — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 13:44:32 +0000

I worked at AMZN for a bit and the complexity is not exactly arbitrary; it's political. Engineers and managers are highly incentivized to make technical decisions based on how they affect inter-team dependencies and the related corporate dynamics. It's all about review time.

New comment by kokanee in "ICE bought vehicles equipped with fake cell towers to spy on phones"

kokanee — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 17:54:01 +0000

You might not like the tone, but I don't see what makes the words false. "Paramilitary" describes a non-military group behaving similarly to a military group, and we're talking about armed masked men sweeping homes, taking prisoners, and engaging in violent conflicts. "Operating illegally" means that federal, state, or local laws have been broken, and that seems to be the case, e.g. Gonzalez v. ICE.