Hacker News: kunzhi

New comment by kunzhi in "Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?"

kunzhi — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 23:05:03 +0000

That's...wow. What an absolutely disappointing reply.

If "be kind" is an actual value of HN I have yet to see it in almost 15 years of being active on this forum. This community is generally speaking not kind and fulminating is de rigeur as far as I've been able to surmise.

But whatever. I won't bother you or anyone else on here anymore. Good riddance.

New comment by kunzhi in "Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?"

kunzhi — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 21:59:03 +0000

Thanks for your reply. Yep, you got me with that word. Exposure has become totally toxic to me, just like "merit."

New comment by kunzhi in "Ask HN: Have you ever regretted open-sourcing something?"

kunzhi — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 23:32:44 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by kunzhi in "Three weeks after acquiring Windsurf, Cognition offers staff the exit door"

kunzhi — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 17:42:55 +0000

I worked with a guy once whose previous employer, a startup, had been bought by a large well-known entertainment company (famous for running an amusement park or two in Southern California). He told me that when they had the company party, the three founders all got up on stage to thank the employees for their hard work, sacrifice, etc. The first two founders were humble, gracious, struck the right note.

However, alcohol was flowing and when the third founder took the mic he started with: "I just wanna thank everyone here...for making me FUCKIN' RIIIIICH." Didn't raise the mood exactly.

That was Silicon Valley then and it's Silicon Valley today. Folks are just saying the quiet parts louder and louder now.

"He got his bag."

Learnable Programming (2012)

kunzhi — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 22:57:22 +0000

Article URL: https://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44780552

Points: 53

# Comments: 7

New comment by kunzhi in "Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)"

kunzhi — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 16:20:18 +0000

Makes me think of this classic from Derek Sivers - There is no speed limit - https://sive.rs/kimo

The Machine Stops (1909) [pdf]

kunzhi — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 13:06:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/Machine_stops.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44570718

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by kunzhi in "Grok 4"

kunzhi — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 01:25:59 +0000

seriously?

New comment by kunzhi in "Grok 4"

kunzhi — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 23:40:06 +0000

Grok might be able to find the cure for cancer but as long as it's associated with Musk, not touching that thing with a 10-foot pole.

(Simon's analysis, of course, is lovely)

New comment by kunzhi in "A Typology of Canadianisms"

kunzhi — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 23:36:11 +0000

> It seems everyone outside of Ontario feels some kind of alienation or other. The west, as you mentioned, but also the maritimes, and especially the Québécois.

Yep, and then there's Newfoundland, which isn't even part of the maritimes. (No worries though, they're used to being excluded)

New comment by kunzhi in "An open letter from educators who refuse the call to adopt GenAI in education"

kunzhi — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 23:34:15 +0000

> At its heart, education is a project of guiding learners to exercise their own agency in the world. Through education, learners should be empowered to participate meaningfully in society, industry, and the planet.

I agree but I have never seen an education system that had this as a goal. It's also not what society or employers actually want. What is desired are drones / automatons that take orders and never push back. Teaching people about agency is the opposite of that.

We are so stuck in a 19th century factory mindset everywhere, GenAI is just making it even more obvious.

New comment by kunzhi in "A Typology of Canadianisms"

kunzhi — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 19:03:03 +0000

> For anyone interested in Canadian history, always check-out the French version of a wikipedia page

In reading about Canadian history this entire comment strikes me as very "East" biased? (Because I'm reading a strong implication that the French are the true holders of the history and the English just showed up later. Which may very well be true)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_alienation

New comment by kunzhi in "Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists"

kunzhi — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 16:58:22 +0000

>Dynamic, on-the-fly generation & execution is definitely fascinating to watch in a sandbox, but is far to scary (from a compliance/security/sanity perspective) without spending a lot more time on guardrails.

Would love love love to hear more on what you are doing here? This seems super fascinating (and scary). :)

New comment by kunzhi in "Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists"

kunzhi — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 01:06:53 +0000

Funny this article is trending today because I had a similar thought over the weekend - if I'm in Ruby and the LLM hallucinates a tool call...why not metaprogram it on the fly and then invoke it?

If that's too scary, the failed tool call could trigger another AI to go draft up a PR with that proposed tool, since hey, it's cheap and might be useful.

New comment by kunzhi in "Ancient X11 scaling technology"

kunzhi — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 20:21:28 +0000

Interesting article, I'll admit when I first saw the title I was thinking of a different kind of "scaling" - namely the client/server decoupling in X11.

I still think X11 forwarding over SSH is a super cool and unsung/undersung feature. I know there are plenty of good reasons we don't really "do it these days" but I have had some good experiences where running the UI of a server app locally was useful. (Okay, it was more fun than useful, but it was useful.)

New comment by kunzhi in "Meta announces Oakley smart glasses"

kunzhi — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 18:00:07 +0000

Nice - maybe mine will be called YT.

New comment by kunzhi in "Meta announces Oakley smart glasses"

kunzhi — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 20:17:44 +0000

> I really enjoyed the Oakley Flak series, the fit was superb.

Oh for sure, they were quite good, there was a real reason they became popular. But like you said, it got to be annoying that wearing Oakleys was a statement. (Plus, at least where I lived, they were part of the "douche uniform.")

In terms of recommendations, I'm still getting lots of mileage out of my Ray-Ban Wayfarers, and they're polarized.

New comment by kunzhi in "Meta announces Oakley smart glasses"

kunzhi — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 20:15:41 +0000

Yeah it's odd. Was it a warning or a prophecy? Was it both? Hard to say I suppose.

New comment by kunzhi in "Meta announces Oakley smart glasses"

kunzhi — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:25:07 +0000

I’m a 90s kid so there’s something poetic about Zuck choosing Oakley for this, feels on-brand for him.

In my mind it was inevitable that we would reach this point. The novel Snow Crash predicted this exact phenomenon (along with the Metaverse, of course, which is where they are trying to drive this). It’s the same with companies issuing cryptocurrencies and the like.

We aren’t totally locked in to the techno-feudal state just yet, but we’re getting there. Pretty fascinating how foreseeable these last many years and decades have been.

New comment by kunzhi in "Google is using YouTube videos to train its AI video generator"

kunzhi — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 17:15:11 +0000

Reading this article I couldn’t help but remember the Key & Peele skit about joke theft - “high on potenuse.” All this AI training feels similar to me on some level. Yeah, it’s “just making a copy” on the other hand the person who originated the idea doesn’t get to participate in the success.

Life is hard, but at least on the other hand, it’s also unfair.