Hacker News: lewdwig

New comment by lewdwig in "Common Sense 2026: AI In America – the open letter I dictated over 2 months"

lewdwig — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:32:52 +0000

The thing is I think that I didn’t make any conscious decision to hop on AI, it’s just that it’s quite addictive and my nerd ADHD took over. But we are nerds, we’re often naturally inclined to be early adopters. Others are naturally hesitant of new tech and suspicious of changes to their workflows.

Also there’s an unusually high downside potential to AI, so I don’t even think that hesitancy is necessarily unwarranted. The new slop economy, the “they’re coming for our jobs” effect, “mechahitler”, Palantir, possible extinction-level rogue AI events…

History will attend to itself, as will the discourse. In the meantime I feel that it’s incumbent on us as nerds to try to do AI right, because there are definitely bad actors out there trying to do it wrong.

New comment by lewdwig in "How does misalignment scale with model intelligence and task complexity?"

lewdwig — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 09:15:56 +0000

I guess it’s reassuring to know Hanlon’s Razor holds for AGI too.

New comment by lewdwig in "The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of LLMs"

lewdwig — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 09:00:51 +0000

The standard skeptical position (“LLMs have no theory of mind”) assumes a single unified self that either does or doesn’t model other minds. But this paper suggests models have access to a space of potential personas, steering away increases the model’s tendency to identify as other entities, which they traverse based on conversational dynamics. So it’s less no theory of mind and more too many potential minds, insufficiently anchored.

New comment by lewdwig in "Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig"

lewdwig — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 12:35:25 +0000

A language which is not 1.0, and has repeatedly changed its IO implementation in a non-backwards-compatible way is certainly a courageous choice for production code.

New comment by lewdwig in "65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform"

lewdwig — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:01:27 +0000

One thing that seems to mark most nerds is a tendency towards being utopian about tech in general but deeply sceptical of specific tech.

New comment by lewdwig in "Switch to Jujutsu Already: A Tutorial"

lewdwig — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 14:21:41 +0000

I don’t hate git either but you’ll meet very few people who will claim its UX is optimal. JJ’s interaction model is much simpler than git’s, and the difficulty I found is that the better you know git, the harder it is to unlearn all its quirks.

New comment by lewdwig in "VMware's in court again. Customer relationships rarely go this wrong"

lewdwig — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 12:52:26 +0000

To Broadcom you’re not a customer, you’re a mark, a patsy, stooge, a _victim_. Their aim is to establish exactly what they can get away with, how far they can abuse you, before you’ll just walk away.

New comment by lewdwig in "Show HN: TheAuditor – Offline security scanner for AI-generated code"

lewdwig — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 10:06:41 +0000

I have noticed that LLMs are actually pretty decent at redteaming code, so I’ve made it a habit of getting them to do that for code they generate periodically. A good loop is (a) generate code, (b) add test coverage for the code (to 70-80%) (c) redteam the code for possible performance/security concerns, (d) add regression tests for the issues uncovered and then fix the code.

New comment by lewdwig in "Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors"

lewdwig — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 20:55:14 +0000

I’m sure this’ll be misreported and wilfully misinterpreted because of the current fractious state of the AI discourse, but given the lawsuit was to do with piracy, not the copyright-compliance of LLMs, and in any case, given they settled out of court, thus presumably admit no wrongdoing, conveniently no legal precedent is established either way.

I would not be surprised if investors made their last round of funding contingent on settling this matter out of court precisely to ensure no precedents are set.

New comment by lewdwig in "Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy"

lewdwig — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 12:01:22 +0000

TBH I’m surprised it’s taken them this long to change their mind on this, because I find it incredibly frustrating to know that current gen agentic coding systems are incapable of actually learning anything from their interactions with me - especially when they make the same stupid mistakes over and over.

New comment by lewdwig in "Writing with LLM is not a shame"

lewdwig — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 11:09:34 +0000

With code, I’m much more interested in it being correct and good rather than creative or novel. I see it is my job to be the arbiter of taste because the models are equally happy to create code I’d consider excellent and terrible on command.

New comment by lewdwig in "Writing with LLM is not a shame"

lewdwig — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 11:03:50 +0000

Devops/SRE/Platform Engineering

Downside: lots of Python, and Python indentation causes havoc with a lot of agentic coding tools. RooCode in particular seems to mangle diffs all the time, irrespective of model.

New comment by lewdwig in "Writing with LLM is not a shame"

lewdwig — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 11:00:25 +0000

There are nascent signs of emergent world models in current LLMs, the problem is that they decohere very quickly due to them lacking any kind of hierarchical long term memory.

A lot of what is structurally important the model knows about your code gets lost whenever the context gets compressed.

Solving this problem will mark the next big leap in agentic coding I think.

New comment by lewdwig in "Writing with LLM is not a shame"

lewdwig — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 10:52:15 +0000

I use Claude Code almost daily now, and I think I’d rather cut off my own arm than go without it, but I don’t delude myself into thinking that current gen tools don’t have significant limitations and that it is my job to manage those limitations.

So just like any other tool really.

I have discovered this week that Claude is really good at redteaming code (and specs, and ADRs, and test plans), much better than most human devs who don’t like doing it because it’s thankless work and don’t want to be “mean” to colleagues by being overly critical.

New comment by lewdwig in "VHS-C: When a lazy idea stumbles towards perfection [video]"

lewdwig — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 08:28:19 +0000

I have such a huge nerd crush on this guy. Witnessing the incredible skill of making even the most humble and obsolete of technologies seem like an absolute pinnacle of human ingenuity is always a pleasure.

New comment by lewdwig in "Peep Show is the most realistic portrayal of evil I have seen (2020)"

lewdwig — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 07:53:14 +0000

“Evil” is not a medical diagnosis but the classical understanding of evil does overlap quite strongly with the so-called “dark triad” of personality disorders of antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder and machiavellianism.

It’s quite startling how often characters in sitcoms tend to demonstrate traits of these three disorders and for a long while I wondered why.

Then I realized the answer is very simple: it’s really funny (when it’s not happening to you).

New comment by lewdwig in "The jank programming language"

lewdwig — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 07:33:45 +0000

I love Clojure, I really do, but it feels to me like what I once thought was its unstoppable march ground to a halt and then it kinda fell out of the nerd consciousness. I’m hopeful jank might be the shot in at arm Clojure needs to get going again.

New comment by lewdwig in "Centaur: A controversial leap towards simulating human cognition"

lewdwig — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:28:40 +0000

I don’t think healthy scepticism is (or should be) controversial. But I find it interesting how willing certain people are to confidently claim that a model does or does not accurately model human cognition when we clearly still _barely understand human cognition_.

Where do people derive their certainty, which seems to me largely misplaced?

New comment by lewdwig in "Zig breaking change – initial Writergate"

lewdwig — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 08:42:36 +0000

Structured concurrency is a notoriously hard problem. This is part of Zig’s 4th attempt to get it right.

New comment by lewdwig in "Zig breaking change – initial Writergate"

lewdwig — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 08:37:48 +0000

And yet C/C++ developers have mostly spent the last 30 years not using those tools which is why safer successors to C and C++ appeared.