Hacker News: lowbloodsugar

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage"

lowbloodsugar — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 03:17:24 +0000

I think that’s the difference. Using LLMs to learn how to write interesting code, I hope, would be welcomed. I’m not confident that’s true though, reading some of these comments.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"

lowbloodsugar — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:30:11 +0000

>the US is perfectly capable of ramping up manufacturing to ungodly numbers

Evidence? Genuinely curious. I read that for every ship the US can build, China can build 200. Our drones come from China. Have we got a magic tomohawk cruise missile factory that can be dialed up to the rate that China can produce? We have the raw materials pipeline and know-how still?

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "The AI Demand Bubble"

lowbloodsugar — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:19:11 +0000

TFA admits that Amazon's AI revenue is only 59% from Anthropic and OpenAI, with 41% coming from actual customers using bedrock. That seems like they are in a winning position. I've run Qwen on Bedrock. Big models on Bedrock do outperform the models I can fit on my single RTX PRO 6000.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

lowbloodsugar — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:48:50 +0000

I would assume that while Iran doesn't have the material for a bomb, they have enough nasty material for an air burst to do significant long-term impact. They couldn't possibly use it unless Israel nuked them first.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "LLMs reward expertise"

lowbloodsugar — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 02:48:17 +0000

Difference is, it can teach you.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "LLMs reward expertise"

lowbloodsugar — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 02:35:23 +0000

Opus, assume i know nothing about web development. if i wanted to design a new webpage, with a good design, what are some of the terms of art, some best practices? Like if i wanted a big block at the top, some things to click on and some pictures below that, is there terminology for that?

>Yes. Nearly everything you described has a standard name. Here is the vocabulary, organized by what part of the page it describes...

Goes on to identify Header, Navbar, Stucky header, hamburger menu, hero, CTA, Above the fold etc.

>So your described page is: header/nav -> hero with CTA -> card grid -> footer. That is the single most common landing page structure in existence, and that is fine. Being conventional is a feature, not a failure.

I've had the same conversation with an electrician wiring a car charger: we are more likely to succeed if I use his terminology.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)"

lowbloodsugar — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:14:40 +0000

Ok. Let’s read the papers cited:

> Our results further confirm that experts are more proficient in self-assessing their abilities than novices.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "SwiftUI After 7 Years"

lowbloodsugar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:46:52 +0000

Well we all love Liquid Glass. Most loved UX update in iPhone and macOS history. Massive dealbreaker for an app not to look like Liquid Glass. I definitely choose apps based on whether they look like proper Liquid Glass applications instead of the developer taking shortcuts and focusing on working features instead.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "Cancelling Cursor"

lowbloodsugar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:36:13 +0000

It’s probably good for Cursor to lose customers like this. The old model of SDE writing code and harness helping with tab completion is just so unproductive that it might reflect badly on Cursor. It’s certainly not worth Cursors effort to keep it alive. But then I don’t get why harness-in-ide is particularly useful at this point. I use vscode and jetbrains, depending on language because I’m still working with the AI rather than vibe coding. A lot of folks would say I’m the Luddite.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "The Coldcard Disaster Gets Worse: The Hack May Have Reached $88.6M"

lowbloodsugar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:24:08 +0000

Yeah. It’s propaganda. It ought to be “Not your code? Not hardware you designed and built? Not your coins.” But then like ten people could safely own BTC. BTC is a criminal conspiracy that requires fools for legitimacy.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "Karpathy’s Pelican"

lowbloodsugar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:15:52 +0000

This. This is why the burst of posts on HN of “I made this useful tool/crate/application” were just so sad. The old model was getting what the kids now call aura by developing useful open source products: products where it’s far easier for someone to consume the product than write it themselves. We had people posting things as if that model still existed. Dude, you wrote it with an LLM! Posting them (here) is not only pointless, it’s advertising that the person who wrote it isn’t smart enough to understand that I have an LLM too.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "Karpathy’s Pelican"

lowbloodsugar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:09:41 +0000

Don’t worry. I’m sure they’re not training it to be good at things like writing database backends, financial services, logistics systems, user interfaces, or anything of economic value. As long as you’re not working on three.js specifically, I’m sure Anthropic isn’t making any progress you should be worried about.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "Twenty Years of RISC OS Open"

lowbloodsugar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:49:37 +0000

32bit ARM remains my absolute favorite instruction set. And yeah, C compiler output was criminal! I wrote products entirely in the BASIC assembler. What a time to grow up!

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "The Coldcard Disaster Gets Worse: The Hack May Have Reached $88.6M"

lowbloodsugar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:35:20 +0000

> In this case, there isn’t much of a mistake to point out.

I don’t buy this. There is no $249 device that I would trust with even 1 BTC. These folks looked at the options to preserve $100,000 and picked a $249 device over an exchange. Or a bank. Or the DOW.

It is heartbreaking the loss that some have suffered. But it doesn’t benefit anyone to say “Who could have known?” Everyone knew: because not one person said “I have verified this product and it cannot possibly be vulnerable”. So “it’s open source and you can verify it yourself!” Ok. Nobody did! “Well maybe they did, they just didn’t find the exploit” - that’s the point!

> My guess is that the next phase is to revise history and form a consensus that Coldcard was never a recommended wallet and that it was obvious to everyone with good OPSEC at the time.

Yeah. I didn’t use it. I would never use it. The problem is that “everyone with good OPSEC” are “obviously just plants of Big Bank and the IRS”. The criminals that benefit from “normal” people “legitimizing” bitcoins have really good PR department.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "The Coldcard Disaster Gets Worse: The Hack May Have Reached $88.6M"

lowbloodsugar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:15:41 +0000

Might have been the plan all along.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "P[drive failure]: how reliable is your NAS?"

lowbloodsugar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:01:35 +0000

RAID is not backup. Snapshots on same storage are not backup. For “the oh I don’t like this edit of my Word doc, do I have a version from yesterday”, sure, snapshots. For momma giving birth photos, you need backup. S3 is $1/tb for backup. Blu-rays are metal not ink now, discs are $2/25gb which might work for older photos. LTO6 drives can be had for under $1000.

> i want to keep my data for my entire life.

NAS has very little part in this conversation. In this conversation, a NAS is the same category a desktop drive: it is better than a laptop that you can lose.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "P[drive failure]: how reliable is your NAS?"

lowbloodsugar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:09:31 +0000

A NAS is not a backup device.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "The Art of 64-bit Assembly"

lowbloodsugar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:05:09 +0000

I don’t get it. I am this books target market. Part of this demographic is that if you challenge me, I will accept the challenge. So challenging me to figure out how to do this by using AI instead of buying this book seems like a serious fail.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions"

lowbloodsugar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 05:23:16 +0000

I told Opus to go research the state of the economy and it said we’re all fucked.

New comment by lowbloodsugar in "The End of an Era"

lowbloodsugar — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:14:44 +0000

I think that Silo is just a darker, stupider City of Ember. Like there have been shitty derivative works long before AI came along. Now there’s AI that can plagiarize faster and better than humans and those people are sad.