Hacker News: m0llusk

New comment by m0llusk in "Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on Steve Jobs’s years at NeXT Computer"

m0llusk — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:32:07 +0000

Craig Federighi is still there, right? He had a lot to do with bringing together NeXT frameworks and enterprise database interfaces. If Tim Cook's successor is truly engineering oriented then we might see them work together to get the old buggy going forward again.

New comment by m0llusk in "An AI coding agent, used to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs"

m0llusk — Mon, 11 May 2026 11:32:55 +0000

Meanwhile many LLM users have seen generated code quality drop as prices and service are brought in line with costs. If graduate student level work costs many times the price of a student worker then why bother?

New comment by m0llusk in "A treasure trove of fossils rewrites the story of early life"

m0llusk — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:57:52 +0000

It turns out to be more interesting than that. For example, there is no other ape with skin resembling that of marine mammals. And that is just a start. Mankind is seriously weird.

New comment by m0llusk in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

m0llusk — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:00:33 +0000

The details of the story are interesting. Backups stored on the same volume is an interesting glitch to avoid. Finding necessary secrets wherever they happen to be and going ahead with that is the kind of mistake I've seen motivated but misguided juniors make. Strange how generated code seems to have many security failings, but generated security checks find that sort of thing.

New comment by m0llusk in "America's Geothermal Breakthrough"

m0llusk — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 14:09:54 +0000

With all the exotic drilling tech making fracking work, it seems like geothermal is a natural pivot since much of the challenge is controlling the cost of drilling deeply.

New comment by m0llusk in "Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training"

m0llusk — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:42:16 +0000

Medical device companies are run very differently from most technology development companies. They have to be because the stakes are high, evaluation criteria are different, and medical related marketing and sales have separate industry managed channels and venues.

New comment by m0llusk in "Airline worker arrested after sharing photos of bomb damage in WhatsApp group"

m0llusk — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 13:49:53 +0000

This defensiveness just makes the situation worse. If they came across as at a disadvantage and doing their best that could attract help and admiration. Trying to cover things up while being hostile just makes them look like reactionary creeps with too much power. An unfortunate turn of events in any case.

New comment by m0llusk in "Slop Cop"

m0llusk — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 02:12:54 +0000

That isn't really true, though, at least not when actual common usage is considered. As the studies of "Trendslop" have revealed, LLMs aggressively normalize output. What they do is generate content based on averages over large samples. This gives everything from them a strong tendency to revert to the mean from concepts to presentation and style.

New comment by m0llusk in "Slop Cop"

m0llusk — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 01:58:25 +0000

Being cautious and an autistic mathematician also I am prone to heavy qualification. This causes very large blocks of my writing to be highlighted as "Hedge Stack" which isn't really helpful. Lots of Overused Intensifier and Triple Construction instances also, but those are usually words or phrases, not several paragraphs together as with Hedge Stack.

Seems like a sad situation, but I'm not going to start changing my communication style to avoid sounding like an LLM. At least not yet.

New comment by m0llusk in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

m0llusk — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:08:21 +0000

There is a word for this kind of thing: Trendslop. Asking LLMs for advice consistently generates average responses as if the questions were being asked of the training sample population. It is reversion to the mean as a service.

New comment by m0llusk in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Work"

m0llusk — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:29:24 +0000

Bullshit is more dangerous than lies.

New comment by m0llusk in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

m0llusk — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:07:49 +0000

No need to swarm the carriers. Support craft are far more vulnerable, absolutely required, and low in numbers at this time.

New comment by m0llusk in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

m0llusk — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 01:55:37 +0000

That is easy. Those top apps in mobile stores are constructed in part with compilers which are under great pressure from developers to generate good code as quickly as possible. There is often bloat at the level of the development environment or some critical library, but core developer tools are a big part of the software space and are made and sold with very different criteria from the most popular apps vended from walled gardens.

New comment by m0llusk in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

m0llusk — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 01:52:04 +0000

There is a huge space of possible software solutions. A very large amount of software that has real value involves using basic methodologies to build interfaces to databases and enable some known business logic. Writing this kind of software is very different compared to making highly general developer tools that need to have finely honed abstractions. LLMs are especially good at whipping up basic apps, but can actually interfere with the process of coming up with and implementing new concepts that operate differently from existing tools. In this respect I find that working with LLMs is very similar to working with graduate students who have energy, drive, and patience, but are also prone to making bad decisions and doing work that ends up being thrown away.

New comment by m0llusk in "Apple Just Lost Me"

m0llusk — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:38:23 +0000

Macbooks are standard fare for tech workers. Having reached the top of the mountain it should not be a surprise that there are heavy winds. Instead of behaving like custodians of the cathedral we get fast movement with breakage and an emphasis on pursuit of bold aesthetic novelty. If there is any bizarre trend here it is Apple burning billions to give people features they do not want while letting core functionality weaken and fail.

New comment by m0llusk in "The Resolv hack: How one compromised key printed $23M"

m0llusk — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 23:15:56 +0000

stable as in house always wins?

New comment by m0llusk in "PC Gamer recommends RSS readers in a 37mb article that just keeps downloading"

m0llusk — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 22:50:47 +0000

When sites show me a bunch of ads and slow my machine with tracking then I just close the window. They don't want me to read their articles anyway. When a company shows you who they are ...

New comment by m0llusk in "Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD"

m0llusk — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:38:24 +0000

Studying the effects of recreational drugs is similar to studying diet in terms of the level of complication. The headline "No evidence" is a good example of the discourse about this subject. There absolutely is such evidence, but this new analysis comes to different, potentially more robust, conclusions from the same data. As long as results are presented in this way a meaningful shared comprehension of the situation is likely to remain out of reach.

New comment by m0llusk in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

m0llusk — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:32:00 +0000

That is bad use of statistics. San Francisco forms the core of an urban conurbation of over eight million people.

New comment by m0llusk in "US F-35 damaged by suspected Iranian fire makes emergency landing"

m0llusk — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:23:21 +0000

Good news, F-35 performance has surpassed expectations significantly! Bad news, F-35 production and deployment cost have surpassed expectations massively!