Hacker News: m12k

New comment by m12k in "Microduck"

m12k — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 16:09:39 +0000

Wherever the capital is (so yes, America)

New comment by m12k in "OpenRouter is joining Stripe"

m12k — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:48:19 +0000

Stripe has a lot of money, but not a lot of AI-buzzword compliance. OpenRouter is highly AI-buzzword compliant, but doesn't have a lot of money. It's a match made in heaven

New comment by m12k in "Opus 5.0 drives incoherence into the stratosphere"

m12k — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:23:38 +0000

I'm wondering if some of Opus' chain of thought patterns have bled into its "human readable text output" circuitry. E.g. some of them that I stumbled on, "the bug is in the lock, not the query" reads like some of the shorthands it might use in its own chain of thought.

New comment by m12k in "AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)"

m12k — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:06:36 +0000

Throwing unread AI output at others is the new version of “sitting on your phone, oblivious to those spending time with you”. Every new consumer technology comes with a new way of being rude.

New comment by m12k in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

m12k — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:07:40 +0000

We don't hand over more power to the owner class by making fewer things ownable.

New comment by m12k in "A big win for Android interoperability"

m12k — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:20:54 +0000

We desperately need to break Visa's stranglehold on access to the consumer side of commerce. As long as everyone's only innovating and competing on the merchant side of things, we're not really going to get anywhere.

New comment by m12k in "RTX 2080 Ti Memory Upgrade to 22 GB"

m12k — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:02:56 +0000

My 2008 MBP had a motherboard failure due to bad factory solder, but you could sometimes fix it by taking the motherboard out and putting it in the oven for just the right amount of time to reflow it. I still remember how scary it was putting the logic board in the oven - but it wasn't really bravery, when the alternative was a non-functional laptop anyway. I did eventually give up on it after it had relapsed two or three times.

New comment by m12k in "Any text-to-SQL benchmark should address difficulties of real-world data stores"

m12k — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:32:43 +0000

Friend of mine built a startup around this, allowing non-techies to "query their database using natural language": https://www.blazesql.com/ Not sure how he achieved it (if TFA is to be believed), but it's my impression that his query generation and results are fairly robust.

New comment by m12k in "EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams"

m12k — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 07:16:57 +0000

I experienced this too, when I started reading out loud more. At first, it was just that my eyes would scan ahead a bit from what I was saying, to help me get the right emphasis by knowing where the sentence was going. It felt like I had "handed off" saying the words out loud to a "subroutine", so my attention could be on what I was reading. Then that "readahead" extended to a whole sentence. And at that point it was like I was so far ahead of what I was saying that I had time to think about it a bit. And then at some point it was like the "reading the words" part got handed off to a "subroutine" too, so my attention could mostly stay on whatever I was thinking

New comment by m12k in "GPT‑Live"

m12k — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:57:09 +0000

Siri is how I set timers, alarms and reminders on my iPhone. Every once in a while, I'll try to use it to play something on Spotify via my Sonos, then give up and do it manually in the app instead.

New comment by m12k in "Show HN: Fortress – a stealth Chromium so your agents stop getting blocked"

m12k — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 03:34:31 +0000

Reminds me of this old joke: No ethically trained software engineer would ever write a destroyBaghdad function - they’d write a destroyCity function to which you could pass Baghdad as a parameter.

New comment by m12k in "Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 Explained"

m12k — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 23:19:51 +0000

The intuition I've built is that you can't talk about a false positive rate being high or low on its own - it's always relative to the actual occurrence rate of positives in the tested population. E.g. if there's a 1 in 10000 risk of a false positive, but real positives also are only 1 out of 10000 tested cases, then a positive case will have a 50/50 chance of being a false positive (because for every 10000 tests, you'll have on average one false positive and one real positive). So a false positive rate can only be said to be low if it's significantly lower than the real occurrence rate of positives.

New comment by m12k in "Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries"

m12k — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:59:34 +0000

Connecting voyeurs and exhibitionists is already a great business idea - don’t know why we need to add robots to the mix.

New comment by m12k in "Doing a masters while working in Spain"

m12k — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:19:20 +0000

I don't know about the rest of Europe, but in Denmark, universities get a part of their funding based on the number of graduates. So the university has an incentive to help student actually graduate instead of kicking them out. That may or may not matter to the bureaucrat responding to an appeal - but I'd certainly not just assume that "I'm close to graduation, just let me do this one more exam attempt" isn't a good enough reason for them to let you try.

New comment by m12k in "Show HN: Pulse – Dashboard for Claude Code, approve tool calls from your phone"

m12k — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 18:15:20 +0000

I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Claude Code’s built in remote control feature already lets you respond to permission prompts from the Claude app on your phone.

New comment by m12k in "Think of the children: How to force real ID for all internet traffic (2023)"

m12k — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:57:51 +0000

I feel genuinely conflicted: On the one hand I get the "authoritarian overreach heebie-jeebies", that I think a lot of people on HN probably share. On the other hand I'd also really like the West to harden its election processes from election interference by its adversaries (e.g. Russia) - and shoring up dysinfo on e.g. Facebook by requiring users to prove their identity with a government ID is one of the only ways to truly effectively combat this at its source (fact-checking just can't keep up with a firehose of dysinformation). Ideally I'd want "real id requirements" to be limited " partake in public discourse" (mainly Facebook and Twitter). But the slippery slop argument just feels pretty strong here too - once a mechanism like this is in place, its use will only ever expand, and it's much easier for a new government to commit overreach if it's already there and just needs expanding. And of course all this "think of the children" nonsense needs to stop.

New comment by m12k in "The AirPods Effect"

m12k — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:09:55 +0000

Douglas Adams summed it up eloquently:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

New comment by m12k in "Getting Creative with Perlin Noise Fields"

m12k — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:40:21 +0000

Reminds me of this writeup that I read recently about using a different noise function (not Perlin) to emulate terrain erosion: https://blog.runevision.com/2026/03/fast-and-gorgeous-erosio...

New comment by m12k in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"

m12k — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:30:19 +0000

In case anyone is wondering, the quote "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water" is an ancient Zen Buddhist proverb. It speaks to how the life you live, and actions you perform, before and after enlightenment are not materially different. But how and why you do and experience them changes, becoming more mindful and less mired in “attachment” and overthinking.

New comment by m12k in "My automated doubt development process"

m12k — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:42:37 +0000

If I was doing all this ad hoc, it might just be. But I’ve had Claude save this as three “skills” (standard workflows) that chain together (review-branch, triage-findings, apply-fixes) so all I need to do is say “review the branch”, make judgment calls on truly ambiguous decisions, and then “apply the fixes”. It’s effort-full but not for me