Hacker News: makerofthings

New comment by makerofthings in "Computation as a universal and fundamental concept"

makerofthings — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:49:35 +0000

Imagine a program that generates the digits of pi, one after the other and stops when it is finished. A general purpose program analysing this program to decide if it stops or not would have to know about pi. And about every other possible algorithm.

New comment by makerofthings in "The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing"

makerofthings — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 07:14:28 +0000

That’s a lot of brands. You might have to buy a chicken.

New comment by makerofthings in "Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness"

makerofthings — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:14:16 +0000

I get really bad motion sickness, I tried reading hacker news in the car with these on when the feature first appeared. It didn't help.

New comment by makerofthings in "Illegal Numbers"

makerofthings — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:24:29 +0000

The recent post on ripping DVDs reminded me of the DeCSS prime number. Fascinating topic to think about.

Illegal Numbers

makerofthings — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:24:29 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48436883

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by makerofthings in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

makerofthings — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:48:24 +0000

What if the language model writes a story about a character who is conscious and that story is written live about how the character interacts with the world.

New comment by makerofthings in "Writing Portable ARM64 Assembly (2023)"

makerofthings — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:26:45 +0000

I have been very successfully ignoring Windows on Arm since it first appeared :)

New comment by makerofthings in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

makerofthings — Fri, 29 May 2026 06:44:09 +0000

We might well be the most advanced species in the universe. Seems unlikely, but we really don’t have anything else to measure against at the moment.

New comment by makerofthings in "The Eternal Sloptember"

makerofthings — Mon, 25 May 2026 07:17:45 +0000

I wish these posts that talk about non-human mistakes that agents make would post some examples. They would be interesting to see.

New comment by makerofthings in "ProgramBench: Can language models rebuild programs from scratch?"

makerofthings — Thu, 07 May 2026 05:45:48 +0000

It’s the annoying thing about AI. If it works, the AI is magic. If it doesn’t work, you’re using it wrong.

New comment by makerofthings in "For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day"

makerofthings — Sun, 03 May 2026 17:21:57 +0000

This is me. Different music, same deal. Finding you’re not as alone as you thought you were is what the internet is for.

New comment by makerofthings in "DeepSeek V4 – almost on the frontier"

makerofthings — Sat, 02 May 2026 18:35:43 +0000

Anybody know how much ram you would need in a Mac to run the Pro model?

New comment by makerofthings in "ChatGPT Images 2.0"

makerofthings — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:16:00 +0000

I respectfully disagree, I think code has always been more of an art than a science. It's an odd one, I'll grant you, as you need to do a lot of work to really appreciate it.

New comment by makerofthings in "ChatGPT Images 2.0"

makerofthings — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:07:34 +0000

Code is my art and is how I express myself. I agree that nothing that AI does is art.

New comment by makerofthings in "ChatGPT Images 2.0"

makerofthings — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:51:08 +0000

I don’t think that’s completely true, there is an art to code beyond it just being correct. There are a great many correct implementations of a program, but only some of them are really beautiful as well. Most people don’t see the code or appreciate this, but the difference between correct and art is clear to me when I see it.

New comment by makerofthings in "ChatGPT Images 2.0"

makerofthings — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:45:49 +0000

It’s making a tiny number of people richer and a very large number of people poorer. It isn’t going to end well.

New comment by makerofthings in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

makerofthings — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:58:33 +0000

I totally see what you're saying, but to me this feels different. Compilation is a fairly mechanical and well understood process. The large language models aren't just compiling English to assembler via your chosen language, they try and guess what you want, they add extra bits you didn't ask for, they're doing some of your solution thinking for you. That feels like more than just abstraction to me.

New comment by makerofthings in "German implementation of eIDAS will require an Apple/Google account to function"

makerofthings — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 10:23:45 +0000

Requiring people to use products from one of two private American companies with a bad track record of locking people out of their accounts is more than “not great”. Some things are better not done if they can’t be done well.

New comment by makerofthings in "Trying for 1 month but can't learn pixel art still"

makerofthings — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:50:09 +0000

+1 to these, amazing resource. Really helped me.

New comment by makerofthings in "Apple Just Lost Me"

makerofthings — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:47:21 +0000

I read about the new age check nonsense just before 26.4 downloaded, fortunately. I turned off automatic updates and so I guess I have a little time to get out of the apple ecosystem. I'm thinking GrapheneOS on Pixel 10. This is absolutely not required by UK law, apple just seems to enjoy the taste of government boot.