Hacker News: marcellus23

New comment by marcellus23 in "A brief history of instant coffee"

marcellus23 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 00:12:07 +0000

> I drink more coffee than 99% of the population

How much is that?

New comment by marcellus23 in "Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide"

marcellus23 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:01:06 +0000

AI-generated UIs, at least ones aimed at an engineering audience, have a very distinct appearance. They seem to always have the following attributes:

- Dark mode design with lots of colors

- Buttons that have vibrant, bright borders and duller backgrounds

- Excessive (IMO) usage of monospace fonts for stylistic reasons

None of this proves that it's AI (the other comments have covered that) but in my experience it's always correct.

New comment by marcellus23 in "The future of version control"

marcellus23 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 19:11:55 +0000

That's kind of the simplest case, though, where "theirs" and "ours" makes obvious sense.

What if I'm rebasing a branch onto another? Is "ours" the branch being rebased, or the other one? Or if I'm applying a stash?

New comment by marcellus23 in "How people woke up before alarm clocks"

marcellus23 — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:55:24 +0000

The other comments make good points but also want to point out that that quote was written 37 years ago.

New comment by marcellus23 in "The MacBook Neo"

marcellus23 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 02:08:01 +0000

I use Windows and macOS both daily and it's truly baffling to me that anyway could consider Windows software quality to crush the Mac -- either first party or third party. macOS has no shortage of bugs but compared to Windows it works like a dream.

As one example of many, Night Light (Windows' version of adjusting your screen to be warmer at night) has been broken for me, for 5+ years. I mean literally it just never works on its own. The only way to kick it into working is toggling HDR on and then off, every single time I wake it up.

I would guess it's just my configuration but I built a second PC from totally new parts, and got a different monitor, and installed Windows 11 instead of 10, and it's still broken.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Put the zip code first"

marcellus23 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 01:00:38 +0000

I don't disagree with you generally but does he really claim it does? The entire page only mentions US, near as I can tell.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Our Agreement with the Department of War"

marcellus23 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 21:29:13 +0000

The GP's use of the word "impose" didn't seem perjorative to me or suggest that Anthropic is the offender and the government is the victim. I think you're reading a lot into a simple word choice and this response seems way too hostile.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage"

marcellus23 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 05:49:17 +0000

The iPhone 8 was released in 2017 and the Pixel 8 is from 2023.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Privilege is bad grammar"

marcellus23 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:05:20 +0000

I'm not sure that's a literal quote from their boss. It seems to be an illustrative example, probably exaggerated.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Lena by qntm (2021)"

marcellus23 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 17:51:15 +0000

The beginning describes the formation of an intelligence and it is indeed very dense. You can figure out what's going on but it takes some slow reading, and probably best to revisit it once you have some more context from later in the book.

The whole book isn't like that. Once you get past that part, as the other commenter said, it gets much easier.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Nano-vLLM: How a vLLM-style inference engine works"

marcellus23 — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:41:25 +0000

It really doesn't.

New comment by marcellus23 in "[dead]"

marcellus23 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 15:41:37 +0000

This just takes me to an information-less landing page for some unlaunched product.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Scaling long-running autonomous coding"

marcellus23 — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:34:55 +0000

He changed his mind? The comment you're citing seems partly tongue-in-cheek anyway, but even if it wasn't, how is this some kind of gotcha?

New comment by marcellus23 in "The Influentists: AI hype without proof"

marcellus23 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:54:24 +0000

That's the real reason the conversation seems pointless. Every thread is full of comments from one group saying how useful AI is, and from another group saying how useless it is. The first group is convinced the second group just hasn't figured out how to use it right, and the second group is convinced the first group is deluded or outright lying.

New comment by marcellus23 in "The unbearable frustration of figuring out APIs"

marcellus23 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:01:23 +0000

All of this is written with a sense of anger and sarcastic invective that doesn't seem appropriate. This is part of learning any new language or API. Going in with an attitude of "I should already know how all this works, why am I forced to do research or look at docs?" seems unfair and will spoil the experience of learning anything.

> Why was that so hard? Why are the models here separate from the ones in the right click menu? Too many questions.

The very screenshot above this paragraph actually answers this, in what admittedly might be an uncharacteristically clear UI: "Siri and Safari will always run translations online."

New comment by marcellus23 in "Web development is fun again"

marcellus23 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:36:17 +0000

There are simply so many counterexamples out there of people who have developed projects in a small fraction of the time it would take manually. Whether or not AI is having a positive effect on productivity on average in the industry is a valid question, but it's a statistical one. It's ridiculous to argue that AI has a negative effect on productivity in every single individual case.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Web development is fun again"

marcellus23 — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 19:19:51 +0000

> I'd be shocked if the developer wasn't actually less productive

I agree 10x is a very large number and it's almost certainly smaller—maybe 1.5x would be reasonable. But really? You would be shocked if it was above 1.0x? This kind of comment always strikes me as so infantilizing and rude, to suggest that all these developers are actually slower with AI, but apparently completely oblivious to it and only you know better.

New comment by marcellus23 in "OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026"

marcellus23 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:52:14 +0000

I'd rather live in a universe where that money is taken out of the military budget.

New comment by marcellus23 in "Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert"

marcellus23 — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 17:56:50 +0000

You’re right, I think my confusion was that they’re both labeled Kiayukwan in Apple Maps.

New comment by marcellus23 in "William Golding's Island of Savagery"

marcellus23 — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 17:09:20 +0000

I think that's clearly the way to interpret the novel. The idea that you could even debunk a piece of allegorical fiction is silly. It would be like trying to make a point by claiming that the tale of the scorpion and the frog was made up, or The Metamorphosis.