Hacker News: marcta

New comment by marcta in "Astra for Law"

marcta — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 11:33:05 +0000

Don't leave it on a cliffhanger, what really happens?

New comment by marcta in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

marcta — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:37:05 +0000

Why is arr.filter().map() better than arr.reduce()? Doesn't arr.reduce() only loop once through the array?

New comment by marcta in "Python sets and dictionaries can have quadratic-time performance"

marcta — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:09:30 +0000

I think the point is that once it becomes a crypto key, stock price, weather observation, whatever, the datum ceases to be random and becomes arbitrary.

New comment by marcta in "My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test"

marcta — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 05:27:05 +0000

Which business will hire a consultant who doesn't fully endorse the AI-everything religion?

New comment by marcta in "AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users"

marcta — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:44:27 +0000

Here's a thought experiment: consider the person that you disagree with the most (politically, religiously, socially, whatever). Would you want _that_ person to have an AI chatbot aligned to them and their views?

New comment by marcta in "My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”"

marcta — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:18:57 +0000

In fairness, a false positive is better than a false negative.

New comment by marcta in "Web Security is Too Hard"

marcta — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:41:54 +0000

Presumably the big scary sysadmins have access to the *.cloudflare.com DNS records, and marketing just needs to push this thing right now and can't wait, so it's easier for them to buy a new domain with a shiny new TLD than wait for pay.cloudflare.com to be authorised.

cloudflare.com/pay probably has a similar chain of approval: if every marketing idea had its own top-level route, it would get pretty crazy with such a big company.

New comment by marcta in "Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey"

marcta — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:55:25 +0000

A similar thing happened in the Falkland's War: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/bbcs-treason-battle...

New comment by marcta in "Advertise in ChatGPT"

marcta — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:58:36 +0000

May I interest you in Jevon's paradox: if a thing becomes cheaper or more efficient, usage tends to go up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

New comment by marcta in "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion"

marcta — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:13:46 +0000

That is literally what Excel is for. Why didn't you use that first of all?

New comment by marcta in "When 2+2=5"

marcta — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:38:34 +0000

Schrödinger's basilisk?

New comment by marcta in "European digital ID wallets rely on safety services of Google and Apple"

marcta — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:49:03 +0000

50% of the population are below average intelligence.

New comment by marcta in "Tokenmaxxing is dead, long live tokenmaxxing"

marcta — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:07:22 +0000

Why would you look for sawdust? That's a waste product. You would motivate everyone to stop producing actual furniture, and just buy the biggest bits of wood to turn entirely into sawdust. Which is textbook Godhart's law.

This is what's happening here, you have people setting up two chatbots to churn useless tokens at each other, making only sawdust.

I contend that tokens per se are actually a waste product, or at least non-value add. The end user doesn't actually care how many tokens were used to make a thing. If you could get the same result with fewer tokens, that would be an improvement.

New comment by marcta in "I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI"

marcta — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 05:24:33 +0000

Why should a radiologist have to debunk AI slop? They have enough to do already. That's the same mentality that is frustrating open-source repositories with sloppy pull requests, and saying "here, sort this out for me".

New comment by marcta in "Never Give Them Your Face"

marcta — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 17:35:27 +0000

I was going to say the same. Also, if you go to shops like Screwfix or Toolstation (in the UK), you have to give your postcode and name to them before they sell to you. I tried opting out once and they refused to sell to me. I give them fake postcodes and names instead now, but it's very invasive and completely unnecessary.

New comment by marcta in "Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics"

marcta — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:49:20 +0000

Maybe it's like Formula 1: it's a purposefully-extreme goal, which drives new development and makes "lesser" goals feel more achievable.

New comment by marcta in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

marcta — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:52:17 +0000

The G in AI GPU stands for "grift"

New comment by marcta in "Airlines Can't Charge You for What You Wear"

marcta — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:13:38 +0000

There is a reason that luggage has to be weighed. If you watch Mentour Pilot, there's a not insignificant number of plane accidents (and outright disasters) that occur due to the plane weight being calculated incorrectly, and thereby running out of fuel.

https://www.evionica.com/blog/blog/how-much-the-passenger-we...

New comment by marcta in "The Eternal Sloptember"

marcta — Mon, 25 May 2026 06:49:37 +0000

Some "ai is bad" arguments come from the threat of losing one's livelihood, which is a monetary concern.

New comment by marcta in "UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system"

marcta — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:50:44 +0000

Yes Minister has something about this, I seem to remember. Because the government isn't profit motivated, they are instead motivated by the size of their budget and the number of employees.