Hacker News: mat0

New comment by mat0 in "The lost joy of music piracy"

mat0 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:03:42 +0000

oh man I’ll never forget that site. I remember my dad and I trying to find the name of a song to download (Endless summer nights), none of us knew any english at the time, but we loved that song. So he was listening to a recording of that song, we knew the band name but we didn’t know the song name. And by some magnificent chance I was reading the tracks in the AG ui and that part of the track played and I said to my father (in spanish) “that’s the one. download this one”. “you sure?” “yes, do it!”. downloading took so long in our dial up modem, but when we could play the track it was so amazing. the audio quality, no radio voice on top. absolute bliss. thank you

New comment by mat0 in "Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards"

mat0 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:02:34 +0000

You can touch an animal and it will react to it. Why are you putting language in front of it? Or let’s put it this way, what though you need to think before you feel something is interacting with you body? What you define as consciousness, having a theory of mind or any kind or inner monologue is a very small subset of what consciousness is. And I’m not talking about some pseudo esoteric hippy thing here. I’m talking about what Tomas Nigel was talking about many many years ago https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

New comment by mat0 in "Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards"

mat0 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:56:20 +0000

Yes. I have high confidence that animals are in fact conscious, in the same way that one can train in meditation and completely (although briefly) shut off the thinking brain, the inner dialog, and still be fully conscious and aware of what’s happening. For me, consciousness is this awareness of all the inputs we are having: visual, tactile, sound, etc. there’s no reason to believe that primates weren’t conscious of what was happening, of their surroundings, sensations, sounds, etc. before language developed.

New comment by mat0 in "MAI-Code-1-Flash"

mat0 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:15:55 +0000

how long until they rebrand this shit as copilot?

New comment by mat0 in "Advice to young people, the lies I tell myself (2024)"

mat0 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:17:39 +0000

Just in case some people missed it, the author is 32yo.

New comment by mat0 in "Do your own writing"

mat0 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:22:55 +0000

This is the second time today that I come across this quote. I’m always happy to see Vonnegut in the wild. Let alone two times in a day!

New comment by mat0 in "No Terms. No Conditions"

mat0 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:44:08 +0000

for me it was the “No further pages. No hidden clauses.” Reeks of LLM

New comment by mat0 in "The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books"

mat0 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 11:08:18 +0000

if you appreciate books, you don’t buy them from amazon. that’s been true for a number of years now. of course, if someone is tight on budget and wants to get a book, I wouldn’t go at them for getting the cheapest option available, which in 99% of cases, amazon is. but for people that can afford it? no excuse. I find it to be immoral to buy from amazon. my wife and I have switched years ago: small local libraries > dussmann > amazon

New comment by mat0 in "Leaving Google has actively improved my life"

mat0 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 11:19:14 +0000

I hate that the Internet thought me now to distrust everything. In this case, I have the feeling that the author chose those words carefully to click bait us somehow without actually lying

New comment by mat0 in "The Software Development Lifecycle Is Dead"

mat0 — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:55:46 +0000

I read it for you. Spoiler alert, remained uninteresting until the end. I agree with the notion that we will have to adapt our workflows now that coding is getting cheaper (at least for now), but the author is suggesting to forgo PRs entirely and demonises humans for being slow and some sort of bottleneck. The author is suggesting that you can let agents go crazy on your codebase and that if you don't do it you are some sort of dinosaur that doesn't accept change. It's complete nonsense in my opinion.

New comment by mat0 in "I'll pass on your zoom call"

mat0 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 06:07:15 +0000

Or just open the call in the browser. It’s much easier to do that than to spin a vm. At this point I just distrust the author

New comment by mat0 in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

mat0 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 16:50:39 +0000

I don’t follow Stranger Things, so I cannot speak about the quality of the show, but I clicked on the link to see which settings the guy was talking about and I was surprised about how awful the CGI of that shot looks like. It’s hideous. Looks worse than 10 year old video games. What is that about? Am I going crazy?

New comment by mat0 in "We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs"

mat0 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 07:45:29 +0000

you cannot know. that’s why the post elaborates saying (paraphrasing) “if you realize it’s taking longer, cut your losses and move on to something else”

New comment by mat0 in "I Am Mark Zuckerberg"

mat0 — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 08:34:22 +0000

Good for you, Mark! I had a nice chuckle. On a more serious note, I really feel for the people that cannot get any kind of support and try to get some help by messaging "the owner" of the social network they are in. With big companies, you used to be able to get someone to talk to you when you had a problem. Not anymore. The best you can get is a well trained LLM

New comment by mat0 in "A WebGL game where you deliver messages on a tiny planet"

mat0 — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 01:44:07 +0000

same. sensitivity of the camera is just too high. it handles ok but so much sensitivity creates this motion sickness. had to quit after 30 seconds and I still can’t recover. but beautiful game though!

New comment by mat0 in "Nine things I learned in ninety years"

mat0 — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 10:47:55 +0000

yes. why do we listen to this guy compared to any other 90 years old person? most people would listen to him because he is monetarily successful or because “he made it”. but as he points out, most of it was luck, so there’s really no point in paying closer attention to him than to any other older person that would like to give away his or her advice. number 4 is literally “I read a meme on fb that said that you should be happy now”. great advice. i was hoping he would say something like “i saw this quote and that triggered an interest in buddhist philosophy or meditation”. instead he ends that advice with “i saw another post on fb that confirmed this idea”

i understand he has no obligation to give any good reason for his advice, he just felt like giving it, and that’s nice of him. i would just suggest younger people not to waste too much time listening to “successful people” (whatever that means) on advice because it’s usually not applicable anymore or at all and is just entertainment with no real value

New comment by mat0 in "In Defense of C++"

mat0 — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 11:03:44 +0000

Whenever I open one of these sites that asks me to confirm tracking, if it doesn’t have an easy way to cancel or reject, I just leave the page. The banner had hundreds of different companies listing “legitimate” reasons to track, and after turning off around 10, I noticed that I had hundreds to go. Sorry, I hope people enjoy your website. I just cannot see a reason to accept that amount of tracking. I don’t care that much about C++ anyway

New comment by mat0 in "Boring work needs tension"

mat0 — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 12:08:06 +0000

anyone reading this comment: don’t do this. this is not the way to work on a team.

i’ve seen so many random prs of engineers that thought this was the time to go on a rabbit whole and fix some random error they found. worse, i’ve seen regressions introduced on random “fix” PRs that had no description, no ticket, nothing. this is not team work. if you see an issue and you know how to fix it, by all means, fix it. but create a bug ticket with explicit current and expected behavior that people can read and test. if you don’t have time to create a ticket, then you don’t have time to fix random bugs

New comment by mat0 in "GPT-5 vs. Sonnet: Complex Agentic Coding"

mat0 — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 18:33:24 +0000

Not the person you were responding to but, if a company provides a service, they want you to use it instead of their competitors. No company is going to say “use ours unless you want to use the best, then use our competitor’s”. so even though I agree with you that they are not explicitly saying “this is the best model in the world”, they are definitely saying “hey this is the best we got, use it”.

New comment by mat0 in "Why English doesn't use accents"

mat0 — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:53:48 +0000

This is a fun one, because no matter how you pronounce it, if someone tries to correct you, you can just say "American vs British pronunciation"