Hacker News: mekael

New comment by mekael in "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"

mekael — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 01:25:28 +0000

May i ask what industry youre in? Also, how’s the winter in SLC?

New comment by mekael in "Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance"

mekael — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:53:53 +0000

Sir, this is a Wendy’s

New comment by mekael in "On AI regulation and messaging"

mekael — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:53:03 +0000

Some of us have always had a class consciousness, we just tend not to be boisterous about it.

Mine is based on two things:

1. The fact that i grew up in poverty and never want anyone else to suffer that fate.

2. I was raised in a religious tradition that can be accurately described as socialist.

New comment by mekael in "Mythos social engineering AISI INC-2026-07-28-01"

mekael — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 04:52:40 +0000

I'm 99.9% sure that everyone is AI in that thread.

New comment by mekael in "Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI"

mekael — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:31:58 +0000

I mean, I've done that for a couple of things, but probably 90+ percent was vendored libraries and javascript which could be ignored. Sadly, this is not one of those cases, and Im guessing yours isn't either?

New comment by mekael in "Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI"

mekael — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:20:50 +0000

I've found that engineers on a large team do read every line, mainly due to the fact that the skill levels run the gamut from intern to lead, and only 1 or 2 people out of 12 might have knowledge of the application being modified.

It's actually getting worse due to "AI code bloat", for example I have 16k lines of code to review across 3 apps by the end of this week. Normally it would be a quarter of that, but what Claude produces is extremely verbose in some places and anemic in others, and I can't tell at a glance what's right and what looks right with that much ground to cover.

New comment by mekael in "Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees"

mekael — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:43:34 +0000

There’s communism the theoretical idea and “communism” the application.

The twentieth century was neither, but just authoritarianism wearing a trench-coat.

New comment by mekael in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

mekael — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:38:26 +0000

That will entail an immense amount of violence to be undertaken by the working class against those in power, unless you think they'll gladly give up all of their ill gotten gains out of the goodness of their black little hearts.

New comment by mekael in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

mekael — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:35:51 +0000

But who benefits from that economic growth? If it's only the capital owning class, and the rest of us are left in the dust, then the growth is irrelevant.

I ,for one, have read enough history to know that it's never the proles who end up benefiting.

New comment by mekael in "The Dark Night of Mathematics"

mekael — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 01:52:32 +0000

Tell me you’ve never experienced the joy of solving a math problem without telling me you’ve never experienced the joy of solving a math problem.

Also, in your scenario, the genie is used undermine all of human thought, destroy the ability for people to support themselves in the current economic system (which is in and of itself horrific already) , and is making people consider / commit suicide. Thats not a genie, thats a demon.

New comment by mekael in "AI 2040: Plan A"

mekael — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:46:12 +0000

As a society we already know how to make the lives of everyone better:

1. Stable housing

2. Access to safe drinking water

3. Access to food

4. Access to healthcare

5. Access to education

6. Stable governments

The EA community has so many "ideas" about what would help, when all they need to do is focus on those six and the world would be as close to a utopia as you or I could hope to see in our lifetimes.

I legitimately thought you were kidding about the shrimp welfare initiative, but after looking it up I was more infuriated about EA than I normally am when it comes up. I can think of several causes which would be better served with 3 million USD, and all of them take care of human beings. Living, breathing, intelligent human beings. These people should not be in any position of power or taken seriously ever.

New comment by mekael in "Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds"

mekael — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 02:56:50 +0000

Im unsure as to how "it's clear that AI is going to make that possible".

Things that help kids learn

- parents who love and care for them

- stable housing

- stable access to food

- stable access to high quality eduction provided by a human being

- stable access to healthcare

None of those are provided by AI, and never can be. The only thing that will is a thorough reimagining of the society we live in.

Note: This is all predicated on living in America, and I pre-apologize to everyone who doesn't.

New comment by mekael in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

mekael — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 02:18:35 +0000

Years ago i slid down a bannister at a dance club, caught my foot, flipped over backwards, and landed on a barstool. Having grown up poor as dirt, i knew that calling an ambulance would be at least a grand if not double that. I called an uber to take me the 15 blocks to the hospital.

Total cost was 70 bucks (10 bucks for the uber, 60 for the er copay).

The number of people here in the US who use uber as an ambulance is waaay higher than you would think.

New comment by mekael in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

mekael — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:58:24 +0000

At the end of the day doesnt that just end up being universal healthcare but with more steps?

New comment by mekael in "Calvin and Hobbes and the price of integrity"

mekael — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 04:30:03 +0000

Which one?

New comment by mekael in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

mekael — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 03:11:09 +0000

As an aside, i read this, gave you an upvote and then went to check your submission history and saw that I’d kick your rep over to 2222. Congrats!

New comment by mekael in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

mekael — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:47:49 +0000

Ive mainly been outputting them to high fidelity jpegs and then stuffing them into a cbz for portability. Works well went im reading on my ipad. As for the others i had them sorted out about a week or two after i decompiled the original binaries.

I’ve definitely kicked myself a few times for not posting about them sooner, but the fear of pissing off CondeNast tempered my willingness to show off

New comment by mekael in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

mekael — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 01:35:37 +0000

Interestingly enough, i’ve been sitting on a project for the last 12ish years where i just took the FMloader lib and used that from C# to turn the djvu files into pdfs. All that was needed was a decompiler and an hour of banging my head on it. I published some of the results a few years ago but need to go back and actually build out a full app.

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

mekael — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:10:09 +0000

Neat fact, those kind of conversations are already happening at ${DAY_JOB}.

New comment by mekael in "Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers"

mekael — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:26:23 +0000

Depending on the size of the market in your area, or the market in general, not giving two weeks is effectively blackballing yourself. The city I work in is small enough I might have trouble in the future after leaving a manager in a lurch or burning a bridge.

Is that how things should be handled? Nopers. Is it how things are due to employers having more power than employees? Yeahpers.