Hacker News: michaelbrave

New comment by michaelbrave in "EFF is leaving X"

michaelbrave — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 05:40:31 +0000

yes it was this, not the EFF but the Trump admin, it was a surprisingly normal and level headed policy take, and I was pleasantly surprised, but then it turned out it wasn't their official stance, it was removed and replaced with a statement and stance that was nearly the opposite. But for the life of me I can't find it again, but I swear I didn't imagine it.

New comment by michaelbrave in "EFF is leaving X"

michaelbrave — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 05:19:24 +0000

I don't think they shifted their stance, I think the stances of the left and right shifted around them. For example I remember during Trumps first term they announced a rather sensible stance on the internet/net neutrality via an official blog post, and shortly after (maybe even the next day) it turned out that intern who wrote the piece was fired and it was removed. It's not that the stance was particularly anti-right etc, but that the positions of the right solidified more towards pro-big business rather than anti-regulation as they had previously been trying to be.

New comment by michaelbrave in "Microsoft's 'unhackable' Xbox One has been hacked by 'Bliss'"

michaelbrave — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 22:35:18 +0000

I would like to try running linux on an xbox series-x (but thought it wasn't in the cards), it might make for a decent openclaw setup.

New comment by michaelbrave in "I built a programming language using Claude Code"

michaelbrave — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:37:15 +0000

a few months back I had a similar thought and started working on a language that was really verbose and human readable, think Cobal with influences from Swift. The core idea was that this would be a business language that business people would/could read if they needed to, so it could be used for financial and similar use cases, with built in logic engines similar to Prolog or Mercury. My idea was that once the language starts being coded by AI there are two directions to go, either we max efficiency and speed (basically let the AI code in assembly) or we lean the other way and max it for human error checking and clear outputs on how a process flows, so my theory was headed more in that direction. But of course I failed, I'd never made a programming language before (I've coded a long time, but that's not the same thing) and the AI's at the time combined with my lack of knowledge caused a spectacular failure. I still think my theory is correct though, especially if we want to see financial or business logic, having the code be more human readable to check for problems when even not a technical person, I still see a future where that is useful.

New comment by michaelbrave in "Revise age verification terms for MidnightBSD"

michaelbrave — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:30:56 +0000

not fringe loonies, big business, Meta and Palantir (and others) are financially pushing for it.

New comment by michaelbrave in "Millions Of Americans can now claim Canadian citizenship but must prove descent"

michaelbrave — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:50:43 +0000

I imagine the ones that want to move to Canada are not the 'merica' types and would fully agree with you on most of those points.

New comment by michaelbrave in "Verified Spec-Driven Development (VSDD)"

michaelbrave — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 07:12:56 +0000

Same, I've sorta ended up converging on make a rough plan, get second and third opinions from various AI's on it, sort of decide and make choices while shaping the plan, which we turn into a detailed specsheet. Then follow the 'how to design programs' method which is mostly writing documentation first, then expected outcomes, then tests, then the functions, then test the flow of the pipeline. This usually looks like starting with Claude to write the documentation, expectations and create the scaffolding, then having Gemini write the tests and the code, then have codex try to run the pipeline and fix anything it finds that is broken along the way. I've found this to work fairly well, it's looser than waterfall, but waterfall-ish, but it's also sort of TDD-ish, and knowing that there will be failures and things to fix, but it also sort of knows the overall strategy and flow of how things will work before we start.

New comment by michaelbrave in "A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification"

michaelbrave — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 06:55:33 +0000

I'm still in the process of having to write letters to lawmakers about the stupid 3D printer law, now I'm going to have to write letters for this stupid thing too. Like how hard is it to take a day to have a conversation with someone that just knows a little bit about these things, a hobbyist even. The minimal amount of question asking, hell they could even ask an LLM and it would still give a better answer.

New comment by michaelbrave in "No Bookmarks"

michaelbrave — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 06:43:06 +0000

I keep thinking about something like a search engine integration that would suggest relevant bookmarks at the top of your search results. It might have been even cooler back when we had things like delicio.us and if we could have gotten recommended relevant links from people we followed's bookmarks too. But even knowing how to code like I do I sorta can't think of how to do it, maybe a browser extension that injects over google? I guess I've more thought about how it would interact than how to actually make it.

New comment by michaelbrave in "California's new bill requires DOJ-approved 3D printers that report themselves"

michaelbrave — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:15:16 +0000

This is bullshit. It's a clear power grab to re-seize democratized means of production, and added surveillance. Both suck. The proposed bill in Washington is even worse, and blanket bans nearly any kind of machining or manufacturing that doesn't use surveillance. I'm going to have to actually write letters to lawmakers now as if there wasn't enough bullshit happening already.

New comment by michaelbrave in "Two days of oatmeal reduce cholesterol level"

michaelbrave — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 07:36:12 +0000

I don't think it's the fiber.

I did a similar unscientific experiment in the past where I did a juice fast for two weeks and had bloodwork done before and after (similar bodytype, unhealthy, overweight, high blood sugars, high cholesterol etc). Basically the doctor was shocked how all my numbers became the same as someone really healthy during the fast. So I think the lack of junk and calorie restriction is doing more than the fiber.

New comment by michaelbrave in "Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking"

michaelbrave — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 21:21:22 +0000

I sort of already had an experience where it did kinda. I was consulting with it potential fashion choices to upgrade my work uniform, to look professional but still creative, basically to look more like a creative director. It recommended brands, colors, styles etc. Then I was asking about eyeglass frames showed it three pictures, described my facial features and it was like "you have to buy this one now" more enthusiastic than expected. It wasn't ads or anything but there was a bit of salesyness in there.

New comment by michaelbrave in "Claude’s memory architecture is the opposite of ChatGPT’s"

michaelbrave — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 16:07:10 +0000

I kinda figured they were more interested in enterprise customers rather than consumer customers.

New comment by michaelbrave in "Claude’s memory architecture is the opposite of ChatGPT’s"

michaelbrave — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 16:06:12 +0000

I always kinda figured that AGI would need to be sort of similarly modeled like a brain, for which LLMs could at least fit the function for language. Meaning AGI won't be LLM based, but maybe parts of it could be.

New comment by michaelbrave in "In the long run, LLMs make us dumber"

michaelbrave — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 02:25:30 +0000

Kinda, I mean so our brains shift once we are able to write things down instead of having to memorize completely, similarly when the internet happened we now could find answers quickly and stopped remembering or writing down things that were easy to find. So now thinking will shift again, dumber might be the right word, but it might not be, our thinking would shift away from computation type of knowledge and lean more toward making good judgments or having clearer goals type of knowledge.

New comment by michaelbrave in "Physically Based Rendering in Filament"

michaelbrave — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 01:42:31 +0000

that's going to be a confusing name with the connections to 3D printing

New comment by michaelbrave in "The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers"

michaelbrave — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 18:55:15 +0000

I've seen quite a bit of this too, the other thing I'm seeing on reddit is I guess a lot of people really liked 4.5 for things like worldbuilding or other creative tasks, so a lot of them are upset as well.

New comment by michaelbrave in "What's going on with gene therapies?"

michaelbrave — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 21:13:29 +0000

I think a lot of our diseases if looked at genetically instead of symptoms-wise that we will probably find out that it's actually multiple conditions that we just group together for manifesting in similar ways. I've felt this in my own life with ADHD things where it seems to me that there are at least 3-4 different types of ADHD and that they respond to treatments/medications differently, and this makes me think that many other conditions might be similar, especially if we start looking at them genetically.

New comment by michaelbrave in "What's going on with gene therapies?"

michaelbrave — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 21:10:22 +0000

More likely the profit would then be in dealing with animal husbandry types of modifications instead. Cows/chickens that don't get sick, that kind of thing.

New comment by michaelbrave in "Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking"

michaelbrave — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 11:47:23 +0000

If LLama goes away we would still get models from China that don't respect the laws that shut down LLama, at least until China is on top, they will continue to undercut using open source/model. Either way, open models will continue to exist.