Hacker News: michaelcampbell

New comment by michaelcampbell in "My new obsession: A horse-racing board game of pure luck"

michaelcampbell — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:04:28 +0000

> character creation in the rpg classic traveller.

This is half the game. I fondly remember a few "game days" in the early 80's with some friends spending hours "rolling" Traveller characters. Partly because it was quite possible for your character to due DURING GENERATION, before the "rpg" part of the game actually started.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills"

michaelcampbell — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:27:48 +0000

> Turns out the humans weren't so bad after all...

The people pushing AI _over_ humans never thought they were. They just don't care about 'good' or 'bad', only 'time-to-market'. A bad app making money is better than a good one that isn't deployed yet. And who cares about anything past the end of the quarter? That's the next guy's problem.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "Show HN: Auto-identity-remove – Automated data broker opt-out runner for macOS"

michaelcampbell — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:36:32 +0000

There are "show hn" submissions for things that people just want to show off multiple times a week.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "Colossus: The Forbin Project"

michaelcampbell — Sun, 17 May 2026 11:54:49 +0000

I've worked with companies whose infosec dept. is little more than "see tool alert, ask user what's going on", and then keep searching for the right _tool_ than injecting any human agency in that loop.

If any role is ready for an LLM to take over (or even a shell script), it's that one.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "O(x)Caml in Space"

michaelcampbell — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:13:25 +0000

> the “Ox” in the name is to evoke “oxidizing”

Hah, I was reading it as `0x`, a common prefix indicating hexadecimal, though I can't say my brain made any leap as to why "0xCAML" would be any more hex than standard.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

michaelcampbell — Thu, 14 May 2026 17:44:20 +0000

> Many of my professors were from other countries. I literally wouldn’t have an education without immigrants.

Curious take; do you think if there were a no-immigrant law on the books those professorial positions would have gone completely unfilled? You _GOT_ an education with the help of immigrants, but that does not imply you wouldn't have had they not been there.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "Don't hijack my mouse pointer"

michaelcampbell — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:42:09 +0000

Ouch, that is awful.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "Don't hijack my mouse pointer"

michaelcampbell — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:41:13 +0000

There's an old, but good, set of browser plugins called "don't fuck with paste" that helps a little, at least.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "Coursera and Udemy are now one company"

michaelcampbell — Tue, 12 May 2026 13:29:52 +0000

As a purchaser of many Udemy courses (and yes, there are good ones), I'm waiting for the enshittification to begin.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged"

michaelcampbell — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:19:24 +0000

"this is AI" is the new "This is shopped", but without the "I can tell by the pixels" rejoinder.

I mean sometimes they're right, but honestly in this day and age does that even matter?

New comment by michaelcampbell in "Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged"

michaelcampbell — Fri, 08 May 2026 20:17:53 +0000

Were you attempting to give us an example of the Goombah Fallacy? Because this is a picture perfect one.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "I want to live like Costco people"

michaelcampbell — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:27:11 +0000

I'm reminded of a comedian's bit I heard recently (he does a lot of "crowd work")

> So, what do you guys want to do? Feel like pooling all the cash we have and going to Trader Joe's to buy an apple?

(TBH, I think he said "whole foods" there, but the sentiment is the same.)

New comment by michaelcampbell in "AI slop is killing online communities"

michaelcampbell — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:17:25 +0000

> You're absolutely right. The problem was so small that SO only had to make a site-wide survey, make a couple of public statements, big administrative changes and a big campaign to earn hearts and minds back.

The SO population decline started before LLMs, too.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

michaelcampbell — Thu, 07 May 2026 12:05:15 +0000

I think there's a continuum here, too. I've heard it said, in jest, mind, that LLM's square the dev. It turns a 1.5x dev into a 2.25x dev, but it also turns a 0.75x dev into a ~0.56x dev.

I think the exponent of 2 is probably too high, but it's not a bad approximation of a very messy reality.

There is also the division of people who value the thing being produced vs. valuing the actual production of that thing, whether or not its used. I don't see one side here being "right", necessarily, but when a company is behind it one is certainly more valued, and I think not incorrectly.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "Red Squares – GitHub outages as contributions"

michaelcampbell — Wed, 06 May 2026 14:46:37 +0000

> I’ve personally can’t remember the last time there was an outage that prevented me from doing work.

You and I are in different domains. It's not daily, but I can't remember the last time I (in my company) went a week WITHOUT having to workaround some outage. Perhaps semantics, but I can "do work" through most of them, but that work isn't getting built or deployed in the same time frame it would have been had the outages not occurred. So "affected" is at least weekly for me.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers"

michaelcampbell — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:26:12 +0000

I do exactly this for the half dozen or so ports that I do care to remember.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "HashiCorp co-founder says GitHub 'no longer a place for serious work'"

michaelcampbell — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:59:28 +0000

Don't forget the "..., and no one/nothing is ing" clause.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "CJIT: C, Just in Time"

michaelcampbell — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:42:51 +0000

It goes to https://dyne.org/cjit/tutorial.html for me, and very much works as I would expect it to (chromium engine browser, MacOS)

New comment by michaelcampbell in "Show HN: Rip.so – a graveyard for dead internet things"

michaelcampbell — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 11:32:36 +0000

The trust is dead, though. Not by all, but not by none either.

New comment by michaelcampbell in "CJIT: C, Just in Time"

michaelcampbell — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:40:00 +0000

Looks interesting and fun, but in no instance of any C compiler I've come across is the "classic example" of "hello, world" using `fprintf(stderr, ...)`

To each their own I guess.