Hacker News: mikenew

New comment by mikenew in "When did Google get so weird?"

mikenew — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 21:22:56 +0000

I'm increasingly not seeing the point of google search. If I have an agent that can find whatever I ask it to, including with constraints like "peer reviewed journal articles only" or "working code published on github", why would I be using google's kinda-shitty LLM to do a worse version of that? Search results are just SEO-stuffed AI slop so I find nothing there of value either.

I genuinely think I have not used traditional web search in months.

New comment by mikenew in "StarCraft returns in 2030 as an open-world shooter"

mikenew — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 23:25:27 +0000

There is no one left at Blizzard with any RTS experience. They've long since left for smaller studios.

SC2 is my favorite game of all time and I would love nothing more than an SC3. But if there ever is to be a real spiritual successor it won't be from Blizzard.

New comment by mikenew in "iPhone Duo"

mikenew — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:50:17 +0000

That's true, but if you wanted to boil down the art of acting to one sentence it would be "do not pretend; actually do".

Jobs was a great actor in that he did not pretend to be excited. Whatever coaching is being given here is exactly in the opposite direction of acting.

New comment by mikenew in "AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too"

mikenew — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:10:09 +0000

Ha, well that's good because I would hate to be labeled an "LLM advocate". I've been on the negative side of the conversation many times, and I think the downsides are very real and often ignored. But calling them useless is just not reality.

As far as system prompts and skills, my approach has been to start with nothing and add very specific instructions as I notice issues or feel like I need them. Mostly around trying to keep it terse, kill the obnoxious rhetoric ("It's not X. It's Y"), and give specific guidance on how to write code. Skills are things like "use edge-tts to generate spoken audio for this answer and send it to me" kind of thing.

New comment by mikenew in "AI Can Make You Suck Faster Too"

mikenew — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 06:33:29 +0000

> The chatbot recommended some of the dumbest shit you could possibly do

The "I tried it and it sucked" is borderline conspiratorial at this point. There are enough talented, thoughtful developers saying there's something real here, and it is worth believing them and investing some time to understand it, even if you come out the other side and decide you don't want to use LLMs.

Use a very good model. Set up a good harness. Spend some time on your system prompts and skills. Develop your intuitions about how the model works, what it's good at, how to scope the work, and how to steer it. Recognize when it's alleviating menial work and recognize when it's making choices you really need to understand yourself. Be patient and accept that the failures are going to be very painful for a while.

Don't write it off until you've genuinely seen the upsides.

New comment by mikenew in "How I use LLMs to learn complex topics"

mikenew — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:49:55 +0000

I've decided that the main thing I'm building is my own mental model. You can take notes, create docs, put graphs and websites together, but unless I'm just trying to generate some reference material the only real objective is to develop the understanding and intuitions inside my own brain.

So I have the LLM offer a very short explanation of something, and from there's it's just me asking questions. Anything that feels fuzzy or not fully internalized is something I poke at until I'm satisfied.

It really has helped me develop a sensitivity to what I understand vs what I don't, and the ability to drill into any part of it is amazing.

New comment by mikenew in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"

mikenew — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:07:38 +0000

It's not a tactical failure of the US; it's a strategic one. The US operates a tremendously powerful military, but that doesn't change the fact that the war with Iran was a tremendous strategic blunder. "Moronic" is a pretty fair characterization.

New comment by mikenew in "Apple defeats liability for not scanning iCloud for CSAM"

mikenew — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:25:39 +0000

Apple is on the side of privacy if it serves their marketing. Which is why they would rather build and normalize CLIENT SIDE CONTENT SCANNING so they can continue to market iCloud as "secure and private".

If Apple's interests sometimes align with ours then great. I'll take it. But don't attribute to this ~5 trillion dollar company some kind of altruism.

New comment by mikenew in "Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK"

mikenew — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:30:39 +0000

Yeah at 120hz each frame is 8ms. So you're only missing a single frame around 30% of the time.

I certainly want my latency as low as I can get it. But I'm pretty skeptical that anyone is truly feeling the difference of a couple ms.

New comment by mikenew in "45% of enthusiasts 'seriously considering' leaving Sony for PC"

mikenew — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:55:59 +0000

Current top 5 played games on the Steam Deck are: Slay the Spire 2, The Binding of Isaac, Dave the Diver, Stardew Valley, and Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 is the only one you can consider AAA, but Larian is hardly an EA or Blizzard.

The big AAA studios recycle the same formulas and push graphical quality (mostly downstream of Unreal Engine improvements) because they are risk averse. Similar to big comic-book-hero films. It's not what consumers want and it's increasingly starting to show. AAA is struggling badly while indie has been on an absolute tear the past few years.

New comment by mikenew in "GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse"

mikenew — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:50:07 +0000

Arcan is such a fascinating project that I've never quite managed to get my head around.

Midjourney's Full Body Ultrasound [video]

mikenew — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:20:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nzzpUKhj1M

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48769128

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by mikenew in "Migrate from OpenClaw"

mikenew — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:57:56 +0000

That was my experience a couple months ago, and until someone shows me real evidence of something valuable they've made with it, I'm not wasting my time on this stuff again.

New comment by mikenew in "Apple WWDC 2026"

mikenew — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:03:10 +0000

Authenticity requires vulnerability and that's not something Apple can do.

An AI Agent Progresses Towards Idiocy, Not Expertise

mikenew — Thu, 14 May 2026 20:20:14 +0000

Article URL: https://holdtherobot.com/blog/an-ai-agent-progresses-towards-idiocy-not-expertise/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48140700

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by mikenew in "Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving"

mikenew — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 06:13:12 +0000

I use Opencode, both directly and through Discord via a little bridge called Kimaki.

https://github.com/remorses/kimaki

New comment by mikenew in "Qwen3.6-Max-Preview: Smarter, Sharper, Still Evolving"

mikenew — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:59:38 +0000

GLM 5.1 was the model that made me feel like the Chinese models had truly caught up. I cancelled my Claude Max subscription and genuinely have not missed it at all.

Some people seem to agree and some don't, but I think that indicates we're just down to your specific domain and usage patterns rather than the SOTA models being objectively better like they clearly used to be.

New comment by mikenew in "Z.ai doubles it's coding plan prices"

mikenew — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 03:28:30 +0000

I've found GLM 5.1 to be extremely good, as long as you keep the context under 100k or so. But I do agree; the actual service is rough. It's often unusable during peak hours.

I imagine they're trying to slow down the acquisition of new customers because they're so overloaded. But yeah at double the price it doesn't seem worth it anymore.

New comment by mikenew in "Z.ai doubles it's coding plan prices"

mikenew — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:24:36 +0000

I can't find an announcement on this, but here's the archived subscription page from a couple days ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20260410092340/https://z.ai/subs...

The Max plan has doubled, and the Lite and Pro plans have more than doubled. No change in usage limits.