Hacker News: mmcnl

New comment by mmcnl in "Ask HN: Does anyone else feel like nothing matters anymore?"

mmcnl — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 18:34:11 +0000

Why are we not curing cancer? We should.

New comment by mmcnl in "Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?"

mmcnl — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:04:49 +0000

Yeah this is misleading cherrypicking. Also it's super slow. Not impressed with slow efficient chips. Anyone can make a chip efficient by reducing clock frequency and sacrificing performance in the process.

New comment by mmcnl in "Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?"

mmcnl — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:00:32 +0000

Easy, it's priced much lower in the US on purpose so that reviewers will directly compare it with the Neo to get more favorable reviews, while in fact it should be compared to the Air from a price perspective (and then it will lose on everything big time except the 120Hz display). It's all misleading marketing.

MacBooks simply have the best value proposition. Compared to the competition at similar price point they are much faster, have much better build quality, better displays, better battery life, less fan noise, etc. Also much higher resale value.

New comment by mmcnl in "Can Intel finally beat ARM on performance per Watt?"

mmcnl — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 11:56:13 +0000

You're completely right. Power draw scales non-linearly with clock frequency. Therefore one can easily increase perf/W by lowering the clock frequency, at the expense of performance. This is not new information, this is basic physics. The Apple M-chips were not revolutionary because of their efficiency, but because they were (and still are) efficient AND fast. In fact the fastest consumer chips on the market.

So agreed, this is extremely misleading.

New comment by mmcnl in "“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers"

mmcnl — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:19:18 +0000

For me this metaphor only makes the original point more credible.

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

mmcnl — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:14:15 +0000

There are many math problems that are simply puzzles: intellectually interesting but nothing worth of value depends on it. To me it would be more impressive if we could define hard problems that need to be solved up front and see how the models deal with that.

The results OpenAI demonstrated are impressive, but it also looks like they threw a lot of compute at it just to get results. How many tokens did they waste on problems they couldn't solve? Applying inference infrastructure on a large number of math problems at scale we haven't seen before to me doesn't demonstrate an exponential curve in model abilities.

New comment by mmcnl in "AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions"

mmcnl — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 18:26:50 +0000

Sooo true, AI never asks questions. It just makes up requirements. I think it's because the models are trained on benchmarks where task completion is an important metric. But I'd rather have it not finish a task and specify why than make up stuff along the way.

New comment by mmcnl in "AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job"

mmcnl — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 11:00:24 +0000

I recognize this, LLMs never stop, they pursue the dead end at all costs.

New comment by mmcnl in "AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job"

mmcnl — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 10:56:40 +0000

The real value I think never really was the code, it was the learnings from the journey to get to the code. The struggle allowed for iterative discovery of the real requirements and technical challenges. With AI you skip that path and it looks like you've achieved your goal only on a superficial level.

I think this doesn't mean AI is useless (it's not), it's just that we have to think harder about the requirements and end-stage verification and have less trust in the process to result into valuable outcome.

New comment by mmcnl in "What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality"

mmcnl — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:41:41 +0000

Indeed. I wonder how much AI will do in industries with longer feedback loops that are much noisier. I think the field of software is a unique field in that sense.

New comment by mmcnl in "What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality"

mmcnl — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:35:36 +0000

I think other industries are late, but also will see less productivity gains. In software engineering agents have the benefit of very short feedback loops that provide extremely actionable insights which allows the agent to very quickly iterate towards the final solution. This is much less the case in other industries such as law and finance I think. The first pass of the agentic loop is usually something that barely works (you don't even get to see it with the latest models). If that first pass is the primary output in other fields with no tight feedback loops, then the productivity boost will be much lower than in software.

New comment by mmcnl in "Jellyfin founder Andrew leaves team"

mmcnl — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:10:41 +0000

Plex has a great Tizen app. It just works on my TV same as Netflix.

New comment by mmcnl in "Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report"

mmcnl — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:34:33 +0000

Hardware revenue is 3x the services revenue, even with half the margins it still generates more profit than services. I get that Apple would like to increase service revenue but they are a hardware company at heart and their financial statements show it too

New comment by mmcnl in "Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report"

mmcnl — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:13:23 +0000

The battery life stinks, the build quality is subpar and the fan runs all the time. If you don't care about anything that makes the MacBook Pro a premium device, then sure you can be overpriced consumer-grade slop that has a slight edge in specs (except CPU). But it's a miserable trade-off.

New comment by mmcnl in "Asahi Linux 7.1 Progress Report"

mmcnl — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 13:10:09 +0000

This is just plain wrong. Apple generates most revenue and profits with hardware and it's not even close.

New comment by mmcnl in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

mmcnl — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 19:15:35 +0000

The world would be a better place without AI, OpenAI, Anthropic and all others. It only immerses the world into chaos, dystopia and increased inequality. So far nothing for the public good has come out of it.

New comment by mmcnl in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

mmcnl — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 19:12:10 +0000

The AI "market" is not a free market. It needs regulation.

New comment by mmcnl in "Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers"

mmcnl — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:10:16 +0000

Very normal in The Netherlands, was kinda surprised to learn it's not a thing in English speaking countries?

New comment by mmcnl in "Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers"

mmcnl — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:04:54 +0000

Not in some ways. The value of working code that meets the requirements and generates revenue is very high, it's a gift.

New comment by mmcnl in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

mmcnl — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:12:59 +0000

I agree here. Sure, certain tasks that would take weeks are just one prompt away now. But out of a group of 100 people, how many are able to come up with the correct prompt?