Hacker News: mwigdahl

New comment by mwigdahl in "Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)"

mwigdahl — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:34:35 +0000

Neal Stephenson's work is outstanding in my opinion, although some find it polarizing. My favorite of his is _Anathem_, followed closely by _Seveneves_.

Iain Banks's science fiction novels (mostly set in the Culture, but he does have others) are also great.

New comment by mwigdahl in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Where Do We Go from Here?"

mwigdahl — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:42:32 +0000

And you should be able to. But people who don't want that or don't have the means to afford it can have the benefits of automobile transport without the capital expense.

New comment by mwigdahl in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

mwigdahl — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:41:31 +0000

Agreed. And I think he was wrong. Literacy allows individual humans to be exposed to and understand far more of the world's culture and knowledge than the conveyance of knowledge through recitation of epic poems would ever have allowed.

Hell, I would never have had the pleasure of arguing with you without it! :)

New comment by mwigdahl in "Claude Opus 4.7"

mwigdahl — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:30:49 +0000

That depends a bit on token efficiency. From their "Agentic coding performance by effort level" graph, it looks like they get similar outcome for 4.7 medium at half the token usage as 4.6 at high.

Granted that is, as you say, a single prompt, but it is using the agentic process where the model self prompts until completion. It's conceivable the model uses fewer tokens for the same result with appropriate effort settings.

New comment by mwigdahl in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

mwigdahl — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:42:25 +0000

The real question is whether we're worse off or better off overall than we were in Socrates' Athens.

New comment by mwigdahl in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

mwigdahl — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:38:36 +0000

Ironically, AI facilitates self-driving cars, which promise to _reduce_ the need for private automobile ownership.

New comment by mwigdahl in "We May Be Living Through the Most Consequential Hundred Days in Cyber History"

mwigdahl — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:24:09 +0000

Agreed, call it future shock or the Singularity or just overall outrage fatigue, people just aren't reacting to these kinds of things at a level commensurate with their risk or danger.

New comment by mwigdahl in "Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage"

mwigdahl — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:41:19 +0000

He mentioned this in his original comment:

"CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_COMPACT_WINDOW=400000"

New comment by mwigdahl in "Artemis II and the invisible hazard on the way to the Moon"

mwigdahl — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:06:54 +0000

Only weapons-grade milk.

New comment by mwigdahl in "Claude Managed Agents Overview"

mwigdahl — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:50:15 +0000

Given how far ahead OpenAI was in mindshare, monthly users, and revenue over Anthropic when Claude Code came out, I think we can conclude there's at least some substance behind claims of Claude Code's better product quality.

New comment by mwigdahl in "The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok"

mwigdahl — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:11:48 +0000

I prefer using it via the terminal. Might be anchoring bias, but I have had issues with slash commands not registering and hooks not working in the plugin.

New comment by mwigdahl in "81yo Dodgers fan can no longer get tickets because he doesn't have a smartphone"

mwigdahl — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:06:44 +0000

While we're at it, let's get rid of the ADA. Those disabled people expecting the world to cater to their needs specifically are so abusive to those of us with perfectly functional bodies and flexible minds.

New comment by mwigdahl in "Chess in SQL"

mwigdahl — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:28:14 +0000

Can you comment on whether you wrote the article yourself or used an LLM for it? To me it reads human (in a maybe slightly overly-punchy, LinkedIn-esque way), but a lot of folks are keying on the choppiness and exclusion chains and concluding it's AI-written.

I'm interested in whether others are oversensitive or I'm not sensitive enough... :)

New comment by mwigdahl in "I Quit. The Clankers Won"

mwigdahl — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:08:48 +0000

It's not just you. I feel the same thing, and I saw it in practice helping my son study for a chemistry test just last night. He had worked through a bunch of problems by following the steps in his notes and got the right answers, but couldn't solve them without the notes because his comprehension of why he was taking all the steps wasn't solid.

Once we addressed that, he did great solo. Working the mechanics of the problems with the notes helped, but it was getting independent understanding of the reason for each step that put everything together for him.

New comment by mwigdahl in "New Washington state law bans noncompete agreements"

mwigdahl — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:59:01 +0000

The problem is it won't get as far as trial, if the old company gets wind of it early enough (and they often do). The old company will reach out to the new company and politely inform them they believe they have grounds for a noncompete suit. The new company will either indemnify the worker, or (far more often) drop them as not worth the hassle, and take their #2 choice.

The legislation needs to change. The situation as it stands is ripe for barratry and bullying.

New comment by mwigdahl in "The Jellies That Evolved a Different Way to Keep Time"

mwigdahl — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:11:07 +0000

Based on what? This reads as pretty standard science journalism to me. She uses em-dashes, but so do I. It's a real punctuation mark with legit uses, and certainly not a 100% LLM marker.

New comment by mwigdahl in "Warranty Void If Regenerated"

mwigdahl — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:31:34 +0000

I took that phrase differently. The story makes the point that the AIs fail when metrics of quality can't be expressed in words. The use of a bare "adequate" reinforces the opacity of the coffee's quality. Certainly it would have worked well to use more words to convey specifics of the "adequacy" as you mention, but IMO that would have undercut the link back to the theme of human ineffability.

Obviously everyone's mileage may vary, but I didn't see this as a huge defect, and actually felt it worked pretty well.

New comment by mwigdahl in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

mwigdahl — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:09:30 +0000

"The process is the punishment"

New comment by mwigdahl in "Every layer of review makes you 10x slower"

mwigdahl — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:19:00 +0000

I hope you mean "flow state" and not actually "fugue state".

New comment by mwigdahl in "Kagi Translate now supports LinkedIn Speak as an output language"

mwigdahl — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:11:25 +0000

Interesting that the model knows that maintenance employees at Google are contractors...