Hacker News: nphardon

New comment by nphardon in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

nphardon — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:32:42 +0000

This is funny, i get it; but the idea that using LLM's precludes thinking is silly. We're doing some heavy lifting over here. There's a lot of noise around pie in the sky ai show n tell projects, but then there's quieter real work being done as well, with highly skilled engineers. 100x is a thing.

New comment by nphardon in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

nphardon — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:53:38 +0000

This also reflects the failings of the teachers to teach in a way that is conducive to learning given the current cultural landscape.

New comment by nphardon in "Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing"

nphardon — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:37:21 +0000

It's wild; at my shop in Silicon Valley they dropped us from unlimited use to 60% prem budget on copilot. People are walking around like zombies.

New comment by nphardon in "Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground"

nphardon — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:24:57 +0000

Yea, math is a crazy thing. just "a tool to solve problems" is a wild take. On one extreme, there's an edgy but logical / plausible hypothesis that we live in a universe of mathematical objects, and at the other, math also discovers a lot of questions, the exact opposite of solving problems.

New comment by nphardon in "I'm Done Using AI"

nphardon — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:23:10 +0000

Man, I just got into a killer flow with it, minimal guardrails, having it doing lots of independent work all the way to task completion, and my company dropped our prem token allowance to 60%. I was hitting 2k+%. So I just got hamstringed. Corporate pulled a complete 180 on us.

Would love to hear if other are in this situation.

New comment by nphardon in "Firefox AI Coding Policy"

nphardon — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:42:51 +0000

I've been telling less experienced engineers: The moment you hit submit on your change, it is your code not claudes, you wrote it, you are responsible for: understanding it, explaining it, supporting it.

New comment by nphardon in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

nphardon — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:30:58 +0000

There's tons of things I like about llm's, but I'm sick of Ai show'n tells. It feels like I'm in kindergarten.

New comment by nphardon in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

nphardon — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:39:15 +0000

"One of the things that LLMs do is plagiarism as a bigger scale."

New comment by nphardon in "Why we lose our friends as we age (2023)"

nphardon — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:08:40 +0000

Ah, I'm one of the outliers, I have more friends now and a richer, healthier social life than I've ever had before. I'm 45, I do have a 7yo kid and wife, two dogs, a full time job, just like everyone else on here for whom these are reasons for not having friends. I have too many friends, actually, but that's a good problem to have. I make a point not to make friends with coworkers and feel bad for some of the people I know who only have work friends. It reminds me of Colin Robinson "I'm gonna go hang out with my real friends, my work friends."

New comment by nphardon in "How to get better at guitar"

nphardon — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:38:28 +0000

There's some analogy around learning to play a song without using your ears and painting without using your eyes. Like the silliness on the drawing side is obvious. The benefits gained by using your ears to learn music (again this is such a silly statement when you think about it) are so huge and so overlooked by so many beginner guitar players. An hour of learning by ear is worth a week of reading. Also, as I see it, youtube is full of perpetual teachers looking for perpetual students; being a perpetual student sucks. All you need is records.

New comment by nphardon in "Issue: Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with Feb updates"

nphardon — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:08:07 +0000

I also havent noticed the degradation and I'm not on Claude Code. I'm on week 4 of a continuous, large engineering project, C, massive industrial semiconductor codebase, with Opus, and while it's the biggest engagement I've had, its a single agent flow, and it's tiny on the scale of the use case in the post, so I wonder if they are just stressing the system to the point of failure.

New comment by nphardon in "[dead]"

nphardon — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:30:25 +0000

I agree. The LLM writing turned me off to the article, and the ELI5 style is off putting.

New comment by nphardon in "Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions"

nphardon — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:29:25 +0000

Seems like my co is shedding US jobs and moving them to Taiwan, and paying up to 75% less in salary.

New comment by nphardon in "Iran War Cost Tracker"

nphardon — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:04:31 +0000

Where does this money go? I see that some is lost value, like in the downed aircraft, but what groups are profiting off this crazy flow?

New comment by nphardon in "Claude's Cycles [pdf]"

nphardon — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:02:15 +0000

Must be a fun time to work on open problems. I published my graduate research close to a decade ago, often find myself fantasizing about tackling open problems with Claude.

New comment by nphardon in "/e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem"

nphardon — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:37:24 +0000

Yes! Also shopping is an insidious thing. Now it's no longer a shopping tool. For me a common flow would be like, 1) think about some thing 2) instantly I'm scroll shopping somewhere 3) remember I'm too frugal to buy things 4) 10 minutes lost to the void. It's been really nice for me to break that particular cycle.

New comment by nphardon in "/e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem"

nphardon — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:08:03 +0000

I went *browserless on my device and it has solved my screen compulsion issues with very little downside. It has been the most effective step I've ever taken. I realized I really love msg'ing friends, having access to maps and navigation, banking, just a handful of apps (no google apps), and that all along it was the browser.

*ios doesnt let you delete Safari so I set a 10 minute timer on it, and i dont have any adblock or content filtering enabled, so it's essentially only good for brief checks (auto-shop phone number, quick news check, etc.) but is useless for anything beyond that.

New comment by nphardon in "Banned in California"

nphardon — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:56:06 +0000

honestly, you couldn't even build your own house.

New comment by nphardon in "Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems"

nphardon — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:46:03 +0000

I knew about this but never attended, so cool!

New comment by nphardon in "Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems"

nphardon — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:31:08 +0000

There's a great discussion with Stephen Wolfram on the Sean Carroll podcast. Listening to it made me think very highly of Wolfram. He's a free thinking, eccentric, mathematician, scientist; who got started doing serious work at a very young age. He still has a youthful creative approach to thought and science. I hope LLMs do pair well with his tools.