Hacker News: patrick451

New comment by patrick451 in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

patrick451 — Sat, 16 May 2026 23:32:23 +0000

I work in a FAANG. My sense is that most of my teammates are loving the AI. Personally, I hate the AI tools and the hype around them and what it has turned this job into. My own morale has never been lower in the 7 years I've been there and I'll probably try to switch careers or semi retire sooner or later.

New comment by patrick451 in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

patrick451 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:03:55 +0000

We should not treat this as an acceptable strategy. If we do not have a viable mitigation for the risks of AI, then AI should be banned from public usage, just like nuclear weapons.

New comment by patrick451 in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

patrick451 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:48:15 +0000

Exactly. At the very least, we should be treating AI like nuclear weapons. It can exist but it should be locked away and never used.

New comment by patrick451 in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

patrick451 — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 06:25:58 +0000

> Sure, we built something in 2 mos that would have otherwise taken us 6 mos, but now I'm fixing the mess that we caused.

You didn't actually build it in 2 months.

New comment by patrick451 in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

patrick451 — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 06:21:35 +0000

There are countless other stories about the AI's spouting complete bullshit. This easily wastes as much time as they save.

New comment by patrick451 in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

patrick451 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:29:22 +0000

Context: I work in robotics. We use mostly c++ and python. The entire team is about 200 though the subset I regularly interact with is maybe 50.

I basically don't use AI for coding at all. When I have tried it, it's just half working garbage and trying to describe what I want in natural language is just miserable. It feels like trying to communicate via smoke signals.

I'll be a classical engineer until they fire me and then go do something else. So far, that's working. We've had multiple rounds of large layoffs in the last year and somehow I'm still here.

New comment by patrick451 in "My “grand vision” for Rust"

patrick451 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:55:14 +0000

This comparison is useless until rust commits to a stable ABI.

New comment by patrick451 in "Claude is an Electron App because we've lost native"

patrick451 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:10:44 +0000

> The first thing you need when you make something new is making it work, it is much better that it works badly than having something not working at all.

It is better for something to not exist than for a shitty version to exist. Software doesn't get better over time, it gets worse. If you make a bad, suboptimal choice today chances are that solution becomes permanent. It's telling that all of your examples of increasing efficiency are not software.

If are aren't going to do it well, don't do it.

New comment by patrick451 in "Visual introduction to PyTorch"

patrick451 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 02:31:24 +0000

Tiny suggestion: make the visualization for torch.zeros and torch.ones have the same y-axis limits so the difference is visually separated.

New comment by patrick451 in "I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)"

patrick451 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 17:27:37 +0000

At least you can read the switch statement. One of the worst features of c++ is all of the code that gets generated for you automatically.

New comment by patrick451 in "The Waymo World Model"

patrick451 — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:21:39 +0000

No human needs to have seen an elephant standing in the road before to know that you should not drive through an elephant standing in the road. These are not "long tail" events as the waymo says. It's a big object in the road. You have seen that hundreds of thousands of times. Calling that a long tail event is an admission that your model has zero ability to generalize.

New comment by patrick451 in "A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content"

patrick451 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:59:40 +0000

Ideally, we would just ban AI content altogether.

New comment by patrick451 in "AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was"

patrick451 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:39:19 +0000

After you have owned a car for five years, can I come steal it?

New comment by patrick451 in "Don't rent the cloud, own instead"

patrick451 — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 13:34:15 +0000

It's basically the same dynamic as hedonic adjustment in the CPI calculations. Cars may cost twice as much now they have usb chargers built in so inflation isn't really that bad.

New comment by patrick451 in "AI didn't break copyright law, it just exposed how broken it was"

patrick451 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:33:44 +0000

If I create something, I should get to dictate how it is used not just until I die but for eternity.

New comment by patrick451 in "X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok"

patrick451 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:16:00 +0000

Until the EU gets their act together on free speech, it's high time the united states hits them with aggressive economic sanctions.

New comment by patrick451 in "List animals until failure"

patrick451 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 13:36:38 +0000

This game thinks buffalo and bison are the same thing and elk and deer are the same thing. Which is absurd, they even require buying different tags when hunting.

New comment by patrick451 in "YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers"

patrick451 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:38:09 +0000

I don't think it's fine for large companies to intentionally lose money to drive smaller competitors out of business. In fact, I think this practice should be illegal and that all who participated should be in jail.

New comment by patrick451 in "How I estimate work"

patrick451 — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:10:23 +0000

These are just bad contractors. I used to work for a remodeling company. We came in under time on the vast majority of projects because the guy who ran the company knew what he was doing and built slack into the schedule.

New comment by patrick451 in "Understanding C++ Ownership System"

patrick451 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 13:12:35 +0000

Python3 drops support for older versions of python3 all the time. Every single release comes with a bunch of deprecated and removed features. There is a very strong chance that a python 3.7 codebase is totally broken on 3.14. Almost no language takes backwards compatibility as seriously as c++ does.