Hacker News: placebo

New comment by placebo in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

placebo — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 02:00:07 +0000

I think the great advantage of AI in software is that it enables you to create code faster. I think that the great disadvantage is that it tempts you to create code incredibly faster.

New comment by placebo in "Archive of Byte magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975"

placebo — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:26:35 +0000

I think that is a valid opinion, but don't think there is any conclusive evidence to make it a valid fact (while of course not disagreeing with "fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem" part). Would be happy to learn otherwise.

New comment by placebo in "Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975"

placebo — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:16:13 +0000

If you're old, I guess that makes me ancient. Byte is what got me hooked on the path I walk to this day, though back then it would be far beyond my wildest dreams to believe that in my lifetime it would be possible to hold an intelligent conversation with software, and everything that entails

New comment by placebo in "The Importance of Being Idle"

placebo — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 05:35:40 +0000

and the problem with always needing something to show is that you can never find peace...

New comment by placebo in "When do we become adults, really?"

placebo — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 08:55:56 +0000

I think what the parent comment was hinting at is that there is no absolute separator between a non-adult and an adult. It is a thousand different things and the type of game you enjoy playing is not necessarily a good indicator on its own.

New comment by placebo in "Thinking Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning"

placebo — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 09:46:00 +0000

You already stated the reason you think why so many people are in total denial. If indeed the reason is indeed a sense of threat to what people take themselves to be then I would be very surprised if the response would have been any different. Whether this indeed is the case is what remains to be seen. I for one do believe there is something different going on here than yet another technological advancement, but again - time will tell

New comment by placebo in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

placebo — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 07:05:48 +0000

Grok's thoughts on the matter:

"In an ideal world, I'd want xAI to emulate the maturity Anthropic showed here: affirm willingness to help defend democracies (including via classified/intel/defense tools), sacrifice short-term revenue if needed to block adversarial access, but stand firm on refusing to enable the most civilizationally corrosive misuses when the tech simply isn't ready or the societal cost is too high. Saying "no" to powerful customers—even the DoD—when the ask undermines core principles is hard, but it's the kind of spine that builds long-term trust and credibility."

It also acknowledged that this is not what is happening...

New comment by placebo in "Ask HN: How did you learn to code?"

placebo — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:17:39 +0000

Basic on a RadioShack TRS-80. Guess I'm one of the older dinosaurs here.

New comment by placebo in "Believe the Checkbook"

placebo — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 07:53:42 +0000

The very fact that people are arguing with a non-existent author signals that whatever generated the content did a good enough job to fool them today. Tomorrow it will do a good enough job to fool you. I think the more important question is what this means in terms of what is really important and what we should invest in to remain anchored in what matters.

New comment by placebo in "Please just try HTMX"

placebo — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:30:49 +0000

This got me thinking: I am not about to fight windmills and the future will unfold as it will, but I think the idea of "LLM as a compiler of ideas to high-level languages" can turn out to be quite dangerous. It is one thing to rely on and not to be able to understand the assembly output of a deterministic compiler of a C++ program. It is quite another to rely on but not fully understand (whether due to lazyness or complexity) what is in the C++ code that a giant nondeterministic intractable neural network generated. what is guaranteed is that the future will be interesting...

New comment by placebo in "The AI bubble is 17 times bigger than the dot-com bust"

placebo — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 20:32:54 +0000

Even if this is true, a possible takeaway is that after the bubble bursts and the dust settles, AI's effect will be 17 times stronger than that of the Internet... Personally, I think it will end up being much higher, but that doesn't mean I'm going to invest in it any time soon

New comment by placebo in "RFCs: Blueprints of the Internet"

placebo — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 20:19:26 +0000

I actually did exactly that for a product back in the days when there was no open implementation. IRC, SMTP, POP3, DNS. Good times :)

New comment by placebo in "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work"

placebo — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 09:28:51 +0000

Really surprised there in no mention of William of Ockham - you know, the guy that made razors...

New comment by placebo in "Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine"

placebo — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 18:25:30 +0000

Thank you. Was subscribed to it around 1981-1983. Eagerly waited every month for it to make its way across the Atlantic so I could dig into all the fascinating new technologies. I'm sure it had a great influence on my interests and eventual career.

New comment by placebo in "GPT-5 leaked system prompt?"

placebo — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 06:28:44 +0000

I'm not saying this isn't the GPT-5 system prompt, but on what basis should I believe it? There is no background story, no references. Searching for it yields other candidates (e.g https://github.com/guy915/LLM-System-Prompts/blob/main/ChatG...) - how do you verify these claims?

New comment by placebo in "Learn touch typing – it's worth it"

placebo — Sat, 31 May 2025 09:01:44 +0000

The correct analogy to me is that being able to run fast will not help you that much in building a rocket to take you to the moon. I'm open to changing my mind though if presented with a solid counter argument.

New comment by placebo in "Learn touch typing – it's worth it"

placebo — Sat, 31 May 2025 07:32:20 +0000

While I can definitely see the ability to type faster as an advantage in some cases, I don't think I'll ever bother going through the process of learning it. From decades of software development I can type fast enough for whatever it is I need without looking at the keyboard and not once have I felt that the bottleneck of my productivity is the the speed that I type. Most of the time goes into thinking how to do it right so that it doesn't have to be done again... And with code generation becoming better all the time, I believe the abstraction layers were one will have to spend more time on will get even higher.

New comment by placebo in "Human"

placebo — Thu, 15 May 2025 09:17:27 +0000

Where do you think morality fits into this game? It seems that we agree that underneath it all is unfathomable and ineffable magic. The question is how does this influence how you act in the game?

New comment by placebo in "Phind 2: AI search with visual answers and multi-step reasoning"

placebo — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 20:43:13 +0000

They are indeed labels, just like complex numbers are labels and just like natural numbers are labels. All of them can be regarded as imaginary if one wants to nitpick but all are very useful imaginary models

New comment by placebo in "When will we fix the tools that run the world?"

placebo — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 06:28:37 +0000

When the means become the end things start to go bad. When one's ego becomes the goal then Moralizing is more satisfying than understanding.