Hacker News: possiblydrunk

New comment by possiblydrunk in "Protect your shed"

possiblydrunk — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:03:42 +0000

Dammit! I was hoping for advice on improving and maintaining my backyard shed. My shed is not a means, it is an end. And it, too, brings me peace and joy and sometimes despair or a great laugh. Sometimes I even apply principles from work (but orthogonally) to development of my shed.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "What 81,000 people want from AI"

possiblydrunk — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:02:52 +0000

Nitpicky comment. The article says > "We call this the “light and shade” of AI: the same capabilities that lead to > benefits also produce harms. The two sides are entangled."

Why not call it a "double-edged sword" or something else? Light and shade are opposites but not necessarily two products from the same tool. It just irks me.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "Conway's Game of Life, in real life"

possiblydrunk — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:28:36 +0000

Nicely done! Scale matters. If you make something big enough relative to its expected size, it will impress and captivate, even if it's simple. General observation, not that the construction here was by any means simple.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "AI coding is gambling"

possiblydrunk — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:00:22 +0000

Fair assessment, but you seem to love "creating" rather than "programming", not that there's anything wrong with that! Pondering the merits of AI has made me realize the opposite -- I love the process and challenge of creating (the programming) even more than the final product. AI is undoubtedly helpful, but when it solves my problem for me I'm not nearly as satisfied? as if I'd solved it myself. It's like copy-pasting an answer from StackOverflow, but for a whole program. I doubt my employer will share my feelings, and I'll have to use increasingly more AI to keep up the productivity.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming"

possiblydrunk — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:52:32 +0000

Optimization usually trades complexity for speed. Complexity hinders debugging and maintenance. Don't optimize unless you have to and not before you know where the bottleneck is. Straightforward common sense advice as long as hardware is not persistently constraining.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "LLM Inevitabilism"

possiblydrunk — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 11:40:46 +0000

Inevitability implies determinism and assumes complete knowledge. Forecasts of inevitable things are high probability guesses based on the knowledge at hand. Their accuracy is low and becomes lower as the level of detail increases. The plethora of wrong guesses get less attention or are forgotten and right ones are celebrated and immortalized after the fact.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "No Hello"

possiblydrunk — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 12:09:51 +0000

It's like a protocol handshake, of course. Why transmit information until you've established that the connection works? Consider it a text modem :)

New comment by possiblydrunk in "Why do programmers need private offices with doors?"

possiblydrunk — Tue, 19 Dec 2023 15:47:26 +0000

I had the privilege of designing a small 4 office space exactly like this for our small bioinformatics developer core. It was beautiful and worked very well. Then the company's legal department decided Legal would benefit more from it and kicked us out. It goes back to how much a company values its developers.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses"

possiblydrunk — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 02:01:31 +0000

So when Google Glass came out, people using them were "Glassholes" because of the ability to record surreptitiously, albeit for a very short period. And there was no mistaking Glass. Meta's look normal and I doubt the LED indicator will draw enough attention this time around. Plus as others have noted, by the time you notice it's already too late and anyway the onus is on you to ask the wearer to stop. And this is worse, as it streams directly to social media. There should be some (legal) way to jam these devices within a certain proximity radius.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "Is this octopus having a nightmare?"

possiblydrunk — Sun, 28 May 2023 00:11:04 +0000

The best we can do is infer. We can't even know for sure what goes on in others of our own species -- we either accept what they say or infer what they might be experiencing based on our own experiences and the fact we're so similar. The further we get away from things "like us", communication falls away as does inferring based on similarity. I mean, how do you know that we even experience/"see" the same color when we both see something orange -- we agree on calling whatever we see as "orange"; but is my "orange" the same as yours? Consciousness is fascinating!

New comment by possiblydrunk in "The Worlds of Italo Calvino"

possiblydrunk — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 23:28:43 +0000

Cosmicomics is excellent. A beautiful blend of science and fantasy. So poetic.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "American drivers have a blinding headlight problem"

possiblydrunk — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 16:38:53 +0000

I look stupid, but wearing blue-blocking yellow lens glasses while driving at night has helped deal with the blinding glare.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "Daily habits of happiness experts"

possiblydrunk — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 17:05:24 +0000

Engaging in activities you feel you have control over, in general, will make you happier.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "Artist banned, told to “find a different style”- AI-made art"

possiblydrunk — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 17:59:34 +0000

Wow, that's like banning a photorealist because their work looks too much like a photograph.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "I am done. I give up"

possiblydrunk — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 12:23:33 +0000

All things end. The trick is knowing when to move on to the next thing -- quitting when things are bad, but also cashing out when things are good. Don't get stuck in the well.

I know it's frowned upon these days (perversely, in my view), but wow what resilience. @wakana should realize the value of that and how powerful that can be in the next endeavor. Maybe battered and bruised, but survived! In this case, maybe it was the wrong matchup - entrepreneurship isn't for everyone, or [bad] luck. Biggest mistake made was maybe hanging on too long -- resilience can be double-edged, too.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "Be wary of imitating high-status people who can afford to countersignal"

possiblydrunk — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 19:44:41 +0000

A key point in the article:

>"...Mild success can be explainable by skills and labor. Wild success is attributable to variance.”

>Hard work increases the likelihood of luck finding you, and hard work also prepares you for when it does.

You can't reliably produce luck, even by imitating people that are "lucky"; all you can do is increase the likelihood that you might capitalize on luck.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you"

possiblydrunk — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 12:10:04 +0000

It's easy to confuse politeness with friendship if that's what you're seeking. It's a sad story, to me.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "Art Made with Artificial Intelligence Wins at State Fair"

possiblydrunk — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 11:56:33 +0000

It's the recognition of perceived merit based on effort. If you believe the human artist did nothing more than you could have done yourself with your current skills, it's natural to devalue the work. Sometimes that effort is intellectual, sometimes it's just brute force, and most often it's reflective of years of training and honing of skills that might be commonplace. At some point you might value the artwork, but not the human artist because you don't think much effort was expended to achieve that work.

In this case the article says:

  "Allen created Théâtre D’opéra Spatial by entering various words and phrases 
  into Midjourney, which then produced more than 900 renderings for him to 
  choose from. He selected his three favorites, then continued adjusting them 
  in Photoshop until he was satisfied. He boosted their resolution using a tool
  called Gigapixel and printed the works on canvas."

The artist claims 80 hours. Is that enough effort? It's certainly not turnkey. That's the question.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "Yarrow – Old Farmer's Almanac"

possiblydrunk — Tue, 22 Nov 2022 19:29:02 +0000

Indeed. Very invasive! Spreads via roots (in addition to seeds) and is very adaptable and drought resistant. Looks pretty and has medicinal value, but beware if you mean to keep it confined.

New comment by possiblydrunk in "Consider working on genomics"

possiblydrunk — Sat, 19 Nov 2022 18:09:30 +0000

Genomics was a pretty good place for software engineers that have an interest in molecular biology; however, the pay is not generally comparable with that earned in a tech industry job. Interesting (to me) is that the software engineers that I've worked with in genomics-oriented labs treat biologists and biological data as the gold standard, while the biologists in those labs are fairly reverential towards the software engineers and computational results! Of course, both are overly optimistic ... Unfortunately, the best software engineers I worked with eventually jumped to software startups or tech industry jobs.