Hacker News: prewett

New comment by prewett in "Taking on CUDA with ROCm: 'One Step After Another'"

prewett — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:04:14 +0000

I figure it must be a cultural problem. ATI was known for buggy graphics drivers back in The Day, if I remember correctly. I certainly remember not buying their cards for that reason. Apparently after AMD bought them, they have been unable to change the culture (or didn't care). The state of ATI drivers has always been about the same.

New comment by prewett in "Artemis II is competency porn"

prewett — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 13:52:27 +0000

In the same way that Cassini was a derivative of Galileo, but around Saturn and with a working antenna. Or Perseverence is a derivative of Curiosity, which is a derivative of Opportunity. Or philosophy is just footnotes on Plato. Or classical music is everyone trying to escape from the shadow of Bach. Or fantasy is just a poorer version of Tolkien.

I suppose there's truth to that, but it unfairly and unhelpful minimizes the accomplishment, and it collapses the awe that the article talks about. If you are viewing the photos as essentially the same, you are shortchanging yourself, because Artemis was not a means for producing photos, those are more like artifacts of production. Again, that would collapse the awe of Artemis.

(Also, technically, I don't think that Artemis is a derivative of Apollo, more like a re-implementation from scratch.)

New comment by prewett in "Native Instant Space Switching on macOS"

prewett — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:20:33 +0000

Spaces is what used to known in Linux as virtual desktops (maybe it still is), and that is how I think of it. Or as virtual monitors. Right now I have desktop one for local system iTerm2 and Firefox, desktop two for client 1 (terminals, IntelliJ IDEA), desktop three for client 2 (VirtualBox, terminals), desktop four for incidental stuff that needs a mostly empty desktop, and desktop five for Chrome (for things that need it), and GIMP and Inkscape (as needed). This way everything stays where I put it, including which windows over which other ones. So I can switch to D1 to look up some documentation on a function, then back to D2 to use that knowledge. Or on my personal laptop I can keep my coding project up one desktop and do the daily web surfing on another, and just switch desktops to have the coding project right where I left it.

(You do use a window manager, btw, it's the thing that puts the title bars on your windows and lets you move them around. On macOS it's integrated in, but on Linux you have to choose one. There are many, all of which have some failing. Except for sawfish, whose failing is that it is no longer maintained.)

New comment by prewett in "I've sold out"

prewett — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:49:43 +0000

If the "launching soon" on tleilaxu.com is to be believed (unlikely), you might find yourself in that world. It'd certainly be a compelling name for a biotech company, although I'd find a company with that name a very troubling sign.

New comment by prewett in "Ask HN: How do you handle marketing as a solo technical founder?"

prewett — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:52:32 +0000

Wow, that's the rare kind of thing where I might consider quitting on the spot.

New comment by prewett in "US reputation hits 'depths not seen this century' – and 'may never recover'"

prewett — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:09:22 +0000

I think a more reasonable reason is that much of the electorate was tired of woke politics. Unfortunately, Trump is just as bad, but in a more traditional sort of bad. (Fortunately, he is also obviously bad. Unfortunately, being obviously bad means we get things like this war.) I also think that many of the Trump voters were aware of his many failings, too, but Harris was more of the same while Trump was definitely anti-woke. I think if the Democrats had run someone traditionally centrist they would have won easily. I think that was why Biden won over Trump; he seemed more traditionally centrist.

New comment by prewett in "NYC families need over $125k in income to live in any borough"

prewett — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 23:09:26 +0000

Apparently the rich have already been moving out of NYC: from 2010 to 2022 the percent of people in the US with $1+ million in federal taxable income dropped from 6% to 4% [1]. A whole bunch left during the pandemic (unsurprisingly), according to [2], but it did not say if they came back afterwards. These aren't great articles, just the first that DDG gave me, but it suggests that there may actually be a trend.

[1] https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/opinion/with-the-rich-already-...

[2] https://capwolf.com/why-millionaires-are-fleeing-new-york-in...

New comment by prewett in "A forecast of the fair market value of SpaceX's businesses"

prewett — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:34:15 +0000

I'm not sure that the continental Colonies brought in much revenue, though. The individual colonists could do quite well, but viewed as an financial investment for the British Crown (which they were not, but that's the OP's analogy) I don't think they were very good. Plus, when they wanted to extract revenue via taxes, the Colonies revolted. Eight years of war probably cost a pretty penny, too.

(Sourcing my claim is difficult. I include this reference [1], which says that the Caribbean colonies were more profitable than all the continental colonies together. It doesn't comment on the cost of the war.)

[1] https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/...

New comment by prewett in "I quit. The clankers won"

prewett — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:16:29 +0000

Even worse, the training set probably includes a lot of code that needed review but didn't get it...

New comment by prewett in "I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era"

prewett — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 01:12:28 +0000

Seemed like satire to me. The author is pretty intentionally oblivious, and even suggests that other people see flaws in their writing that they don’t see. Also, the most egregious errors are right after comments about grammar and such.

New comment by prewett in "The bot situation on the internet is worse than you could imagine"

prewett — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 18:19:16 +0000

The cynic in me thinks that they’re mining bitcoin on our phones… And after completing, it claimed the page was misconfigured.

New comment by prewett in "Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right"

prewett — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:59:17 +0000

> You’re just a bag of meat.

I submit that there is a difference between me and a corpse. Or between a steak and a cow in the field.

"Well, okay, you're just (living) flesh on bones." There's a difference between me and a zombie (or, if you prefer, brain-dead me). There's a difference between me and lab-grown organs [1], or even between me and my kidney cut out of me.

> It’s not even an interesting question.

Consciousness is an active area of research (ergo, interesting enough for some people to devote research to it): biologically [2] and philosophically [3].

Unless you enjoy nihilism, there are some serious problems with materialism (that is, matter is all that there is), which we are encountering. There are also some philosophical problems with it; a cursory search turned up this journal article [4].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8889329/

[2] https://www.nature.com/subjects/consciousness

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

[4] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/philosophy/article/a...

New comment by prewett in "Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?"

prewett — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 05:06:55 +0000

> individual contributors are evaluated by their execution on deterministic tasks.

Ha! Apparently the author hasn't been asked "how long will it take to code this?" yet... And isn't a common developer complaint that management does not know how to evaluate them, and substitutes things like how quickly a task gets completed, with the result that some guy looks amazing while his coworkers get stuck with all his technical debt?

New comment by prewett in "I am leaving the AI party after one drink"

prewett — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:55:06 +0000

> My capitalist side says it's always the product not the process.

Your capitalist side needs to read some Deming. "Your system is perfectly tuned to produce the results that you are getting." Obviously, then, if you want better results, you need to improve your system.

Also "the product" is ambiguous. Is it the overall product, like how the product sits in the market, how the user interacts with it to achieve their goals, the manufacturability of the product, etc.? That is Steve Jobs sort of focus on the product, and it is really more of a system (how does the product relate to its user, environment, etc). However, AI doesn't produce that product, nor does any individual engineer. If "the product" means "the result of a task", you don't want to optimize that. That's how you get Microsoft and enterprise products. Nothing works well together, and using it is like cutting a steak with a spoon, but it has a truckload of features.

New comment by prewett in "I am leaving the AI party after one drink"

prewett — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:48:53 +0000

I think adding new features is exactly the sort of place where AI is terrible, at least after you do it for a while. I think it's going to have a tendency to regenerate the whole function(s), but it's not deterministic. Plus, as others have said, the code isn't clean. So you're going to get accretions of messy code, the actual implementation of which will change around each time it gets generated. Anything not clearly specified is apt to get changed, which will probably cause regressions. I had AI write some graphs in D3.js recently, and as I asked for different things, the colors would change, how (if) the font sizes were specified would change, all kinds of minor things. I didn't care, because I modified the output by hand, and it was short. But this is not the sort of behavior I want my code output to have.

I think after a while the accretions are going to get slow, and probably unmaintainable even for AI. And by that time, the code will be completely unreadable. It will probably make the code written by people who probably should not be developers that I have had to clean up look fairly straightforward in comparison.

New comment by prewett in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"

prewett — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:04:30 +0000

Wow, 48k for $14000. Now you can get a MBP with a million times more memory for $3500 or so. Whereas that CPU was clocked at 1 MHz, so CPUs are only several thousand times faster, maybe something like 30,000 times faster if you can make use of multi-core.

New comment by prewett in "Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)"

prewett — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 22:39:51 +0000

I think the reason that I like dark mode is that I have had floaters in my eyes since at least age 14. They stand out against a bright white window background, but I don't notice them at all on a dark window with light text.

Or maybe it's just because that's how IBM PC DOS, BASICA, etc., as well as the VT100, VT220, VT300s that I used did it.

(Also, I think displays should paint with light, and having a white background is painting darkness on a computer screen. It's particularly bad for presentation slides. A light background just screams "PowerPoint presentation".)

New comment by prewett in "Landmark L.A. jury verdict finds Instagram, YouTube were designed to addict kids"

prewett — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 14:07:00 +0000

Not to disagree with you, but in the case of Civilization, I do find it addicting in both senses. It is one of two games that I just cannot play, because I will be up until 3am playing. (Puzzles and Dragons was the other one, I think I had to uninstall it the day after I downloaded it)

New comment by prewett in "Earthquake scientists reveal how overplowing weakens soil at experimental farm"

prewett — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 02:49:38 +0000

I think the article's theory on why people plow is wrong: it is not to let the soil hold more water, but to get rid of weeds. I know someone who did no-till for a while, and he found that you have to spray with glyphosate to keep the weeds down. Eventually the weeds that had evolved to be glyphosate-resistent spread to his area, and he had to go back to regular plowing. He said that the no-till really improved the soil, though.

New comment by prewett in "Twelve-Tone Composition"

prewett — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:07:33 +0000

I spent a while learning English change ringing, on specially mounted church bells. It is basically an exercise in combinatorics: the "change" is applying the pattern so that the bells ring through all possible sequences that the pattern can do. At first it sounds like noise, but after a couple of years, you do start to notice a certain musicality to it. As I understand Schoenberg, one of his ideas was that you cannot re-use a note until all the others have been used, which is essentially the same requirement that change ringing has. (The bells are heavy and are swinging through their full arc, so you cannot change their order very quickly.) After realizing this, I listened to some Schoenberg and found it much more listenable than I did in college.