Hacker News: proofofcontempt

New comment by proofofcontempt in "Cloudflare Meerkat - Globally distributed consensus"

proofofcontempt — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:19:25 +0000

Every cloudflare blog post that gets posted on here shares that quality now

New comment by proofofcontempt in "The UK Joins the Pirates"

proofofcontempt — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:23:30 +0000

It's a weird premise to compare the UK government actions to those of Israel and defend the sanctity of Russia and the Cameroonian shipping registry.

Also, the following line is absolutely laughable.

> Fortunately Putin is neither as war hungry nor as politically desperate as Starmer.

New comment by proofofcontempt in "How to earn a billion dollars"

proofofcontempt — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:50:33 +0000

The pursuit of everlasting growth that pg describes inevitably results in cheating. At a certain point the market reaches a saturation point and if you're capitalising on every possible opportunity to retain your high growth rate, that will include hoarding resources and circumventing consumer protections.

New comment by proofofcontempt in "Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health"

proofofcontempt — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 23:00:34 +0000

> Although a large body of research finds that workers want to work remotely, our findings suggest that workers may not realize the costs of remote work for their well-being

Sentences like this just make my eyes roll. 'Workers' have agency to make judgement on what has a positive and what has a negative effect on their well being.

Personally not having to commute led to me being able to attend meetup groups in the evenings where I formed an amazing group of friends and met my current partner. It had such a massively positive impact on my well-being.

New comment by proofofcontempt in "Orchestrating AI code review at scale"

proofofcontempt — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:00:10 +0000

Human review is about learning and there's an implied social contract in that someone is giving you their time to make you better. It isn't necessarily necessary but replacing it with AI shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why it is part of the process.

New comment by proofofcontempt in "Orchestrating AI code review at scale"

proofofcontempt — Fri, 29 May 2026 10:40:03 +0000

I'm not sure the people integrating it into CI process understand what CI is.

New comment by proofofcontempt in "The White House Intervened to Get a $620M Deal for Donald Trump Jr"

proofofcontempt — Fri, 29 May 2026 09:51:05 +0000

Watching this from outside the US, what gets me is not that corruption exists (shocker!) but how brazen they are with doing all of this in the open. Somehow it seems to be working in their favour as it appears to be normalising such behaviour.

New York passes pied-a-terre tax

proofofcontempt — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:37:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/28/new-york-mamdani-pied-a-terre-tax-passes.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48309584

Points: 278

# Comments: 441

New comment by proofofcontempt in "'Hidden datacentre tax' costing Irish households millions"

proofofcontempt — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:54:06 +0000

Governments cater to corporations rather than to people. It's an unpopular opinion on here since so many people profit from the industry, however the fact is AI and data centres are seen incredibly negatively by the majority of society and the rhetoric and lobbying practices of the companies pushing for this new age are the reason.

New comment by proofofcontempt in "Disagreement Among Frontier LLMs on Real-World Fact-Checks"

proofofcontempt — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:59:28 +0000

Let's be real, we all asked Claude to summarise this because it was written by Claude

New comment by proofofcontempt in "Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks"

proofofcontempt — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:57:15 +0000

What does this show that we didn't know already? LLMs cannot provide accurate answers to questions where data is not included in their training sets. This doesn't appear to have much substance

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

proofofcontempt — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:14:57 +0000

This argument of "if we don't do it, someone else will" to justify theft is so tiring. The companies doing the stealing are collectively the same ones that have power to prevent it, if they were incentivised to do so.

New comment by proofofcontempt in "Bigger context windows won't save your agent"

proofofcontempt — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:18:04 +0000

> The issue is not just whether the model can fit the context. It is whether the context given to it is useful or not.

This is why human in the loop is always going to be necessary.

New comment by proofofcontempt in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

proofofcontempt — Wed, 06 May 2026 20:54:19 +0000

I'm with you on all apart from code review.

Our team has tried a couple tools. Most of the issues highlighted are either very surface level or non-issues. When it reviews code from the less competent team members, it misses deeper issues which human review has caught, such as when the wrong change has been made to solve a problem which could be solved a better way.

Our manager uses it as evidence to affirm his bias that we don't know what we're doing. It got to the point that he was using a code review tool and pasting the emoji littered output into the PR comments. When we addressed some of the minor issues (extra whitespace for example) he'd post "code review round 2". Very demoralising and some members of the team ended up giving up on reviewing altogether and just approving PRs.

I think it's ok to review your own code but I don't think it should be an enforced constraint in a process, because the entire point of code review from the start was to invest time in helping one another improve. When that is outsourced to a machine, it breaks down the social contract within the team.

New comment by proofofcontempt in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

proofofcontempt — Wed, 06 May 2026 18:26:51 +0000

The CTO got fired last month, presumably for poor performance. And the director that has taken is place is now all in on AI because he's desperate to turn things around but has no idea how.

New comment by proofofcontempt in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

proofofcontempt — Wed, 06 May 2026 18:23:01 +0000

Pretty much this. It's like a cult mentality. Those who critique the approach or push back get sidelined. There are demos every week of essentially Claude loops and MCP integrations and those of us not reaffirming the ideas stopped getting invited.

Heard some wild statements in the past few months. A couple that come to mind:

- "we don't need to review the output closely, it's designed to correct itself" - "it comes up with the requirements, writes the tickets, and prioritises what to work on. We only need to give it a two or three line prompt"

The promise of this agentic workflow is always only a few weeks away. It's not been used to build anything that has made it to production yet.

New comment by proofofcontempt in "Appearing productive in the workplace"

proofofcontempt — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:51:14 +0000

What is described here closely resembles my experience too.

My company is full of managers who haven't written code in years. They hired an architect 18 months ago who used AI to architect everything. To the senior devs it was obvious - everything was massively over engineered, yet because he used all the proper terminology he sounded more competent to upper management than the other senior managers who didn't. When called out, he would result to personal attacks.

After about 6 months, several people left and the ones who stayed went all in on AI. They've been building agentic workflows for the past 12 months in an effort to plug the gap from the competent members of staff leaving.

The result, nothing of value has been released in the past 18 months. The business is cutting costs after wasting massive amounts on cloud compute on poorly designed solutions, making up for it by freezing hiring.