Hacker News: pyridines

New comment by pyridines in "Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera"

pyridines — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 23:11:26 +0000

What I hate about my new Toyota's volume knob is that there is no indication of volume level in the UI, and the knob itself doesn't ratchet. So I have absolutely no feedback about how much louder or quieter it's going to get when I turn the knob. If I have no music going, but I'm waiting to hear the next GPS instructions, how can I make sure I'm going to hear them? If I'm not sure where the volume is at right now, I can't, unless I turn it and then try and trigger some sound effect or something. It's needlessly complicated.

New comment by pyridines in "Extreme Heat conference cancelled due to extreme heat warning"

pyridines — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 06:38:38 +0000

> no need to tear them down after a couple of decades

Where are people constructing buildings that need to be torn down after a couple decades? This is a refrain I've heard about construction (in the US?) several times in discussions like these, and I find it very puzzling.

New comment by pyridines in "When I reject AI code even if it works"

pyridines — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 04:50:53 +0000

IME it's Claude that pushes back, and Codex that just does the thing. It's happened once or twice where I've told Claude bluntly and directly "do this" and it responded "no, here's why that's a bad idea..." Maybe it's just my CLAUDE.md.

Not sure if there are sycophancy benchmarks for coding agents

New comment by pyridines in "ChatGPT's image generator can be manipulated to produce violent, sexual content"

pyridines — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 07:05:24 +0000

An image model could probably generate gore as long as there was, say, both PG-13 violence and surgery photos in the training set. There's probably no way to prevent the ability of the model to generate disturbing imagery without also sacrificing its ability to make acceptable things.

New comment by pyridines in "Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw""

pyridines — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:33:17 +0000

'censorship' may be too strong a word, but there is something unprecedented about this. AI tools are supposed to be general-purpose and able to assist with all sorts of tasks. It's expected that they are restricted when it comes to "unsafe" content like illegal or nsfw information and activities. However, this is the first time, to my knowledge, that an AI tool has been restricted from assisting with something that's perceived as a threat to the AI company.

New comment by pyridines in "When AI writes the software, who verifies it?"

pyridines — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 04:44:37 +0000

In my experience, an agent with "fresh eyes", i.e., without the context of being told what to write and writing it, does have a different perspective and is able to be more critical. Chatbots tend to take the entire previous conversational history as a sort of canonical truth, so removing it seems to get rid of any bias the agent has towards the decisions that were made while writing the code.

I know I'm psychologizing the agent. I can't explain it in a different way.

New comment by pyridines in "OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub"

pyridines — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 15:49:08 +0000

It is ridiculously more expensive and complicated under the hood, technically, but to the user, the sheer convenience of being able to text the computer "hey, when I get an email like X, inform Y and do Z" and that's it, you're done, is unmatched.

New comment by pyridines in "The Performance Revolution in JavaScript Tooling"

pyridines — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 08:36:57 +0000

Some nitpicking.

> Modern JavaScript applications aren't just a few scripts anymore — they're sprawling codebases with thousands of dependencies, complex module graphs, and extensive build pipelines.

This has been true for at least a decade.

The very next paragraph:

> JavaScript-based tools that were once "good enough" now struggle to keep up, leading to sluggish build times, laggy editor experiences, and frustratingly slow feedback loops.

The tools really weren't "good enough", even back then, by these metrics. JavaScript tooling has been slow and bloated on large codebases for just as long.

New comment by pyridines in "Human brains are preconfigured with instructions for understanding the world"

pyridines — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:10:19 +0000

Animal intelligence is often underestimated, (e.g. there's a famous test that shows that chimpanzee working memory is better than ours) but our use of language is qualitatively different from other animals. Some animals have rudimentary communication, but no other animal is capable (as far as we know) of recursive, infinitely variable language structure like us.

New comment by pyridines in "React vs. Backbone in 2025"

pyridines — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 19:15:54 +0000

> spaghettification is also a non-issue, as long as the framework defines clear containers for spaghettis

Sorry, but I disagree strongly with this. When there is, inevitably, a bug that the LLM can't fix, someone's going to have to read all that spaghetti, and they'll curse whoever put it there. "clear containers for spaghetti" is a pipe dream, all abstractions leak, and the bug may very well be in the spaghetti. "Just start over" is unrealistic for large, complex apps.

Of course, if you really have a solution for this, that would be incredible.

New comment by pyridines in "FFmpeg moves to Forgejo"

pyridines — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 04:33:04 +0000

they're referring to the infamous Corporate Memphis style which is frequently used in big tech branding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Memphis

New comment by pyridines in "My favorite use-case for AI is writing logs"

pyridines — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 04:03:40 +0000

It's not unreasonable to briefly forget details like that, especially when you're dealing with a multi-language codebase where "how do I make a log statement?" requires a different pattern in each one.

New comment by pyridines in "Juneteenth in Photos"

pyridines — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 21:53:34 +0000

Another American holiday coming up with an equally useless name is Fourth of July. Nobody seems to have a problem with that name, and nobody I know calls it Independence Day. Neither Fourth of July or Juneteenth are great names out of context, but they both have histories behind them and can't be changed anymore.

Heck, Juneteenth is a better name, since it is not literally month+day.

Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books

pyridines — Tue, 20 May 2025 16:45:42 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/05/chicago-sun-times-prints-summer-reading-list-full-of-fake-books/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44043524

Points: 27

# Comments: 0

New comment by pyridines in "TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users"

pyridines — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 19:27:15 +0000

I was dumbfounded too, but NBC explains in this same article:

> "The law banning TikTok [...] allows the president to grant a 90-day extension before the ban is enforced, provided certain criteria are met."

New comment by pyridines in "Teacher caught students using ChatGPT on their first assignment. Debate ensues"

pyridines — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 05:17:44 +0000

I agree - if I was a student, I would be very tempted to use an LLM for this sort of coursework-irrelevant busywork assignment, especially if I had other work on my plate. It's not so hard to rationalize using it for this type of thing vs. an "actual" assignment, all due respect to the professor, who I'm sure means well

New comment by pyridines in "Doctor-prescribed videogame for ADHD"

pyridines — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 00:18:21 +0000

A shame there's only one doctor left :(

New comment by pyridines in "We made an animated movie in 8kB"

pyridines — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 02:32:47 +0000

Oh, that's nothing. I present to you a 1 byte program that outputs the complete works of Shakespeare:

The interpreter, written in Rust (for performance), evaluates the command `a` by printing to STDOUT a particular payload included in the runtime.

New comment by pyridines in "Ubisoft Says Out Loud: We Want People to Get Used to Not Owning What They Bought"

pyridines — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 18:32:50 +0000

Here's my two cents, not directed towards you, but to the discussion in general.

If someone wants to lease a product to you, and you would rather they sell it, that doesn't give you the right to pirate it. When the only way to buy a thing is to "buy" a misleading lease, piracy becomes more "permissible", as in people will blame you less for pirating it, but that doesn't make it morally good.

It's obviously a bad thing for the publisher to make it seem like you're buying something, then pull the rug out from under you. It's extremely misleading, maybe it should be illegal. It's definitely a bad thing, even if it's all technically there in the fine print that nobody reads. Pirating the thing in response to this is a situation where two wrongs don't make a right. It's debatable, sure, but it's morally gray at best.

No matter how you slice it, you're still depriving the creators/publishers/etc of the money they ask for in return for the thing you want. Maybe you don't like the publisher, maybe you think the platform is evil, but you are still taking what doesn't belong to you.

A big reason it's bad is the plain ol' categorical imperative. If everyone did it, there would be no more music, movies, games, etc, because the people making them wouldn't get paid. That's true regardless of how the thing is sold.

If you don't like how they're selling it, boycott it. That's fine. It's not like we're talking about essential goods like shelter or food. Most of the time, the discussion is around entertainment.

TL;DR Pirating is morally gray at best, but it is not 100% morally good, and I wish people would be honest about that.

New comment by pyridines in "OpenAI drops ban on military tools to partner with The Pentagon"

pyridines — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 01:47:30 +0000

I'm reminded of the Itchy and Scratchy clip where they each pull out bigger and bigger guns on each other, until finally the earth explodes.