Hacker News: qarl

New comment by qarl in "Claude's new system prompt doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics"

qarl — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 01:50:50 +0000

I don't understand what you're saying. Could you try again?

New comment by qarl in "LLMs as a Cognitive Virus"

qarl — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 23:33:25 +0000

Yes. That's my point.

New comment by qarl in "LLMs as a Cognitive Virus"

qarl — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 22:35:15 +0000

> Agent Smith became an actual virus in the 2nd and third movies.

OOO. I never put that together before. Very nice. Very hypocritical of him.

New comment by qarl in "LLMs as a Cognitive Virus"

qarl — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 22:24:51 +0000

To be fair - I know several people for whom this would be an improvement.

New comment by qarl in "LLMs as a Cognitive Virus"

qarl — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 22:13:28 +0000

You continue to refuse to answer the question in my argument. I am not inclined to answer yours, nor do I see the point of it.

New comment by qarl in "LLMs as a Cognitive Virus"

qarl — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 22:11:44 +0000

> I'm not sure what the point you're making is.

I'm making the point that the viral sensationalism in this article can be equally applied to automobiles, computer, telephones, calculators, and toothbrushes.

If the article had merely been what you said "is AI worth the cost" then I would not have taken issue with it.

New comment by qarl in "LLMs as a Cognitive Virus"

qarl — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 22:09:05 +0000

Do you truly believe that AI will prevent people from thinking?

It seems clear to me that people will continue to think, but in different ways.

I hate to bring this analogy up again, but it seems impossible to escape: did losing the ability to do long division really impact humanity?

New comment by qarl in "LLMs as a Cognitive Virus"

qarl — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 22:02:10 +0000

In cooking food we lose a great deal of our immunity to parasitic infections. Cooking food absolutely does make us more vulnerable to uncooked food.

> Or is it always the case during an automation?

Obviously. Any time we make a useful discovery and begin using it, we become dependent on using it.

New comment by qarl in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

qarl — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 08:24:39 +0000

If you have an actual criticism of my argument you'll need to be more clear to be understood.

New comment by qarl in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

qarl — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 05:38:41 +0000

Well - not really a circle. I keep saying the same thing over and over and you keep throwing arguments at it, unsuccessfully.

New comment by qarl in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

qarl — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 04:19:41 +0000

Right.

And what I'm saying is I refuse to believe the Linux kernel approval procedures are that inefficient. Therefore, your belief "bottleneck was most likely not mechanical code changes" is most likely incorrect.

It would be interesting to get the actual answer to this question.

EDIT: Substantially changing your argument after posting isn't nice. But to answer your charge - no - I never made that claim.

New comment by qarl in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

qarl — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 03:57:40 +0000

The lag there is not due to the review time. How many maintainers were involved? 300? Because I'm still finding it hard to understand how the work of 300 people handling 300 commits cannot be parallelized into months (per your own stat.)

New comment by qarl in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

qarl — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 03:34:05 +0000

My apologies. I did not want to be downvoted for promoting my own material.

https://github.com/qarl/qscreensaver

New comment by qarl in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

qarl — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 03:32:29 +0000

> An LLM is not a mechanical automated system.

Pretty sure that's exactly what LLMs in coding harnesses are.

New comment by qarl in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

qarl — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 03:30:56 +0000

Yes, I understand the difference in rigor.

I refuse to believe the six year delay here was getting people to test a patch.

Which, actually, Claude Code will also do quite well.

New comment by qarl in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

qarl — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 03:15:49 +0000

Well - except in this conversation it's incredibly relevant. It took six years to do this work when the work is likely mostly mechanical and could have been done much more quickly and safely with an automated system.

I thought automation would be interesting to HN - given the context and the fact it was not used.

New comment by qarl in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

qarl — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 03:12:14 +0000

It's a shame you're misrepresenting what is actually going on.

In another comment here I explained that I have run a test: asking Claude Code to add a substantial feature to 270 different C programs.

Despite your beliefs - it went extremely well.

New comment by qarl in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

qarl — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 02:09:13 +0000

I ran a test where I added a "light" mode to xscreensaver: unique changes to over 270 different C programs.

It mostly did an amazing job in a short period of time.

EDIT: Of course I get downvoted for saying this. HN isn't interested in reality any more.

New comment by qarl in "Linux eliminates the strncpy API after six years of work, 360 patches"

qarl — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 02:04:24 +0000

Am I going to be the first person to ask this after five hours? Really?

Wouldn't this work be extremely easy to implement with an LLM coder?

New comment by qarl in "Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves NP-Complete Problems"

qarl — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:37:59 +0000

To be fair - I'd be more shocked by the result that a physical process can solve NP complete problems.

If that were true, I'd have expected Mother Nature to have exploited it a long time ago.