Hacker News: riddlemethat

New comment by riddlemethat in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

riddlemethat — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:46:05 +0000

Universities today are seen as debt manufacturing facilities. Debt that cannot be discharged. AI is seen as an act of war against the world’s working classes. Rich people aren’t building bunkers in foreign countries and buying yachts the size of a town because we ran out of land in America. Buckle up for a wild tumultuous period of human history.

New comment by riddlemethat in "Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers"

riddlemethat — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:32:53 +0000

I’m imagining dozens of people worldwide sharing your nostalgia for Vista.

New comment by riddlemethat in "Anthropic acquires Stainless"

riddlemethat — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:59:10 +0000

In the niches there are riches and boring businesses build wealth. Congrats!

New comment by riddlemethat in "Legacy Update for Windows 8.1 for x64-based Systems"

riddlemethat — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:53:22 +0000

Or Windows 8.x in general

New comment by riddlemethat in "AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise"

riddlemethat — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:04:10 +0000

Open source models apply pressures on the low end of the market. The paid models are so much better that they can charge based on value for enterprises.

New comment by riddlemethat in "A Meta employee gets real about the horror of working there"

riddlemethat — Sat, 16 May 2026 13:41:21 +0000

People actually use AI. People do not use virtual reality headsets.

New comment by riddlemethat in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

riddlemethat — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:08:26 +0000

That regulatory framework would add a lot of cost to providing online services. There would be far fewer people able to use them because companies would pass that cost to their users/customers.

New comment by riddlemethat in "Claude for Small Business"

riddlemethat — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:06:34 +0000

The downvotes are because my post was clear and they did not understand the point. We did not replace our CPA. We replaced the book keeper. The human CPA is the human in the middle reviewing the work of the AI. There is no responsible business owner alive today who would trust an LLM to replace their CPA, IMHO.

New comment by riddlemethat in "Codex is now in the ChatGPT mobile app"

riddlemethat — Fri, 15 May 2026 04:04:17 +0000

I stopped trying to use Claude to do anything with 4.7 because it sucks up so many tokens so quickly. I use the 4.6 model still and have switched to Codex for larger tasks. It also works better at more complex coding tasks than Claude for web apps that have python backends and typescript front ends.

New comment by riddlemethat in "Claude for Small Business"

riddlemethat — Thu, 14 May 2026 13:25:49 +0000

Csv files are fine with a bot categorizing the expenses.

No need to have a desktop app to do entry.

Why would I worry about an LLM properly cataloging expenses (book keepers job) when we keep human in the loop with the CPA to check their work?

I think you don’t understand the problem the AI solved/reduced costs on.

New comment by riddlemethat in "Claude for Small Business"

riddlemethat — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:14:01 +0000

I run a small business. I used AI to do book keeping for my LLC with two members (I have a partner). We had used a bookkeeper in previous years but we couldn’t ignore the potential cost savings of using AI. We have a CPA who said the books look great so we will likely no longer need a human to do book keeping. We were able to cancel Quickbooks because of this. Quickbooks (andvanced plan) alone was $3k/year in savings.

New comment by riddlemethat in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

riddlemethat — Mon, 11 May 2026 12:18:11 +0000

The only “real” competition for Google Workspace is Microsoft if you need a full collaboration solution beyond just email, and 99.999% of customers of such hosted solutions need that full solution. It’s why Dropbox worked even though hacker news users probably roll their own sync solution.

New comment by riddlemethat in "Gemini API File Search is now multimodal"

riddlemethat — Sun, 10 May 2026 12:29:58 +0000

It’s still the best option for uptime, document analysis (on a cost basis), and Google is less likely to experience a significant cybersecurity breach than a less established company. They’ll be fine as long as they stay in the game even if they never have a Ferrari again plenty of people buy Toyota.

New comment by riddlemethat in "Using coding assistance tools to revive projects you never were going to finish"

riddlemethat — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:22:37 +0000

What’s fun for me these days is picking up a project I started with an LLM doing agent driven development a few months ago or even a year ago and hit a wall and stopped being able to be picked up by the latest version of Claude and/or codex and bringing it further. Some can now launch some still are too complex for the agent to build. But, it’s getting easier and easier to build personal apps. We are not far off from being able to say “Alexa, build me an app on my iPhone that lets me take pictures of the food in my fridge to compile the nutritional benefits and sync it with my workout app then compare it to the ideal ingredients I should eat based on my fitness goals in my health app and have it set to send me emails where it can find me better ingredients to buy that are cost effective, local, and meet my diet restrictions” and in 15 minutes that app suddenly exists.

New comment by riddlemethat in "Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones"

riddlemethat — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:36:15 +0000

If you want security through obscurity you can revert to IPoAC (RFC 1149).

New comment by riddlemethat in "Michael Rabin has died"

riddlemethat — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 13:16:44 +0000

Anti-Jew rhetoric is at a level unseen since WW2. It’s the new normal. It’s horrible.

New comment by riddlemethat in "IPv6 traffic crosses the 50% mark"

riddlemethat — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:41:21 +0000

If it’s not 10BaseT I can’t see small spread adoption.

New comment by riddlemethat in "New iPhone age and identity checks restrict internet freedom in the UK"

riddlemethat — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:34:35 +0000

Some people just want government to parent them.

New comment by riddlemethat in "MacBook Neo"

riddlemethat — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:27:58 +0000

This, coupled with the nightmare fuel that Windows has become as of 2026, means no one sane should buy a Windows computer. It's more expensive, more intrusive, and Microsoft management clearly has zero respect for its customers.

New comment by riddlemethat in "Never buy a .online domain"

riddlemethat — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 15:03:36 +0000

You know it's getting bad out there when corporations act like the government.