Hacker News: rmunn

New comment by rmunn in "Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls"

rmunn — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:51:57 +0000

Maybe the workflows, etc., are inherent complexity, so that any similarly-flexible product will have the same problems.

But the awful client-server architecture, where anything you do takes several seconds of waiting for the client to send who-knows-what to the server and get data back, even selecting something from a dropdown... that is absolutely just Jira. A competing product would be able to deliver much, MUCH snappier UX. Jira is just the crappiest, slowest UI that I have ever had the displeasure of being forced to work with.

New comment by rmunn in "Logic for Programmers"

rmunn — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:23:21 +0000

Back when I was in college, I took some philosophy classes just for fun. I discovered when I took Symbolic Logic that while everyone else was struggling with the class, I was finding it pretty easy, because chaining together a proof in symbolic logic felt just like programming. It was the same mental steps: you have the starting conditions, there's an endpoint you want to reach, and you need to chain together these fundamental operations in order to get there. (And sometimes you needed to see how to break them apart: if you need to prove P AND Q, then proving P separately and proving Q separately were usually easier steps, and then once you've proved P and you've proved Q then you've proved P AND Q. Which felt a lot like refactoring a large function that did two things into two separate, smaller functions that do one thing each).

Looking through the sample chapter, I'm reminded of my experience with symbolic logic class. It looks like it'll be much the same thing, but flipped on its head: instead of knowing programming and using that knowledge to make symbolic logic easier, this looks like it'll be about knowing symbolic logic and using that knowledge to make programming easier. Seems pretty useful; I'll give the sample chapters a more in-depth read soon.

New comment by rmunn in "Our position on open-weights models"

rmunn — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 05:30:10 +0000

Even with all the downsides of being colonized by Britain, it was still far better than being colonized by Belgium. Heck, being colonized by pretty much anybody but Belgium was better than being colonized by Belgium. Read up on the Belgian Congo sometime: it was a parade of horrors.

GP was making a relative comparison; pointing out that both were bad in absolute terms does not negate the point. -2 is still greater than -17.

New comment by rmunn in "Tell HN: Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party"

rmunn — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:58:09 +0000

In countries with a sensible legal system, yes. Truth is not a defense against defamation in all countries. I can't know what country you (generic you) are in, so best to look up your local laws on defamation.

New comment by rmunn in "So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe"

rmunn — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 03:25:50 +0000

The word "the" is doing a lot of work in your last paragraph. I initially missed seeing the word "the", and that changed the meaning entirely for me. Observe:

> MySpace seemed like shit until you put Facebook next to it.

This sentence would be claiming that MySpace was a lousy experience, but Facebook was even worse. Which would make it hard to explain why people jumped ship.

> MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it.

What you actually wrote claimed that MySpace seemed great, but then Facebook was even better. Which makes it easy to explain why people jumped ship.

I don't have an actual point to make about MySpace or Facebook. (I never used MySpace, and only used Facebook once, two decades ago, because the social group I was in at the time was using Facebook as their only means of announcing events — once I moved to a different town I dropped Facebook and closed my account). I just wanted to comment about the grammatical structure of that sentence, because I thought it was fascinating. The word "the" is so often mere filler, which could be omitted and the sentence would still be perfectly understandable. (Hence why many languages, such as Russian, don't have the word "the" at all). But here's a counterexample to that general rule, a sentence where omitting one since instance of the word "the" inverted the meaning.

New comment by rmunn in "Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding"

rmunn — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:27:59 +0000

> Firstly, they didn't spend trillions on training.

Then please argue with the guy who said they did, the guy who goes by richardw and whose comment I was responding to in the first place. He's the one who said "If the US companies need trillions to barely beat Chinese companies spending billions, despite a multi year head start..." and, to the best of my knowledge, you haven't replied to him at all. Instead, you have consistently replied to me, arguing points I'm not discussing, not TRYING to discuss, and arguing with me about points that somebody else made. As I told you in a different comment, PLEASE read more carefully in the future.

I am sick and tired of talking about this by now. I no longer care if you have a good point or not, you have exhausted my supply of good will. Good bye. Feel free to have the last word, you're the only one who cares by now.

New comment by rmunn in "Codeberg bans vibe coded projects"

rmunn — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 09:40:27 +0000

In Codeberg's case, they have chosen not to distinguish between those. Their bright line is "mostly", as in, if your project "mostly" consists of LLM output then it is not allowed. The definition of "mostly" is, of course, vague, and people are going to argue about where the line should be drawn. But there's at least something vaguely approaching an objective measure: they might look through commits and count how many have an LLM listed as a co-author, or they might count the number of lines of code changed by those commits. Who knows, at this point, what they will end up doing. But they're not trying to judge "how well did you curate the output of the LLM"? They have, instead, decided to judge "how many lines/commits/something created by LLMs have ended up in your code?"

New comment by rmunn in "Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding"

rmunn — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 23:51:34 +0000

Which is true, but also completely irrelevant to the point of this discussion. Which was about the U.S. companies spending trillions and the Chinese companies spending billions and matching them in quality. I made the point that the U.S. companies and Chinese companies were doing different things: training on raw data vs. distilling the model that someone else had trained. That difference explains the difference in spending. (The secondary point is that the Chinese companies would not have been able to get to the point they have, while spending as little as they have, without Claude, GPT, et al to copy from).

This is probably the last reply I'll make to you. I'm getting a little tired of repeating myself. Whether you're just not getting it, or refusing to get it, either way it's starting to feel like a waste of time to try to rephrase the same thing again and again. Please read more carefully in the future.

New comment by rmunn in "Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding"

rmunn — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 23:50:31 +0000

And, as I pointed out elsewhere, the difference I was pointing out was an economic difference. You keep on ignoring that fact and thinking I'm talking about ethics, but I'm not. I'm saying the difference is between spending trillions on training from raw data vs. spending billions on distilling that trained-from-raw-data model.

New comment by rmunn in "Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding"

rmunn — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:08:05 +0000

It takes more computing power, and money, to pay for training an LLM, compared to distilling an LLM that someone else has already trained. That's the economic difference.

New comment by rmunn in "Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding"

rmunn — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 09:07:08 +0000

The difference I was referring to was economic; I was not making an ethical judgment. So many people seem to be reading my comment as making an ethical judgment (based on their reactions); maybe I should edit it to clarify.

Nope, seems I'm past the edit window. Oh well.

New comment by rmunn in "VTubing: How a Japanese Phenomenon Is Going Worldwide"

rmunn — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:35:38 +0000

It quotes figures from Q1 of 2026, so it was definitely published this year.

New comment by rmunn in "VTubing: How a Japanese Phenomenon Is Going Worldwide"

rmunn — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:34:54 +0000

The first time I encountered VTubing, I thought the point was just to hide your face, for various reasons. Being sensitive about your looks, not wanting to attract stalkers, whatever. But there's apparently a lot more to it; I was surprised.

New comment by rmunn in "Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding"

rmunn — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:21:54 +0000

Huh? What exactly do you think I'm trying to "cope" with? That American AI companies are overleveraged and some of them are going to go bankrupt? I've been predicting that for months. Why do you think I would need to cope with the idea?

New comment by rmunn in "Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding"

rmunn — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:09:53 +0000

Not saying the American AI companies are ethically in the right, just that the work they did is a lot more expensive to do than what the companies distilling their work are doing.

New comment by rmunn in "Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding"

rmunn — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:08:07 +0000

Good UIs look alike, yes. But I'm not sure that comment is a good rebuttal in this particular case, because the model calling itself Claude is pretty strong evidence of distilling: https://x.com/denisewu/status/2077984660211269870

New comment by rmunn in "Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding"

rmunn — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:47:41 +0000

That's the difference between innovating and copying/distilling someone else's innovation. https://wccftech.com/chinas-kimi-k3-identifies-itself-as-ant...

New comment by rmunn in "I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs"

rmunn — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 02:33:01 +0000

And null termination is guaranteed to work, because the only two characters forbidden in Unix filenames (for most varieties of Unix, I won't guarantee there aren't some weird variants out there) are / and null.

The only times I've needed something more than `find -print0 | xargs -0` has been when I need to apply logic to decide whether to process one of the files, in a way that's not easy to express in a `find` command. Then I write a small script with a for loop and if statements inside it.

But more people should know about `-print0`. It's the answer to 95% of the problems with `find | xargs`.

New comment by rmunn in "Blender 5.2 LTS"

rmunn — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:18:05 +0000

"Torched"? Nah, not at all. But the donut tutorial is famous for a good reason. A donut is basically a torus, which is one of the basic shapes that Blender gives you, so you're starting from a shape that's nearly right — and then the tutorial teaches you how to deform it slightly so that it looks less perfect and therefore more "real". Which means that you're learning the process of modeling. That same tutorial then teaches you the process of texturing, of lighting... By going through the process of crafting an object you don't actually care about, you learn the steps involved in crafting the ones you do care about.

New comment by rmunn in "Blender 5.2 LTS"

rmunn — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 03:09:16 +0000

I prefer larger screens on laptops, so every laptop I've ever owned has had a numpad. Naturally you can't fit a numpad onto a 12" laptop, but USB (or Bluetooth) numpads are available; a quick Amazon search says $10-20 for most of them.

Plus, Blender has an "Emulate Numpad" option that lets you map the numpad controls onto your regular numeric keys (making it harder to use them for their normal purpose, so I wouldn't recommend it unless an external numpad is not an option for some reason). And they have an "Emulate 3 Button Mouse" option, where the middle mouse button can be emulated by holding down Alt while clicking the left mouse button. (Which means that some Alt+LMB shortcuts become unavailable, so again, the best option is to plug in a USB or Bluetooth mouse).

They've thought of it. Their defaults remain the default for a good reason, because the hardware to properly use the default shortcuts is cheap. But they've also accommodated the people who don't want to buy an external numpad or mouse.