Hacker News: rowyourboat

New comment by rowyourboat in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

rowyourboat — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:03:24 +0000

Which poses the question: Why does Google even need to catch up? At least currently, the name of the game is integration. The actual model is a commodity.

New comment by rowyourboat in "Position: LLMs Can't Jump"

rowyourboat — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:15:46 +0000

That's not really a fair comparison, no? Modern LLMs are much more capable than GPT-2. We'ld need a modern LLM trained on exclusively old data, and that might be impossible

New comment by rowyourboat in "Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important"

rowyourboat — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 19:16:41 +0000

We know very little about how psychological drugs work in general. Having to try multiple things to find one that works well for you is par for the course

New comment by rowyourboat in "EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0"

rowyourboat — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:28:49 +0000

No, it can't. It's going to be an interesting legal challenge.

Also, the European Court of Justice has, to the best of my knowledge, not ruled on this yet, either. The fact fight isn't over.

New comment by rowyourboat in "If you're a button, you have one job"

rowyourboat — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 08:05:47 +0000

> there's no way for it to tell the button to cancel the color change

No, but what should happen in cases like that is that the on-click handler disables the button while it is unresponsive. This will communicate the fact that the button is unresponsive visually to the user and also inhibit the button-was-pressed feedback.

New comment by rowyourboat in "Ford hired AI and sacked humans. It backfired badly"

rowyourboat — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 07:37:48 +0000

You're being sarcastic, but...

New comment by rowyourboat in "I Am Not a Reverse Centaur"

rowyourboat — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 05:39:49 +0000

I guess that's why I burned out as a manager: I do not get a sense of accomplishment when my team achieves something

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

rowyourboat — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 08:55:21 +0000

> No fluff, just the document in a shape the target audience expects

I see what you did there

New comment by rowyourboat in "The Supreme Court just told every freight broker that they can be sued"

rowyourboat — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:22:19 +0000

Gaaa. Those short sentences. The style. Has this article been written by AI? I can't stand it any more.

New comment by rowyourboat in "Infrasound waves stop kitchen fires, but can they replace sprinklers?"

rowyourboat — Mon, 04 May 2026 06:42:19 +0000

> An AI-driven sensor activates and wall emitters blast infrasound waves toward the source of the fire in an attempt to put it out

What, exactly, is the role of AI in this context?

New comment by rowyourboat in "Saying goodbye to Agile"

rowyourboat — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 07:05:23 +0000

> always the poor specs

But that is fundamentally what agile is about. It's not about coding faster, it's the recognition that the specs are incomplete or wrong because fundamentally, a lot of customers cannot tell you what the want until they see it. That's why "build something simple and iterate on it" works. Regardless of how good your spec is, once the coding is done the customer is going to realise that that's not what they actually wanted.

New comment by rowyourboat in "I shipped a transaction bug, so I built a linter"

rowyourboat — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 06:00:09 +0000

This shows, once more, that humans are bad with modes. You have two copies of the repo, one in a transaction and one not in a transaction.

The problem is that the thing you use to build the transaction can also be used to directly manipulate the DB. A better API design would be to separate those two things.

New comment by rowyourboat in "AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel"

rowyourboat — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 19:27:16 +0000

> The people using GenAI reap a major time and cognitive effort savings, but the task of verification is shifted to the maintainer.

The people using GenAI should be the ones doing the verification. The maintainer's job should not meaningfully change (other than the maintainer using AI to review on incoming code, of course).

Why does everyone who hears "AI code" automatically think "vibe-coded"?

New comment by rowyourboat in "AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel"

rowyourboat — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 19:24:40 +0000

1 and 2 are really only an issue if you vibe code. There's no reason to expect properly reviewed AI assisted code to be any worse than human written code. In fact, in my experience, using LLMs to do a code review is a great asset - of used in addition to human review

New comment by rowyourboat in "Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains"

rowyourboat — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 07:24:42 +0000

So, that would make this GNU/Windows

New comment by rowyourboat in "Claude is a space to think"

rowyourboat — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 07:34:47 +0000

Remember when OpenAI was about not-for-profit AI development for the betterment of humanity?

New comment by rowyourboat in "When children become caregivers, who cares for them?"

rowyourboat — Mon, 13 May 2024 13:01:33 +0000

Disabled does not mean you need a caregiver

New comment by rowyourboat in "Flowers for Algernon (1965) [pdf]"

rowyourboat — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 13:21:54 +0000

I think you are confusing rings with discs. Larry Niven is the one doing the spinning

New comment by rowyourboat in "How Automated Content Moderation Works (Even When It Doesn't)"

rowyourboat — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 17:33:30 +0000

> There is also a parallel legal reality - that people have the right to free speech.

The right to free speech only means you can't be prosecuted for what you say. It does not compel any private entity to distribute everything that you want to say.

New comment by rowyourboat in "Air Canada is responsible for chatbot's mistake: B.C. tribunal"

rowyourboat — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 06:09:39 +0000

Those are your basic rights: You entered into a contract with the airline, and the airline failed to deliver. Of course you get your money back if the alternative solution is not satisfactory - whether or not the ticket was refundable doesn't even enter into it, as it was the airline that failed to deliver in the first place. That's not stellar service, that's just fulfilling their legal obligations.