Hacker News: sally_glance

New comment by sally_glance in "Cybersecurity looks like proof of work now"

sally_glance — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:54:54 +0000

This is the hard part - especially with larger initiatives, it takes quite a bit of work to evaluate what the current combination of harness + LLM is good at. Running experiments yourself is cumbersome and expensive, public benchmarks are flawed. I wish providers would release at least a set of blessed example trajectories alongside new models.

As it is, we're stuck with "yeah it seems this works well for bootstrapping a Next.js UI"...

New comment by sally_glance in "Live Nation illegally monopolized ticketing market, jury finds"

sally_glance — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 23:24:17 +0000

It's wild that everyone seems to have forgotten that Ticketmaster acquired TradeDesk and actively marketed to scalpers [1] just a couple of years ago. Seems they shut down the platform last year, maybe the "ticket bank" [2] idea worked better... Pretty clear to me that they will use any chance to monetize their monopoly.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/competition-bureau-ticketma...

[2] https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/judge-signals-hell-le...

New comment by sally_glance in "High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain"

sally_glance — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:19:10 +0000

I think the problem is the union argument type - intuitively we read "array of strings OR numbers", but actually it means "array of strings AND numbers". Probably generics would be more appropriate here, with the type param constrained to string or number. Then tsc would also complain about pushing a number without checking the item type before.

New comment by sally_glance in "Cursor 3"

sally_glance — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:56:52 +0000

Yeah, and just like all social media platforms adopted short form video sooner or later they are going to give in to what consumers pay for (in attention or money). Right now it's anyone's guess what that might be in the context of software development.

New comment by sally_glance in "Apple says no one using Lockdown Mode has been hacked with spyware"

sally_glance — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:54:57 +0000

How do you know their definition isn't only "received extortion letters" and "exfiltrate data" is fine as long as it didn't lead to the former?

New comment by sally_glance in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

sally_glance — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:19:04 +0000

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how things turn out. Currently it seems we have examples of where it seems like the technology allows some amount of innovation (AlphaGo, software, math proofs) and examples where they seem surprisingly stupid (recipes?).

Btw, it looks like there is a growing body of research evaluating exactly this. I found this nice overview with even some benchmarks specifically for scientific innovation: https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/Awesome-LLM-Scientific-Dis...

New comment by sally_glance in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

sally_glance — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:00:20 +0000

In software, they can and do perform experiments (make a change then observe the log output). I don't think they possess a "world model" or that it's worth spending too much thought on... My reasoning is more along the lines that our brains are also just [very advanced] inference machines. We also hallucinate and mis-identify images (there are image/video classification tasks where humans have lower scores).

For me the most glaring difference to how humans work is the lack of online learning. If that prevents them from being able to innovate, I'm not so sure.

New comment by sally_glance in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

sally_glance — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 23:16:32 +0000

Experimentation leads to experience, so I feel like this was included by the parent comment. And in the case of writing software, agents are able to experiment today. They run tests, check log output, search DBs... Sure, they can't have apples fall on their heads like Newton had but they can totally observe the apple falling on someones head in a video.

New comment by sally_glance in "Why I love NixOS"

sally_glance — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 22:51:37 +0000

Coming from Ansible with hand-written config templates this was honestly a friction point for me - I felt like NixOS is trying to actively hide what it's actually going to configure. It's gotten better now that I read some nixpkg service sources but from time to time I still feel the urge to just directly manage my systemd units, sshd configs and whatnot. Like, sure it simplifies the setup but at the same time also puts another abstraction between me and the software I'm using.

New comment by sally_glance in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

sally_glance — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 22:28:03 +0000

Can we be sure? Maybe it's just very rare for experience, education and memories to line up in exactly the way that allows synthesizing something innovative. So it requires a few billion candidates and maybe a couple of generations too.

New comment by sally_glance in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

sally_glance — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 22:17:22 +0000

You had me at "fuzzy", but lost me at "clean up" - because that's what I usually have to do after it went on another wild refactoring spree. It's a stochastic thing, maybe you're lucky and it fuzzy-matches exactly what you want, maybe the distributions lead it astray.

On the line test, I guess it's highly probable that the joke and a few hundred discussions or blog pieces about it were in it's training data.

New comment by sally_glance in "Personal Computer by Perplexity"

sally_glance — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:03:35 +0000

That's a great angle - will handcrafted software of the future become the equivalent of a tailored suit today? One might argue it already is, most companies and individuals do just fine using cloud/SaaS offerings and COTS apps. So on first glance it seems like automating software engineering would mainly benefit exactly those providers. The other side of the coin is that it also allows for cheaper/faster in-house DIY solutions and competition.

New comment by sally_glance in "Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI"

sally_glance — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:52:34 +0000

I don't know, maximum package turnover might be bounded and most likely you were previously not constrained by lack of drivers already... Sure you might try and expand but why would that work better than before? Especially assuming all other providers now also have cars.

New comment by sally_glance in "Personal Computer by Perplexity"

sally_glance — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:33:32 +0000

Philosophy territory now... you wrote about technology making labor unnecessary 15 years ago - Aristotele did ~2000 years ago too (same text where he tried to justify slavery but nvm that): "For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, [...] if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves."

I bet in 2000 years they will still be writing about it - yeah, technology changes our lives (for better or worse).

New comment by sally_glance in "Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI"

sally_glance — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:15:42 +0000

Good point, but what if you were previously chaining horse carriage rides and now a car can cover the same distance as 10 of them with a single driver?

New comment by sally_glance in "Atlassian to cut roughly 1,600 jobs in pivot to AI"

sally_glance — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:12:00 +0000

I honestly hope someone will read this comment and vibecode an Atlassian 2.0 platform, preferably open source. But really, I will take closed source and paid as well - just give me something that's on par in terms of features and integration but without the terrible UX.

To be clear, I agree with the terrible products part - but currently they are not dying because there is no alternative platform which is flexible, scalable and feature-complete enough. You may find alternatives for niches, like GitHub for software engineering, but the Atlassian stuff allows for knowledge transfer and familiarity across many many domains. I've seen it used anywhere from government burocracy to customer service and construction companies. They nailed the abstraction for flexible issue management, just the implementation is terrible.

New comment by sally_glance in "Personal Computer by Perplexity"

sally_glance — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:52:02 +0000

The amazing thing is that soon (actually already) we will be seeing people being paid way too much to prompt a LLM to email other people or respond to other peoples emails. And then turn these emails into presentations which will be turned into meeting transcripts again followed by emails.

The lingering question is if the intermediate LLM translation steps will actually make our communication more efficient - or just amplify the already inefficient parts.

New comment by sally_glance in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

sally_glance — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:16:01 +0000

Hm I don't think a secondary market would work very well, using fab time productively requires lots of knowledge and collaboration with the provider. Compared to resources like grain or oil where it's basically "just come and pick it up when it's there".

New comment by sally_glance in "MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max"

sally_glance — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 08:59:45 +0000

And they will most likely also be the last to benefit from hypothetical efficiency gains because they haven't been building up expertise (by burning billions) yet.

New comment by sally_glance in "Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month"

sally_glance — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:18:45 +0000

Yeah, for companies this works because there are external (government) entities providing and enforcing a framework. For countries, there is nothing like that. The traditional solution is separation of powers inside of the country I guess, but this requires limiting individual power. Also it's quite complicated in practice and requires a complex legal framework which is sadly often weak to "workarounds" again.