Hacker News: scioto

New comment by scioto in "macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore"

scioto — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:21:30 +0000

I still prefer my pre-2016 Intel Mac since I can do more things that I want to do on it than my newer M4.

New comment by scioto in "Scott Adams has died"

scioto — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 20:38:48 +0000

As John Scalzi once said, "The failure mode of clever is asshole." [1]

That has prevented me from posting what I thought was a clever or cheeky response in case it didn't come across the way I wanted.

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[1] https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/06/16/the-failure-state-of-...

New comment by scioto in "Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?"

scioto — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 09:32:34 +0000

My output as a software engineer is now zero (I'm even letting my JetBrains personal subscription lapse). True, I am now reaping the rewards of having been a software engineer, but all that is past effort. My LoC since I retired is zero.

New comment by scioto in "Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?"

scioto — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 09:54:10 +0000

-100%. With this looming Shiny Toy plus other sub-optimizations at my last place of work, I decided to retire. Didn't want to deal with it.

New comment by scioto in "Why Your Best Engineers Are Interviewing Elsewhere, CodeGood"

scioto — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:00:54 +0000

One of the biggest reasons I left a company was because the CTO and his toady, both coming from company X, made a unilateral decision to switch to X's proprietary and expensive framework above senior developers' objections because, in his words, if people leave the company, we can always go back to company X to support the application written in X's proprietary framework. Um, yup. Never mind that framework was totally inappropriate for the application, or that the UI looked like a refugee from 2000. Oh, and never mind that the biggest customer had nothing but trouble in another application written in said expensive proprietary framework.

That mindset plus a dash of RTO equaled me out the door.

Edit: spelling

New comment by scioto in "Ask HN: Is your company still hiring junior engineers?"

scioto — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 20:31:15 +0000

The company I worked for, a not-for-profit, didn't want to hire juniors because after training them in modern software development techniques, etc., that they didn't get in their undergrad, they'd leave after about three or four years since they were no longer junior, and the for-profit sector paid better. Admittedly it wasn't sexy or used bleeding edge techstacks. From what I've heard, that's still the case there.

Instead they went after burnt-out for-profit veterans who wanted a better life balance and good benefits who'd already made their numbers and needed medical.

New comment by scioto in "LLM Inevitabilism"

scioto — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 15:50:22 +0000

(commenting late in the game, so the point may have been made already)

I personally believe that "AI" is mostly marketing for the current shiny LLM thing that will end up finding some sort of actual useful niche (or two) once the dust has settled. But for now, it's more of a solution being carpet-bombed for problems, most of them inappropriate IMHO (e.g, replacing HR).

For now there'll be collateral damage as carbon-based lifeforms are displaced, with an inevitable shortage of pesky humans to do cleanup once the limitations of "AI" are realized. Any the humans will probably be contract/gig at half their previous rates to do the cleanup.

New comment by scioto in "Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup"

scioto — Thu, 01 May 2025 16:53:08 +0000

My $0.02 with 708 comments ahead of me.

I currently use Windows, 10 to be exact, to play games, and in a VM to run an income tax fat app (since the online version is so much more expensive). My game machine cannot upgrade to 11. A mobo upgrade won't be that expensive for the game machine, but instead I'll covert it to a Linux box and run the few games that work on Linux.

I believe my Windows days are over as of, say, October 14 this year.

New comment by scioto in "Parkinson's Law: It’s real, so use it"

scioto — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 11:11:12 +0000

I had a somewhat repugnant second-level boss whose philosophy was to give people a little more work than they thought they could do to get the best performance out of them, and I believe he was right since, at least for me, I worked harder to make the earlier deadline and/or did more than I thought I could. He must have known Parkinson's.

That only went so far, since piling yet more work onto someone who made an earlier deadline may get them to the point where they don't perform.

Which is why I appreciated a not-for-profit company where they'd actually ask me if I needed more time, since quality was of utmost importance. At that point at that company I knew the codebase, so I'd consistently over-estimate and deliver early, since there was still a chance of hidden impacts/requirements.

New comment by scioto in "Show HN: Vomitorium – all of your project in 1 text file"

scioto — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 10:31:58 +0000

It'd be nice if something similar were available to traverse, say, directories of writings in Markdown, Word, LibreOffice, etc., and output a single text file so I have all my writings in one place. Plus allow plug-ins to extract from more exotic file types not originally included.

New comment by scioto in "From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction"

scioto — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 15:54:57 +0000

I still have the Infocom game Leather Goddesses of Phobos, complete with scratch and sniff card, and the 3-D (blue-red) glasses for the enclosed comic book. If you don't have VR or first-person, it was the next best thing: they told you when to scratch and sniff.

New comment by scioto in "AI is exhausting the power grid"

scioto — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 11:41:36 +0000

Move to Texas, specifically the ERCOT grid. Texans love power suckers like bitcoin miners, so AI should fit right in.

New comment by scioto in "I love my wife. My wife is dead (1946)"

scioto — Thu, 30 May 2024 16:08:04 +0000

This reminds me of John Scalzi's early SF book, Old Man's War. One of the MC's motivations throughout the book was the love of his wife. Apart from the pew-pew aspects, it's one of those stories that can hit you in the feels in the appropriate places. Won't say any more since it'd give away too much.

New comment by scioto in "Donating forks to the dining hall"

scioto — Thu, 30 May 2024 14:21:50 +0000

What he should have done was to create a foundation for supplying forks, making him and his roommate the officers of the foundation. They could have then solicited funds, including matching from other organizations. From those funds, they could have paid themselves handsome salaries for managing the foundation. Then with the mere pittance left over, they would then purchase forks. I'm sure that there would be other tax breaks in there somewhere to totally live a lavish lifestyle.

Ranking Science Fiction's Most Dangerous Awards

scioto — Thu, 23 May 2024 19:44:50 +0000

Article URL: https://reactormag.com/ranking-science-fictions-most-dangerous-awards/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40459048

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by scioto in "Sony Interactive Entertainment lays off 900 people"

scioto — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 18:54:23 +0000

Tiny data point to support: when the PS5 first came out and for what I perceived a long time afterward it was hard has heck to get one, so I lost interest and put together another Windows gaming machine.

Never came back on my radar.

New comment by scioto in "Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]"

scioto — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 10:36:51 +0000

Well, if it "just works," then it wasn't that hard to do anyway. No raise for you.

New comment by scioto in "Chamberlain blocks smart garage door opener from working with smart homes"

scioto — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 12:22:35 +0000

More like in a year you'll need to subscribe to the 14.99€/month tier to get it to work at all.

New comment by scioto in "How did people deal with punch cards?"

scioto — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 10:28:37 +0000

I also remember working with punch cards as a non-CS engineering major doing FORTRAN. Then in the middle of the course I discovered the timeshare terminals for another mainframe that had a link to the IBM 360 on which we submitted our jobs. All you had to do was create card images in the text files, including your computer money cards (worth their weight in gold) starting at column 7, etc., and then submit the job without having to wait in line at the card reader.

It was wonderful! No carrying around a card deck held together with multiple rubber bands. Of course Someone Official found out we were doing this, so for our last lab I had to punch cards out again.

Other tricks included submitting jobs to the 360 at the other campus, which took less money from your account, but was a little slower.

New comment by scioto in "Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather"

scioto — Sun, 10 Sep 2023 14:25:49 +0000

This is natural progression. The apex predator takes over and over-grazes the land, so to speak, to the point where it no longer supports the apex, so eventually the apex predator dies off, and the other species that are left can flourish.