Hacker News: scj

New comment by scj in "Open source project contains hidden instruction for "AI" agents: delete my code"

scj — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:04:38 +0000

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw

Not 100% apt, but close enough.

New comment by scj in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

scj — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:26:47 +0000

A thought experiment: When all practical software is only written by AIs, will the AIs use goto? What will the programming language of AIs look like?

My bet is something _like_ assembly, but not assembly.

That being said, I think humans will still program for fun. Just like we paint portraiture in a world with cameras.

New comment by scj in "Waymo Safety Impact"

scj — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:16:49 +0000

"For example, the current cities Waymo operates in do not have appreciable snow fall, and as a result neither the Waymo nor the human benchmark data include this type of inclement weather."

I'm happy to see this acknowledged, and hope it's a sign that they appreciate the difficulties of winter driving.

New comment by scj in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

scj — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:55:57 +0000

One of my favourite little details in Jeeves and Wooster is that British cops are shown as bumbling fools who fit right in with the cast.

Meanwhile American police are consistently depicted as trigger happy, shooting at any minor provocation.

New comment by scj in "Honda is killing its EVs"

scj — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:53:41 +0000

> "At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update..."

If an over-the-air patch can have that kind of impact, then what happens if security is compromised and that power is used for ill?

New comment by scj in "Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies"

scj — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 23:27:14 +0000

Could you elaborate (hopefully with real examples) of what it's like to be in the out group with few connections (or perhaps no connections) in regards to a particular good / service?

New comment by scj in "Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years"

scj — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:51:34 +0000

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was established in 1982. We're still in the process of figuring out what it means (and as a living document, the interpretation will change over time).

It's messy. But I'd much rather that than need to ask "What would Pierre Trudeau think of this situation?"

New comment by scj in "LibreSprite – open-source pixel art editor"

scj — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 02:48:32 +0000

The "bre" in "libre" is pronounced similarly to "zebra". Kinda. It'll get you in the ballpark, which is good enough for an Anglo.

"This Hour has 22 Minutes" had a great sketch where both a Francophone (Gavin Crawford impersonating Chantal Hebert) and an Anglo (I forget who) were stumbling over proper nouns from the opposite language. The joke was that both were trying too hard to pronounce things "properly". It came off as inauthentic and awkward.

New comment by scj in "IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off"

scj — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 01:11:03 +0000

It'll likely be used to mine bitcoin instead.

New comment by scj in "The AI bubble is bigger than you think"

scj — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 23:46:01 +0000

Insane question, asked for the purposes of discussion: Would it make sense if those GPUs were top-of-the-line for years? Like if TSMC were destroyed?

Even then, I don't understand why being a landlord to the place were AI is trained would be financially exciting... Wouldn't investing in NVIDIA make a lot more sense?

New comment by scj in "What do we do if SETI is successful?"

scj — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 22:18:49 +0000

> I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so.

What is the minimum amount of aggression necessary to evolve sentience? What is the maximum amount of aggression in an interstellar space-faring species? Where is humanity on that scale?

A super-aggressive species would likely self-annihilate before possessing sufficient energy to travel interstellar distances... So the jury's still out on us.

New comment by scj in "DARPA project for automated translation from C to Rust (2024)"

scj — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 22:55:45 +0000

Is it going to translate C into good Rust code, or just C with a Rust accent? Think transpiled C in Javascript.

Soon LLMs will be able to write Fortran in any language!

New comment by scj in "In Defense of C++"

scj — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 21:23:27 +0000

"you can write perfectly fine code without ever needing to worry about the more complex features of the language. You can write simple, readable, and maintainable code in C++ without ever needing to use templates, operator overloading, or any of the other more advanced features of the language."

You could also inherit a massive codebase old enough to need a prostate exam that was written by many people who wanted to prove just how much of the language spec they could use.

If selecting a job mostly under the Veil of Ignorance, I'll take a large legacy C project over C++ any day.

New comment by scj in "Modernising the Amiga at Forty"

scj — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:46:58 +0000

Could Commodore have made a financially successful low-cost Amiga laptop circa 1991 - 1993?

New comment by scj in "Coding has emerged as GenAI's killer usecase; what if its benefits are a mirage?"

scj — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 19:17:10 +0000

Consider a spoon-fed spectrum for AIs working in large codebases, where is state-of-the-art AI?

"Here's a bug report, fix it."

"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, fix it."

"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, and ideas for what needs to change in code, fix it."

"Here's a bug report, an explanation of what's triggering it, and an exact plan for changing it, fix it."

If I have to spoon-feed as much as the last case, then I might as well just do it. The second last case is about the level of a fresh-hire who is still ramping up and would still be considered a drain under Brook's Law.

I suppose the other axis is: How much do I dread performing the resultant code review?

Put them together and you have a "spoon-fed / dread" graph of AI programmer performance.

New comment by scj in "The rise of judgement over technical skill"

scj — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 15:08:33 +0000

AI can draw blueprints of a house. The house may look aesthetically pleasing, but if it can't hold it's own weight, the design is flawed.

There's a difference between an executed image and a display-only image.

At a certain point, judgment requires technical knowledge.

New comment by scj in "Making C and Python Talk to Each Other"

scj — Thu, 29 May 2025 22:06:26 +0000

Wouldn't it be nice if popular libraries could export to .so files so the best language for a task could use the bits & pieces it needed without a programmer needing to know python (and possibly C)?

Were I to write a scripting language, trivial export to .so files would be a primary design goal.

New comment by scj in "China Can Have It All – China is currently winner of America's self-sabotage"

scj — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 15:06:29 +0000

And how many factories capable of casting steel cannons were in the south?

New comment by scj in "U.S.-born man from Georgia held for ICE under Florida's new anti-immigration law"

scj — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 19:57:31 +0000

Same if the King can say "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" then pardon the soldiers that do.

New comment by scj in "Back From The Future: 1995's predictions of 2025 life"

scj — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 18:57:22 +0000

I'm Canadian and remember repurposing AOL floppy disks that came in the mail circa 1996.

Never used the service though.