Hacker News: scruple

New comment by scruple in "The senior engineer death spiral"

scruple — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:26:22 +0000

Sure, but I went through startups, too. I just hung on for dear life and the people above me were willing to hear about issues with culture and work on it. Only the last 4 years of my career have been at a FAANG.

New comment by scruple in "The senior engineer death spiral"

scruple — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 19:46:58 +0000

I had the same impression. Surely we aren't the ones who are wrong! It couldn't be us!

I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years. I left after 8 months and it was because the company and org and team culture were a horrible, broken, dysfunctional mess, and the people who were capable of changing it didn't want to admit why they had the problems they had in the first place.

New comment by scruple in "Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI"

scruple — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:04:03 +0000

Well you see we need to migrate system A to B and X to Y and here's another new integration to look at and we need to finally get off of this EOL distro and... It'll never stop.

New comment by scruple in "The revolt of the reader"

scruple — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:00:08 +0000

I just typed 233 words into Pangram, I'm trying to synthesize an idea from Aristotle to an experience I am having at work. It's not an original thought, specifically, but the application to this thing at work does appear to be novel. I'm still trying to work out my thoughts. Anyway it concluded that it's 100% AI. Even with a couple of random typos and missing grammar that I added. Smells like horse shit to me. I also don't like the idea that I have to shove a corpus of text into this thing to get it to process that it's incorrect. That expectation is wrong headed and places the burden on the wrong entity.

New comment by scruple in "AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems"

scruple — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:07:53 +0000

We have a tool at work that was entirely spun out of a prototype that itself was entirely driven by a single guy with an unlimited Claude budget. I only touch it on the edges, where I need to integrate it every so slightly into one of my systems. It's a crucial piece of software for the team, though. I've looked over the source, the thing that strikes me the most is the verbosity. Human software engineers would've been much more terse, so the thing has a fucking lot of code that's doing very little. They're trying to deal with that now, while also driving feature requests forward, and from the distance it looks like an unmanageable shit show.

New comment by scruple in "Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber"

scruple — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 16:45:44 +0000

I see it on my Pixel with the Gemini app.

New comment by scruple in "Aphantasia Beginner's Guide"

scruple — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:35:50 +0000

I have the same experience. I'm 45 now, still can't visualize in my mind (and I have weak dream recall). I think there are categories here. Some people are really gifted and can visualize anything on-demand and interact with those visualizations in very interesting ways. That blows my mind, seriously. My wife is like this. Other people exist in a gradient between people like us with no visualization and the people who have absolute control. Those people can sort of acquire and train the skill and over time will improve, mostly organically, too, I think. Those people will tell people like us that we are not trying hard enough. If only we would tried harder, we, too, could acquire and develop this skill. But as you know, people like us cannot simply acquire or develop this skill. We are missing some prerequisite.

New comment by scruple in "Electric shock gloves in use by police departments in Bellevue, Omaha"

scruple — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 17:07:08 +0000

I haven't seen it anywhere else. I was on Reddit before I came to HN this morning.

New comment by scruple in "A Rant About “Technology” (2005)"

scruple — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 03:53:02 +0000

A billionaire discovers society exists.

> Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

It's also the exact interface that wealth allows you to bypass.

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

scruple — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 04:01:08 +0000

I've seen some weird behavior with it, as well. But I'm fine with it. I visit a single subreddit now and if they destroy the UX I'll only be happier for leaving.

New comment by scruple in "Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software"

scruple — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:55:38 +0000

The comment I replied to stated that only WoW and Overwatch had unionized. Every game team has unionized at Blizzard, along with some of the support teams.

New comment by scruple in "Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software"

scruple — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:42:22 +0000

Diablo also unionized and there's some representation in non-game teams like Battle.net. But I also know (I'm in games and in OC myself, loads of friends at local studios from SD, to OC, and LA counties) that they had a demonstration last Thursday, at 2PM Pacific Time they walked out. They claim that leadership is not negotiating in good faith.

New comment by scruple in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

scruple — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:44:41 +0000

I started doing this in the mid-2010s, too. Used to grab throwaway hardware from a former employer and piece whatever still worked together. I've since moved on to a different employer. How do you procure throwaway hardware?

New comment by scruple in "The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader"

scruple — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 01:27:37 +0000

I also primarily use Kobo e-readers right now but I've been wanting something smaller for an EDC. I think this thread is selling me on it.

New comment by scruple in "Claude Desktop spawns 1.8 GB Hyper-V VM on every launch, even for chat-only use"

scruple — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:00:37 +0000

You'd think Artificial Intelligence could be used to find a better path forward, alas.

New comment by scruple in "New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker"

scruple — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 03:21:50 +0000

I have the same sorts of thoughts rolling around in my head, and also agree that the college path is looking grim right now.

New comment by scruple in "My thoughts after using Clojure for about a month"

scruple — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:59:07 +0000

Have you tried Lisp Flavored Erlang [0]? I never got around to trying it out. I used Elixir for a couple of years, building web backends, and I truly loved the experience. I remember wanting to try out LFE but never got around to it before moving on to a different employer/stack.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LFE_(programming_language)

New comment by scruple in "AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers"

scruple — Sat, 30 May 2026 19:38:57 +0000

I just got back from a 12 mile trail run. I'd love to be on the trails more often. And I'd love to explore more trails that are further away. But I have to work all week and that leaves me with my weekends. I also like to read, write, garden, hike, bike, strength train, I have other hobbies like woodworking that I'd love to get back into, homebrewing, I bake bread, and on and on. I love spending time with my wife and my kids and my/our friends. And I have to ration my time heavily because I've got ~50+ hours every single week that's wrapped up in making my staggeringly massive corporation employer more money than it knows what to reasonably do with.

New comment by scruple in "SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)"

scruple — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:31:18 +0000

This is fabulous and I'm going to buy a copy to play on my SteamDeck. Will be sure to leave a review after I've put some hours into it!

New comment by scruple in "Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County"

scruple — Sun, 24 May 2026 01:07:56 +0000

I live nearby, I'm hosting some family at my home who have been evacuated. A fireman friend who has been to the site said the same. That it'll either explode or spill and they're banking on it spilling.