Hacker News: sly010

New comment by sly010 in "Muse Spark 1.3"

sly010 — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 04:33:37 +0000

I think the turing test is still very much load-bearing — if you know what I mean.

New comment by sly010 in "WebMCP: Teaching Your Website to Talk to AI Agents"

sly010 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 18:55:05 +0000

This whole thing reminds me of the "I am writing to inform you that a fire has broken out..." scene from IT crowd. It's ridiculously inefficient.

New comment by sly010 in "Understanding is the new bottleneck"

sly010 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:53:22 +0000

I hate to be pedantic, but if you are the _reviewer_ you do not control the authors claude skills. Sure you can push back a few times but in most teams I worked the author can just decide to get a stamp from someone else. Then as a reviewer you loose all remaining influence. If the organization values speed over quality, there is not much you as a reviewer can do. This seems like a leadership/culture issue not a technical issue.

New comment by sly010 in "Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs"

sly010 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:21:15 +0000

"Recovery" would be a more apt (although less catchy name). The stealing is on the provider side for not giving you access to tokens you already paid for.

New comment by sly010 in "Not everything should cost a token: the case for deterministic AI"

sly010 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 02:25:48 +0000

> Deterministic AI.

Aka, a computer program.

New comment by sly010 in "Zero-copy in Go: sendfile, splice, and the cost of io.Copy"

sly010 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 01:54:17 +0000

Beware, there are versions of go where sendfile is broken and only sends the first 4k of a file on macos.

New comment by sly010 in "Anthropic requires 30 day data retention for Fable and Mythos"

sly010 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:20:31 +0000

> people over-rate how much software/IP is useful in running a successful business

Indeed, by a couple trillions...

New comment by sly010 in "Googlebook"

sly010 — Wed, 13 May 2026 01:57:49 +0000

I don't think people doubt what AI _could_ do, they just have been through enough enshitification cycles to know this is not any different. Right now AI is better than Google but only because Google regressed so much. Market forces always prevail. The operating costs are just too high to offer AI for free for everyone but people will refuse to pay, so AI (at least for the masses) will become just an other marketing funnel companies can buy out. I also don't see how AI will change the fact that clothing companies target average users and don't serve the long tail.

New comment by sly010 in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

sly010 — Tue, 12 May 2026 04:47:55 +0000

No batteries!? Go has a huge stable standard library no other language even comes close to. Built in tooling for unit testing, performance testing, debugging, code formatting, package management, etc. And most go binaries can be compiled statically so libc is not even a dependency. Golang is the definition of batteries included.

New comment by sly010 in "More common mistakes to avoid when creating system architecture diagrams"

sly010 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:33:28 +0000

Then of course there is the whole fractal nature of software. As you add more detail, the arrows can flip flop around. Polling in a lower level of a stack can very much be used as a push mechanism. (e.g. USB interrupts are in fact the host polling the device)

This is why communicating architecture is often as hard if not harder than implementing it.

New comment by sly010 in "More common mistakes to avoid when creating system architecture diagrams"

sly010 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:20:20 +0000

There is in fact a 3rd: build time dependencies.

Control: Object/module/function A calls object/module/function B.

Data: The call can either push or pull data.

Build dependency: The call can be direct (A depends on B) or indirect through an interface/callback/etc (both A and B depends on the interface).

Ideally every design document includes all 3 as separate diagrams.

New comment by sly010 in "Separating the Wayland compositor and window manager"

sly010 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 20:43:08 +0000

... or the WM loads the compositor, or the WM links to a compositor library (i.e. wlroots). The point is there are options...

Honestly, every time this topic comes up, I feel like the person complaining just doesn't want to put in the work and they are angry that they don't get an easy win. And maybe that's a good thing. Do we really need more half baked WMs?

New comment by sly010 in "A Programmer's Loss of Identity"

sly010 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 16:03:09 +0000

> chosen to use fear and intimidation to help sell the agenda of the big tech CEOs who, in turn, have somehow managed to use coal-fired GPUs to capture society’s output and sell it back to us, while converting a significant portion of the economy into an expanding envelope of hot gas

I work for a very big tech company and I have no one to share this with.

New comment by sly010 in "Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use"

sly010 — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:55:14 +0000

There is a 3rd party Android app that uses the accessibility APIs to (supposedly) track and limit my short video use. However, it's broken, so I can't watch short videos at all :)

New comment by sly010 in "An engineer's perspective on hiring"

sly010 — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 15:30:05 +0000

We get it. You are a manager.

New comment by sly010 in "Vibe Coding Gone Wrong: 5 Rules for Safely Using AI"

sly010 — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 23:53:54 +0000

I've seen this image generated by meta AI. The prompt was something like: think of a room, make it look like anything you like, but do not in any circumstance put a clown in it. Guess what...

I think Jason has a "do not think of an elephant" problem.

New comment by sly010 in "Rethinking CLI interfaces for AI"

sly010 — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 21:39:53 +0000

Sorry for the snark, but we couldn't even do this for humans, but let's do it for poor poor LLMs? It's kind of ironic that NOW is the time we worry about usability. What happened to RTFM?

New comment by sly010 in "Is Gemini 2.5 good at bounding boxes?"

sly010 — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 15:21:03 +0000

Genuine question: How does this work? How does an LLM do object detection? Or more generally, how does an LLM do anything that is not text? I always thought tasks like this are usually just handed to an other (i.e. vision) model, but the post talks about it as if it's the _same_ model doing both text generation and vision. It doesn't make sense to me why would Gemini 2 and 2.5 would have different vision capabilities, shouldn't they both have access to the same, purpose trained state of the art vision model?

New comment by sly010 in "Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet"

sly010 — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 05:48:09 +0000

Nah. You misunderstood. "They" don't make money on human time wasted. They make money on ads served. They don't particularly care if the ads were served to humans or agents, they get paid either way. Bot-traffic is actually good for tech companies because it inflates numbers. Capthas are not there to waste our time, but are there to improve their credibility ("We are certain those ad-clicks were real humans because the captha said so").

New comment by sly010 in "Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet"

sly010 — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 05:22:37 +0000

First off, I always thought the type of things described (tracking mouse movements, keypress jitter, etc) are already done by ReCacpha to decide when to present the user with a captcha. I am surprised they are not already doing this.

Second, I am surprised AI agents are this naive. I thought they would emulate human behavior better.

In fact, just based on this article, very little effort has been put into this race on either side.

So I wonder if is has to do with the fact that if companies like google reliably filtered out bot traffic, they would loose 90% of their AD revenue. This way they have plausible deniability.