Hacker News: spamizbad

New comment by spamizbad in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

spamizbad — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 15:38:30 +0000

The problem is you won't be faced with a binary choice of certain death or a single unknown AI cure: You will have a choice between several established protocols AND several unknown AI drugs. You doing a dice roll or do you want to make an educated decision?

New comment by spamizbad in "Agents don't need memory, they need documentation"

spamizbad — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 14:28:36 +0000

I think for many projects you're right. One niche where I disagree: reverse-engineering. You'll need to carry context on things cannot be derived from code immediately eg: past experiments, findings, decomposed schematics/firmware etc. Without this, models are prone to re-doing the same work continuously - which sometimes involves "expensive" (in terms of wall time) simulations.

New comment by spamizbad in "On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted"

spamizbad — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 15:35:42 +0000

"Vibe shift" is all the rage these days but one area where it's most apparent is modern software.

People of Raskin's vintage had a very humanist approach to computing. The mentality was very much an outgrowth of the cultural revolution of the 60s. Computer usage should be joyful rather than toiling. The computer should help you. It should make you feel good about what you create.

That stands in stark contrast today, where things are more hostile. Not just in terms of "Dark patterns", or writing off user needs for the sake of expediency... but even the way we talk about technology today. You need to use X, do Y or you're "not going to make it" / "escape the permanent underclass". It's bleak.

I recently restored a vintage Macintosh SE I picked up at VCF Midwest and despite its limitations that machine was an absolute JOY to use despite its limitations and nearly 40 years of age. This was a machine and software designed by Raskin's contemporaries and it shows.

New comment by spamizbad in "Plan mode is dead"

spamizbad — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 02:35:45 +0000

It's been a while (well, 8 months) since I used Claude Code, but what I can say is that I greatly enjoy using the plan mode that comes baked into omp (oh my pi), especially for tasks around firmware development. I recognize that has a very different workflow than webapps though.

New comment by spamizbad in "America's two largest school districts impose AI moratoriums"

spamizbad — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:29:14 +0000

No quantitative improvements in test scores, but it seems to make kids socialize more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/us/did-school-cellphone-b...

New comment by spamizbad in "AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?"

spamizbad — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:12:22 +0000

Oh I'd say its real. Years ago I worked as that senior who divvied up the work to a team of 4 mid-level engineers in that exact fashion (they were mostly Latin American contractors with limited english). We actually shipped some good stuff too!

Unfortunately, looking back, I could easily see Claude replacing 3 out of 4 of those developers. Myself + one other dev + AI would probably would've shipped a bit more a little faster. With that said tokens aren't free so the net cost savings would've been 2 dev salaries maximum.

New comment by spamizbad in "The Alpha 21264 CPU: NT's Greatest RISC (1998)"

spamizbad — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:17:04 +0000

I feel like PA-RISC actually landed with a handful of useful somewhat-complex instructions. It always struck me as the best architecture from that era, making the correct trade-off of avoided microcode but adopted stuff like completers and shift-and-add operations to minimize instruction count and maximize work done per pipeline.

New comment by spamizbad in "Oracle could face $7B collateral bill for Wisconsin data centre"

spamizbad — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:37:30 +0000

One level above junk. Yikes.

New comment by spamizbad in "Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling"

spamizbad — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:37:13 +0000

Disagree: The era of " will eat your startup by throwing capital/devs at it" are over. Anthropic, OpenAI et al are under too much competitive pressure to chase every quixotic product idea.

New comment by spamizbad in "Apple to increase spend with Broadcom to produce billions more U.S. chips"

spamizbad — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:09:26 +0000

This is more about the CHIPS act than the tariffs.

New comment by spamizbad in "McMansions 101: What Makes a McMansion Bad Architecture? (2016)"

spamizbad — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:02:39 +0000

There's actually a housing shortage in the US so it's not like this is an architecture that is responsive to consumer or cultural preference and demand - local zoning laws do not even permit such freedom.

New comment by spamizbad in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

spamizbad — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 01:20:07 +0000

To an extent that's true, but while Zuck might be hands on but he doesn't typically micromanage his lieutenants. Alexandr was clearly in over his head, has never run anything resembling a high quality engineering org, and blew it up in less than a year. I think his days are numbered.

New comment by spamizbad in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"

spamizbad — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 01:09:57 +0000

Lots of people blame Zuckerberg, but my own view aligns with the author in that much of this is falls on Alexandr Wang's shoulders (Scale AI's founder). It's perhaps somewhat ironic that the "MEI" guy (Merit, Excellence, Intelligence) was permitted to poach high-performing subject matter experts from key engineering orgs and reassigned them to data labeling - something that, let's be honest, is not where you want to allocate your top performers at an org like Meta.

This is one of those things where a (tech) celebrity founder was permitted to blew up a high-performing engineering culture. If shareholders knew the nuances of this they'd demand his ouster. His leadership has been lacking in merit, excellence, and intelligence.

New comment by spamizbad in "I Love the Computer"

spamizbad — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:48:14 +0000

I would say the claim that AI is going to replace most white collar work a very snake-oily term. The technology behind it however is very compelling and interesting.

New comment by spamizbad in "Adafruit receives demand letter from Fenwick legal counsel on behalf of Flux.ai"

spamizbad — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:34:35 +0000

I'm not sure if this was Flux, but one of those AI EDA tool companies had a somewhat absurd ad where the narrator stated the AI tool told them a capacitor was being used to block DC, and that's something they never learned while getting an EE degree. Now, I don't have an EE degree, but I feel like how capacitors interact with AC and DC are sort of "passive components 101" that even hobbyists learn quite early on.

The EDA space doesn't strike me as being anywhere near as SWE when it comes to AI.

New comment by spamizbad in "Nvidia RTX Spark"

spamizbad — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:43:55 +0000

Might be aimed at people who spec out the $5100 Macbook Pros with M5 Maxes and 128GB.

New comment by spamizbad in "Florida sues OpenAI and Sam Altman over AI risks"

spamizbad — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:18:34 +0000

Texas is becoming a hub for educated professionals and Florida is a hub for non-college retirees

New comment by spamizbad in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

spamizbad — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:50:50 +0000

Nobody dies if instagram collapses. Might even cause more people to live.

New comment by spamizbad in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

spamizbad — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:07:00 +0000

Oh we already had that with a RIF earlier in the year.

New comment by spamizbad in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

spamizbad — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:20:14 +0000

I will also tell you, as someone who works at a company that's trying to remain profitable, that token spend has caught the eyes of finance and much like cloud spend they've already started applying pressure to control costs. This May my team is protected to use 30% fewer tokens than we did in April - this was by intention. I suspect we'll drop more in June.