Hacker News: syntheticnature

New comment by syntheticnature in "Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died"

syntheticnature — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:09:00 +0000

Fuller obituary: https://www.hillandwood.com/obituaries/Mark-Stephens?obId=49...

New comment by syntheticnature in ""Just Ask Claude" Is a Rare and Valuable Skill"

syntheticnature — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:01:51 +0000

I think this is why consider the willingness to say "I don't know" a trust signal

New comment by syntheticnature in ""Just Ask Claude" Is a Rare and Valuable Skill"

syntheticnature — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:01:03 +0000

Exactly. I'd rather have a quick "I don't know" than wait for them to generate a reply that is likely to be wrong because I already asked the same models myself before consulting a human. If they generate a reply, I get to tell them exactly how the response is wrong, since the core content is usually the same. Only then do I get the "I don't know."

There are a few people I can tell are better at prompting than I am. Them, I'll tolerate this from, though most of them do more than function as an AI proxy anyhow and usually will say "I don't know, I'll check X" first.

New comment by syntheticnature in "The cost of lies: A Mineserver story"

syntheticnature — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:15:46 +0000

Seems like an even worse time investment; warn people about the fabulist, yes, but never expect there will be some change of behavior like you might get in a children's show.

New comment by syntheticnature in "The cost of lies: A Mineserver story"

syntheticnature — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 03:19:45 +0000

(2020)

I'd hope anyone who saw "Plane Crazy" would know better than to back a Robert X. Cringely Kickstarter, and I'd expect anyone who followed his tech takes for a bit would have acquired some salt to take with any claims he made.

There seem(ed) to be a number of folks absolutely obsessed with hounding Cringely (apparently dead, I know) over the Kickstarter in his irregular posts. Given the highest tier was $200 and the whole of the Kickstarter was $35.5k USD, seems like a lot of throwing good time/energy after a bad Kickstarter call. I'd be overjoyed if that was the worst case of someone walking off with my money I'd ever faced.

They are, or were I guess, free to do so, but it seems wasteful to spend the amount of time in his comments they did.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Minimal Phone 2"

syntheticnature — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 19:16:57 +0000

It's a full-up Android phone, they want to make sure no one complains versus Their Favorite App not having enough RAM.

New comment by syntheticnature in "The Computer Museum of America reclamation project"

syntheticnature — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 14:04:43 +0000

I know some of that found its way to http://textfiles.com/ whose owner is associated with the Archive Team -- though it's focused on text rather than executables, of course.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Dolly Parton has died"

syntheticnature — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:31:04 +0000

Huh, looks she has an entire food line. Wonder if this is planned to be an income stream for some of her charities, similar to Newman's Own.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Slack Code"

syntheticnature — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:15:11 +0000

Hey Slack, how about making workflows less of a pain in the neck to use? In them there is no ability to have branches rejoin to a common path. Worse, an item isn't found in a list it just throws an exception instead of giving me a null item, which oddly I can test for in an if even though it will never happen?

New comment by syntheticnature in "Show HN: Automatically detect and patch walking-dead states in Sierra games"

syntheticnature — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 14:58:29 +0000

I think I spent more time figuring out how the character save files worked in the original Bard's Tale CRPG than actually playing the game; I certainly made more progress with doing so!

New comment by syntheticnature in "Donkey.bas is 45 Years Old – 131 line of Glory"

syntheticnature — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:31:11 +0000

As a kid I modified DONKEY.BAS for my younger brother who wanted to play as a donkey avoiding cars. It was a clumsy modification, I didn't account for the differing size of the pseudo-sprites, but it made him happy.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Oracle cut its Always Free ARM limits to 2 OCPU / 12GB, enforced Aug 18"

syntheticnature — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:22:13 +0000

They'll clean up instances that aren't doing enough for them to notice, even -- I used to run an XMPP server on one, used daily but not with many users, and they kept shutting it down at random multi-day intervals with little warning. Stopped using it.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code"

syntheticnature — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:15:42 +0000

It confused me at the time, mainly because I had a class with written-out C and one with written-out Pascal in the same semester. The Pascal prof wouldn't mark off for C syntax but the C one would would mark off for Pascal syntax.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"

syntheticnature — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:12:42 +0000

Yes, this is extremely common, both as a continuity means and/or as a localized password manager. Know someone who uses a Rolodex for hers, which is funny and yet it works.

Doesn't work well in office environments, but at home the local threat model is largely fine with this.

New comment by syntheticnature in "A Koi Pond Mosaic Made from 10 Pounds of 3D Printer Waste"

syntheticnature — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:28:33 +0000

In the end everything is delayed trash. Some trash is recyclable/compostable/etc.

New comment by syntheticnature in "A native graphical shell for SSH"

syntheticnature — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 20:46:47 +0000

Indeed, a new hire should be able to use Google to find https://puttygen.com/download-putty#Download_PuTTY_on_Linux_... in short order

evil grin

New comment by syntheticnature in "Codex just found a "workaround" of not having sudo on my PC"

syntheticnature — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:58:46 +0000

Unreliable/stupid is worse than malice, here.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Time to talk about my writerdeck"

syntheticnature — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:10:34 +0000

You sound likely to have dysgraphia, based on the fact I have all the same aspects and a dysgraphia diagnosis.

New comment by syntheticnature in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

syntheticnature — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:12:31 +0000

I didn't send it very high up the chain (and was looking for a job at the time anyhow) but mostly got back snickers from peers and an "I know, but this is a directive from above"

New comment by syntheticnature in "Amazon workers under pressure to up their AI usage are making up tasks"

syntheticnature — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:40:03 +0000

Versus my sibling comment to yours, I actually sent that to some internal folks after the bit about AI+total lines committed was said.