Hacker News: th0ma5

New comment by th0ma5 in "Anthropic AI tool sparks selloff from software to broader market"

th0ma5 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 23:07:03 +0000

That is generally only applicable to extremely momentary arbitrage opportunities. There's still a lot of automation though, but it's pretty boring. It's basically look at the news and make a recommendation to a fund manager or something, and various competing vendors of such, down to consumer products like that.

New comment by th0ma5 in "We (As a Society) Peaked in the 90s"

th0ma5 — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:11:02 +0000

I certainly think both can be true, we can have different contexts of technology as we get on the train and go through this cycle Adams describes, as well as fundamentally disagree with a technology's marketing for fundamental reasons. Additionally you could be both and this isn't a conflict.

New comment by th0ma5 in "How to explain Generative AI in the classroom"

th0ma5 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 23:25:05 +0000

This is really well put together, it should probably include more about ethics, hidden bias, etc.

New comment by th0ma5 in "ICE Is Going on a Surveillance Shopping Spree"

th0ma5 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:34:27 +0000

I don't know if you're right or not, but a lot of people who would otherwise be fans of meatheaded thugs are laughing at these people. I do worry the spectre of some unstoppable idiocy is myth. People at the time weren't used to mass media at all, and there were many other dynamics that may not sum up to a succinct conclusion. Perhaps people saying they were like the new Hun or whatever made people less likely to laugh at them, but, I know these people today are also pretty hilariously inept. Like for instance they all think facial recognition doesn't work with your lower face covered, and they don't realize that they actually don't have good discipline on their mask usage, and the tools they use on their phones to try to id people aren't nearly as good as the tools regular people use to track them.

New comment by th0ma5 in "Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs"

th0ma5 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:03:02 +0000

I think this is covered in the Bainbridge automation paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation ... When the user doesn't have practiced context like you described, to be expected to suddenly have that practiced context to do the right thing in a surprise moment is untenable.

New comment by th0ma5 in "ICE Is Going on a Surveillance Shopping Spree"

th0ma5 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 02:53:33 +0000

You're not wrong that that's the intent, I'm just not even seeing stupid bigots that are happy with it and they also don't seem to care about that either. So, once they lose even the hateful for not being hateful enough they're just as likely to be embarrassed by all of this or fracture amongst themselves with various no true bigot fallacy infighting. This has been the more recent mini patterns at least.

New comment by th0ma5 in "ICE Is Going on a Surveillance Shopping Spree"

th0ma5 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 02:14:54 +0000

The difference for me is that the Stasi seemingly had more competent people and more people that actually believed in what they were doing and thought it effective. With none of that, these are the actions of an organization that is failing and full of incompetence. It is even more alarming how effective they could be if anyone actually believed in them, including their own leadership or if the cause actually attracted worthwhile participants.

New comment by th0ma5 in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

th0ma5 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 01:48:52 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by th0ma5 in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

th0ma5 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 01:45:48 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by th0ma5 in "2025: The Year in LLMs"

th0ma5 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:32:48 +0000

I think when a moderator keeps intervening like this it really does mean that there's something wrong here. I think people would be less mad if you just went ahead and said that you have some kind of special arrangement here with this influencer and post publicly that you like them constantly spamming the site and letting their fans flood the place with deflection and appeals for donations to them. Even YouTube had to add a sponsored post disclaimer.

New comment by th0ma5 in "2025: The Year in LLMs"

th0ma5 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 18:22:40 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by th0ma5 in "Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need"

th0ma5 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 01:13:18 +0000

Despite open plugins, and mostly open end result file formats, the entirety of the media software world is built around proprietary software primarily for several reasons: Ephemeral fads have you making money in one big upfront push, integration of some new technique doesn't lend itself to open standards, or the fact that the actual bulk of paying customers are presumably working musicians with budgets, and that market is ultimately small. The side effect of this, much like radios, rc planes and drones, and many other hobbies, is that a collection of smaller product producing organizations have an even smaller, more even playing field full of smaller professionals and some amateurs. Some of the modular hardware producers have the right idea and provide free versions of their hardware as plugins as a marketing gimmick for their actual hardware. However, outside of the Linux world, the mystique of a proprietary salve that will supplant your creative block pushes people towards short sighted sales pushes instead of trying to lock in a give and take interaction with the broader community.

But I would love every thing that you list. I think things like PipeWire for better or worse are pushing things towards sanity, or least, better ideas for managing the mess in the open source world, which is decades in the making.

New comment by th0ma5 in "Ask HN: By what percentage has AI changed your output as a software engineer?"

th0ma5 — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 09:19:30 +0000

I have yet to see a study design that sufficiently controls for all of the variables. In general it seems that if you could do the work on your own, it may not save time, and in the long run, most all output needs to be reviewed, perhaps moreso than if you were composing it yourself... And the additional variables include things like finding out of the box solutions either with or without the model outputs, which is hard to control for as well. Even more impossible to control variables are model quality, training material related to the topic, and many more of those classes of issues that may not be publically available or even possible to trace fully. Truly, anecdotes are not informative of the general experience. It is literally the cliche that is mentioned on this site periodically "these are the lotto numbers that worked for me."

New comment by th0ma5 in "Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness""

th0ma5 — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 20:04:08 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by th0ma5 in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

th0ma5 — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 19:49:18 +0000

At least Excel worked a lot better.

New comment by th0ma5 in "Fahrplan – 39C3"

th0ma5 — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 19:10:58 +0000

Anyone have a schedule that works for different Timezones ??

New comment by th0ma5 in "Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications will be made open access"

th0ma5 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 22:17:14 +0000

I came here with this perspective and it made the rest of the thread feel like submarine PR cleanup for this mess. Perhaps they can afford to keep their high profits because of AI company money?

New comment by th0ma5 in "Opus 4.5 is the first model that makes me fear for my job"

th0ma5 — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 21:23:45 +0000

I just wanted to say I think it is doing people a great disservice to advocate for these specific kinds of tools, but the last paragraph is a universally correct statement, seemingly permanently.

New comment by th0ma5 in "Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI"

th0ma5 — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:42:23 +0000

No, when did I say that?

New comment by th0ma5 in "Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI"

th0ma5 — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:32:01 +0000

If this had any substance then it could be criticized, which is what they're trying to avoid.