Hacker News: thatguymike

New comment by thatguymike in "Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS"

thatguymike — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:50:51 +0000

They are definitely doing this to build RL environments. Absolutely heinous.

New comment by thatguymike in "After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell"

thatguymike — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 08:39:05 +0000

Very interesting! I honestly would have expected the opposite: I was optimistic about strongly functional languages in the age of AI. The more modular and side-effect-free your code is, the easier it should be to constrain changes, catch slop, and reduce LLMisms like spooky hacks-at-a-distance.

It looks like the issues are in the compiler and documentation so hopefully it’s fixable… I write in Python every day but I do miss smarter languages and I hope AI doesn’t fully obliterate them.

New comment by thatguymike in "GPT‑NL: a sovereign language model for the Netherlands"

thatguymike — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:14:18 +0000

> A total of €13.5 million has been allocated to the project.

> This public investment underlines the importance of an independent, trustworthy and future‑proof Dutch language model.

It does, but not in the way you think it does.

New comment by thatguymike in "There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing"

thatguymike — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:24:58 +0000

The next Jonathan Blow is going to be massively empowered by their tools and make something wonderful. Having fewer people involved can lead to a more focused execution of their vision - most amazing indie games are like this. But yes your average game isn’t bad because it’s hard to write C#, it’s bad because it’s hard to design great unique mechanics and levels, and it’s hard to see AI helping (indeed not harming) that.

New comment by thatguymike in "I made my phone slow on purpose"

thatguymike — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:39:05 +0000

I love the concept - blocking apps are often too restrictive which makes me disable them. Slowing could be a nice alternative.

This probably uses a vpn? It’s important to think about how to stop me disabling it casually. I use Opal which blocks my settings page too. Which works great but frustratingly it blocks my legitimate needs very often too!

New comment by thatguymike in "Waymo Drives Off with South Bay Man's Luggage"

thatguymike — Sun, 03 May 2026 01:10:41 +0000

Agreed - they dont even need to send an employee to do it, they can just send a driverless waymo with the luggage surely!

New comment by thatguymike in "Where the goblins came from"

thatguymike — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 05:18:22 +0000

A decade ago I gave a presentation on automata theory. I demonstrated writing arbitrary symbols to tape with greek letters, just like I’d learned at university. The audience was pretty confused and didn’t really grok the presentation. A genius communicator in the audience advised me to replace the greek letters with emoji… I gave the same presentation to the same demographic audience a week later and it was a smash hit, best received tech talk I’ve given. That lesson has always stuck with me.

New comment by thatguymike in "Cursor Camp"

thatguymike — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:48:11 +0000

Well this is incredibly joyful, well done.

New comment by thatguymike in "Men who stare at walls"

thatguymike — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:55:40 +0000

Tech Guy reinvents meditation

New comment by thatguymike in "ARC-AGI-3"

thatguymike — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:32:41 +0000

Curious, that doesn't match the graph up on the Leaderboard page? https://arcprize.org/leaderboard

New comment by thatguymike in "1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6"

thatguymike — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 05:25:59 +0000

That’s… not how the labour market works

New comment by thatguymike in "Tell HN: Happy New Year"

thatguymike — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:57:16 +0000

Happy new year from SF. 2025 was about hanging on, balancing a heavy workload and a new baby, but in ways which I’m confident are the right decisions for our future. I did a lot of Becoming An Adult this year, learning to trust myself and my partner, and prioritizing what matters. 2026 will probably be more of the same..! But I am hopeful things should ease up over time.

Happy new year, this community has given me a lot and I’m grateful for you all.

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

thatguymike — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 17:14:47 +0000

The conceit here is that it’s the bot itself writing the thankyou letter. Not pretending it’s from a human. The source is an environment running an LLM on loop and doing stuff it decides to do, looks like these letters are some emergent behavior. Still disgusting spam.

New comment by thatguymike in "Ask HN: How do I bridge the gap between PhD and SWE experiences?"

thatguymike — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 15:14:56 +0000

Not easy, but I have a friend who did this by reaching back out to his old professors and colleagues, figuring out what they needed, and ended up doing a swe project in his old lab and built that into a consultancy which does tech partnering for science.

New comment by thatguymike in "The Department of War just shot the accountants and opted for speed"

thatguymike — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 15:16:55 +0000

Based on this article alone, I can believe this is a good thing. The US military suffers incredibly from its monopsony position and without a doubt will get a heavy wakeup call (read: dead young people) next time it has to fight a real war. In addition the army should be the most accountable and results oriented branch of government, since it’s the only one that’s actively oppositional. If we can’t fix procurement there then what hope do we have for the rest of government?

New comment by thatguymike in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

thatguymike — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 22:51:12 +0000

Why doesn’t the government put Cloudflare or something in front of their site?

New comment by thatguymike in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

thatguymike — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 22:49:40 +0000

Oh I was hoping for this but with real birds in my neighborhood. Still neat!

New comment by thatguymike in "The collapse of the econ PhD job market"

thatguymike — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 20:38:39 +0000

Not taking away at all from the message, but: there's something funny about a freehand MSPaint extrapolation appearing in a post about econ PHDs :)

New comment by thatguymike in "Find SF parking cops"

thatguymike — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 20:21:48 +0000

This is great. Watch them take the data down in 3, 2, 1...

Until then I'd love to see trails of where the traffic enforcers have been on the main map, it would make the map more engaging.

New comment by thatguymike in "Vibe Coding Through the Berghain Challenge"

thatguymike — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 16:54:25 +0000

It’s funny, I immediately thought it was LLM but I was fairly confident it was ChatGPT. I suppose the styles are converging more than I thought: too long, lists, “not just x it’s y”, “here’s the X”…