Hacker News: theSherwood

New comment by theSherwood in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

theSherwood — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:30:13 +0000

It's great apart from the nested list syntax. It's quite noisy. I'd prefer if it supported indentation.

New comment by theSherwood in "Show HN: A context-aware permission guard for Claude Code"

theSherwood — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:05:59 +0000

What stops the llm from writing a malicious program and executing it? No offense meant, but this solution feels a bit like bolting the door and leaving all the windows open.

New comment by theSherwood in "Stopping bad guys from using my open source project (feedback wanted)"

theSherwood — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:49:48 +0000

I don't know about good vs evil. That seems impossible. But I'd be interested in a license that prevented use by any company owned by one of the top 1% most valuable companies in the world. I have no idea if that's enforceable or not. Basically a license that restricts use for companies that are just trying to be acquired.

New comment by theSherwood in "How can England possibly be running out of water?"

theSherwood — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 16:37:33 +0000

I'm really skeptical of the idea that the blame for the lack of water infrastructure ought to be put at the feet of the water companies. The UK's planning system has strangled just about every infrastructure project in every domain. There is a general trend of local residents preventing infrastructure being built in the area, whether it be for water, energy, rail, or roads.

New comment by theSherwood in "Historical Tech Tree"

theSherwood — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 19:07:42 +0000

This site is an absolute gem. Thank you.

New comment by theSherwood in "Breaking the WASM/JS communication performance barrier"

theSherwood — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 23:52:38 +0000

The current situation is that we have limited uptake of WASM. This is due, in part, to lack of DOM access. We could solve that but we would have to complicate WASM or complicate the DOM. Complicating WASM would seem to undermine its purpose, burdening it forever with the complexity of the browser. The DOM, on the other hand, is already quite complex. But providing a fresh interface to the DOM would make it possible to bypass some of the accretions of time and complexity. The majority of the cost would be to browser implementors as opposed to web developers.

New comment by theSherwood in "Breaking the WASM/JS communication performance barrier"

theSherwood — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 13:43:47 +0000

100%. If we could get a DomString8 (8-bit encoded) interface in addition to the existing DomString (16-bit encoded) and a way to wrap a buffer in a DomString8, we could have convenient and reasonably performant interfaces between WASM and the DOM.

New comment by theSherwood in "When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support?"

theSherwood — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 08:40:51 +0000

I want DOM access from WASM, but I don't want WASM to have to rely on UTF-16 to do it (DOMString is a 16-bit encoding). We already have the js-string-builtins proposal which ties WASM a little closer to 16-bit string encodings and I'd rather not see any more moves in that direction. So I'd prefer to see an additional DOM interface of DOMString8 (8-bit encoding) before providing WASM access to DOM apis. But I suspect the interest in that development is low.

New comment by theSherwood in "CSS's problems are Tailwind's problems"

theSherwood — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 16:41:15 +0000

The advantages of Tailwind are:

- the styling is colocated with the markup - sensible defaults - avoids rule hierarchy/inheritance - minimal JS at runtime

Disadvantages:

- build step and configuration - dynamic styling complexity

I don't think that's a bad tradeoff. And we're talking about styling on the web, here. So there are no good solutions. But there is a bad solution and it's CSS-in-JS.

New comment by theSherwood in "LLM Inevitabilism"

theSherwood — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 13:31:24 +0000

I'm not pretending to any novel insights. Most of us who don't have much use for theology are generally unimpressed by its discourse. Not novel at all. And the "centuries of work" without concrete developments that exist outside of the minds of those invested in the discourse is one reason why many of us are unimpressed. In contrast, AI development is resulting in concrete changes that are easily verified by anyone and on much shorter time scales.

New comment by theSherwood in "LLM Inevitabilism"

theSherwood — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 12:32:53 +0000

You are, of course, entitled to your religious convictions. But to most people outside of your religious community, the evidence for some specific theological claim (such as predestination) looks an awful lot like "nothing". In contrast, claims about the trajectory of AI (whether you agree with the claims or not) are based on easily-verifiable, public knowledge about the recent history of AI development.

New comment by theSherwood in "LLM Inevitabilism"

theSherwood — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 12:15:34 +0000

I agree that "very likely" is not "inevitable". It is possible for the advance of AI to stop, but difficult. I agree that doesn't absolve people of responsibility for what they do. But I disagree with the comparison to religious predestination.

New comment by theSherwood in "LLM Inevitabilism"

theSherwood — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 09:25:29 +0000

I think this is a case of bad pattern matching, to be frank. Two cosmetically similar things don't necessarily have a shared cause. When you see billions in investment to make something happen (AI) because of obvious incentives, it's very reasonable to see that as something that's likely to happen; something you might be foolish to bet against. This is qualitatively different from the kind of predestination present in many religions where adherents have assurance of the predestined outcome often despite human efforts and incentives. A belief in a predestined outcome is very different from extrapolating current trends into the future.

New comment by theSherwood in "Ask HN: What problem would you solve with unlimited resources?"

theSherwood — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 10:16:58 +0000

What's the current regulatory status for mass timber? My understanding was that one of the main hurdles for uptake in the US has been regulation. Is that no longer the case?

New comment by theSherwood in "Ask HN: What problem would you solve with unlimited resources?"

theSherwood — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 09:51:33 +0000

Our lives are already nearly fully dependent on technology. Some of the projections for casualties in the months following a high-altitude EMP (or solar flare) are pretty staggering. Just losing computers means that most people die of starvation within a few months as global supply chains completely collapse.

And you're being unnecessarily adversarial. The comment you're replying to didn't say anything about disregarding the well-being of life on Earth. Interpreting it that way is uncharitable.

New comment by theSherwood in ""AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing"

theSherwood — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 16:08:27 +0000

LLMs have only really been around a handful of years and what they are capable of is shocking. Maybe LLMs hit a wall and plateau. Maybe it's a few years before there's another breakthrough that results in another step-change in capabilities. Maybe not. We can focus on the hype and the fraud and the marketing and all the nonsense, but it's missing the forest for the trees.

We genuinely have seen a shocking increase in reasoning abilities over the course of only a decade from things that aren't human. There may be bumps in the road, but we have very little idea how long this trajectory of capability increases will continue. I don't see any reason to think humans are near the ceiling of what is possible. We are in uncharted territory.

New comment by theSherwood in ""AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing"

theSherwood — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:57:10 +0000

This matches my expectations for the near term pretty closely.

New comment by theSherwood in ""AI Will Replace All the Jobs " Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing"

theSherwood — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:25:03 +0000

The analogies to previous technologies always seem misguided to me. Maybe it allows us to make some predictions about the next few years, but not more than that. We do not know when/where we will hit the limits on AI capabilities. I think this is completely unlike any previous technology. AI is intentionally being developed to be able to make decisions in any domain humans work in. This is unlike any previous technology.

The more apt analogy is to other species. When was the last time there was something other than homo sapiens that could carry on an interesting conversation with homo sapiens. 40,000 years? And this new thing has been in development for what? 70 years? The rise in its capabilities has been absolutely meteoric and we don't know where the ceiling is. Analogies to industrial agriculture (a very big deal, historically) and other technologies completely miss the scope of what's happening.

New comment by theSherwood in "Stop syncing everything"

theSherwood — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 08:17:04 +0000

This is a very interesting approach. Using pages as the basic sync unit seems to simplify a lot. It also makes the sync of arbitrary bytes possible. But it does seem that if your sync is this coarse-grained that there would be lots of conflicting writes in applications with a lot of concurrent users (even if they are updating semantically unrelated data). Seems like OT or CRDT would be better in such a use-case. I'd be interested to see some real-world benchmarks to see how contention scales with the number of users.

New comment by theSherwood in "Commit Mono – Neutral programming typeface"

theSherwood — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 11:59:08 +0000

I like the typeface. The website navigation is really fun. A little confusing until you are used to it, but I like the logic of it. Still unclear which widgets can receive input other than navigation. It would be nice to have some clear visual indicator. Some widgets use arrow keys to change state (tabs, toggles, etc.) rather than just move focus around, which I found surprising. Seems like state changes ought to require a distinct input from the focus-affecting input. Some cases certainly blur the lines, such as when navigating over glyphs and seeing captions on focus changes. On the whole, I really enjoyed it. I wish more UIs would experiment with this kind of stuff.