Hacker News: themacguffinman

New comment by themacguffinman in "Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues"

themacguffinman — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:23:23 +0000

Reminds me of the bit about security in Steve Yegge's Google Platforms rant:

> But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network.

New comment by themacguffinman in "Making"

themacguffinman — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:13:40 +0000

A large part of how actors act is specific cues given to them by the director, which is pretty clearly work by the director. A director also gives specific instructions for a lot of other things that have a noticeable impact on the resulting value of the movie.

That's different from telling a maid to generally clean your home. If you gave a maid specific instructions on how to clean and how to move things around in a way that made a noticeable impact on how clean your house ended up being, you could be proud of the managerial work you're doing. But no one does that, because people pay money to not have to work.

Likewise, if you just told an LLM to let it rip on a general task then you're not doing much work, but if you were managing the LLM to do specific things then you are doing significant work.

New comment by themacguffinman in "Choosing a Public DNS Resolver"

themacguffinman — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 06:19:04 +0000

The downside is obviously that uncached queries take much longer (adding >100ms) and more queries are uncached since you can't share the cache with a large user-base. Unless you just visit the same websites over and over again, this results in worse overall performance.

New comment by themacguffinman in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

themacguffinman — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:04:15 +0000

If you're referring to voters staying home, staying home is a vote for their state's majority. There's no sense in which the average citizen in a democracy is not responsible for the outcome of a democratic vote.

New comment by themacguffinman in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

themacguffinman — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 04:43:38 +0000

I don't believe that at all, the average person voted for this government.

New comment by themacguffinman in "It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12"

themacguffinman — Sat, 30 May 2026 18:39:07 +0000

I remember reading about how the reason that Rosetta 2 had good performance compared to other x86-on-ARM emulation efforts (like Windows') is that Apple built special instructions into their M chips dedicated to emulation, so maintaining Rosetta 2 support occupies silicon space when developing new M chips.

New comment by themacguffinman in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

themacguffinman — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:16:45 +0000

I think it's because mental ability and personal worth is pretty strongly tied in the modern world, in that way calling someone deficient is like insulting them. I don't know if you can escape that dynamic, intellect is just very important in modern work and culture. To judge someone as mentally deficient is essentially relegating them to the bottom rungs of the modern economy and status hierarchy in a way that judging athletic ability doesn't do, so naturally it's not comfortable for people to make that judgement.

New comment by themacguffinman in "I'm a Normie. Can Normies Vibe Code?"

themacguffinman — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:59:16 +0000

The author isn't literally discarding their stances, they're temporarily putting it aside to investigate a specific question. The paragraph is pretty clearly a throat-clearing that establishes the author's stance while saying upfront that this article isn't about those stances.

New comment by themacguffinman in "Googlebook"

themacguffinman — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:04:29 +0000

I do, over the years they've replaced my phone three times, two of those were beyond the 1-year manufacturer warranty period.

New comment by themacguffinman in "New US phone network for Christians to block porn and gender-related content"

themacguffinman — Sat, 02 May 2026 16:28:51 +0000

Seems pretty high effort compared to a content blocker mobile app or native parental controls.

I'm not sure why anyone would get this.

New comment by themacguffinman in "Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead"

themacguffinman — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:16:27 +0000

The difference is that it's pretty acceptable for you to reject family requests for money, it doesn't make you a pariah and being a pariah doesn't carry the same consequences when non-family institutions govern society.

The article spends a lot of time belaboring this point: you don't have to do what your family asks you to do in developed countries. On the other hand, becoming outcast from your family in a kinship-dominated society means you have nowhere else to turn to which is enormous pressure.

New comment by themacguffinman in "Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed"

themacguffinman — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 20:22:49 +0000

How about they keep the bug report open until they attempt and confirm the bug is no longer reproducible?

New comment by themacguffinman in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

themacguffinman — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:46:17 +0000

I doubt software development will stay as "low skilled prompting", or that it is even low skilled prompting right now. Productive LLM usage goes beyond typing in better prompts and involves things like improving guardrails (eg type definitions and tests), context (docs and "skills" and MCP servers), and management strategy (instructing specialized agents together). It seems natural that there will be high skill AI coding to differentiate engineers, at least until superintelligent AGI emerges and kills us all.

New comment by themacguffinman in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

themacguffinman — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 16:07:50 +0000

Isn't that what is implied by the toughest job market yet for junior level candidates? Author is very confident that the answer to his question is "no".

New comment by themacguffinman in "Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps"

themacguffinman — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:25:29 +0000

How is it unsustainable when iOS has enforced even stricter rules for its nearly 20 year lifespan?

New comment by themacguffinman in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

themacguffinman — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 13:19:44 +0000

I think the key metric to good software has really changed, the bar has noticeably dropped.

I see unreliable software like openclaw explode in popularity while a Director of Alignment at Meta publicly shares how it shredded her inbox while continuing to use openclaw [1], because that's still good enough innit? I see much buggier releases from macOS & Windows. The biggest military in the world is insisting on getting rid of any existing safeguards and limitations on its AI use and is reportedly using Claude to pick bombing targets [2] in a bombing campaign that we know has made mistakes hitting hospitals [3] and a school [4]. AI-generated slop now floods social networks with high popularity and engagement.

It's a known effect that economies of scale lowers average quality but creates massive abundance. There never really was a fundamental quality bar to software or creative work, it just has to be barely better than not existing, and that bar is lower than you might imagine.

[1] https://x.com/summeryue0/status/2025774069124399363

[2] https://archive.ph/bDTxE

[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/who-says-has-it-ha...

[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/iran-school-strike-us-mil...

New comment by themacguffinman in "Apple Studio Display and Studio Display XDR"

themacguffinman — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:46:10 +0000

https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-rog-strix-27-dual-mode-...

I haven't found a glossy competitor, or even one with the same HDR spec, but this is the closest I could find so far.

New comment by themacguffinman in "Timeline: Anthropic, OpenAI, and U.S. Government"

themacguffinman — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:25:40 +0000

The events are out of order, the bottom three events are:

- Feb 27, 2026, 02:13 PM: OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation

- Feb 27, 2026, 12:00 AM: Anthropic: Statement on the comments from Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

- Feb 27, 2026, 10:14 PM: Dept. of War: Anthropic is a supply chain risk

New comment by themacguffinman in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

themacguffinman — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 07:24:13 +0000

The keyword is "cancel", not threaten seizure with the DPA and destruction with a baseless supply chain risk designation.

New comment by themacguffinman in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

themacguffinman — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 04:04:22 +0000

Not this, because this is completely unprecedented? In fact, the Pentagon already signed an Anthropic contract with safe terms 6 months ago, that initial negotiation was when Anthropic would have made a decision to part ways. It was totally absurd for the govt to turn around and threaten to change the deal, just a ridiculous and unprecedented level of incompetence.