Hacker News: thenoblesunfish

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Never talk to the police"

thenoblesunfish — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:17:49 +0000

Never frobnicate without a flangleharp, says the flangleharp salesman. He could be right, but you would probably want to ask someone else.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:39:59 +0000

You are going to be asked to do your job, faster, and you are going to have a massive headache managing a bunch of machines mostly doing your job.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:37:05 +0000

Because a lot of us are engineers. It's our mindset and our job to question hype and broad strokes and easy solutions, to go a few levels deeper and ask "okay but does it really work?". I don't think most people are anti AI more than they are anti any tool.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:29:43 +0000

When a junior engineer first sent me something that looked good until I realized it had been vibed, and thus their understanding of what they were doing was too shallow to answer questions and improve on it. That was a doc, but it happens with everything. "Oh shit", I say, as everyone is aggressively encouraged to work this way.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Domain expertise has always been the real moat"

thenoblesunfish — Sun, 31 May 2026 06:42:09 +0000

A terrible example, because chess is very, very simple - deterministic, rules fully specified in a few pages. We're talking about how you operate in a "games" which, among other complexities, involve the economy and human social dynamics. Billions of other agents. Find a plumber and try to beat them when someone calls you with a clogged toilet. Find a teacher and try to beat them when a student is repeatedly acting out.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Domain expertise has always been the real moat"

thenoblesunfish — Sun, 31 May 2026 06:35:49 +0000

True that AI lets you get information fast an efficiently. But it might just make you feel like you understand, even if you don't have the kind of hard won domain intuition that this article is talking about. I certainly often get delusions of grandeur when I learn a lot of something and haven't yet suffered with it in practice.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

thenoblesunfish — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:01:14 +0000

Perhaps part of the issue is that people feel compelled to respond, even though they don't have anything to say. Maybe people think if they burn some tokens for you that's somehow a more polite way to ignore you and hope you go away?

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

thenoblesunfish — Sun, 24 May 2026 07:18:53 +0000

To make sure this opinion is here:

The fact that they get to make this announcement is probably the biggest upside. Their base loves it. It makes people think they are doing something. There is an asymmetry in that if they quietly roll this back or it's blocked in court, it will generate only a tiny fraction of the publicity.

Probably not too controversial here to say that the economy wants these immigrants so good bet they'll keep getting hired.

It's a cruel strategy, but I think it's fair to say that it's far from certain it'll be a consistent one.

Don't let them troll you too much, stay strong.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

thenoblesunfish — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:10:30 +0000

It's annoyingly huge, but is this worse than that? It's software - it does stuff and takes up space. If it takes up more space than you think the stuff is worth, then complain it's bloated, sure, but I am not sure why "silently" is being thrown around.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

thenoblesunfish — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:25:12 +0000

It's true but then again, for most things, the correct answer is somewhere there, amongst the BS, so if you have a good BS detector and want some ideas, you could do worse. You can't outsource the part where you see for yourself if stuff works, and form your own opinions.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

thenoblesunfish — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:21:55 +0000

Charming! Reminded me of "Naive. Super" by Erlend Loe, which I loved.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Composition Shouldn't be this Hard"

thenoblesunfish — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:37:54 +0000

Maybe this unfairly off topic, but in reading the intro, my thought was not that things become brittle and hard to change because of the inelegance of the abstractions, but because of the banal dynamics of work. Mostly, people act quickly towards short term goals, without full understanding. They accept technical debt, they pass things between people, and the numbers to avoid making things kinda gross just never work out.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "The effects of caffeine consumption do not decay with a ~5 hour half-life"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 07:57:36 +0000

Very interesting! An aside and fishing lazily: I am one of those people where caffeine has a very strong and long lasting effect. I don't have caffeine after about 9am or it affects my sleep that night. I love drinking coffee, and fortunately for me it seems like decaf got way better and widely available recently. Did something happen there?

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Restoring the first recording of computer music (2018)"

thenoblesunfish — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:59:05 +0000

"This audio is embedded from SoundCloud and requires cookies to function. To view this content, please enable analytics and marketing cookies using the cookies opt-in at the bottom of your screen." - lame!

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:42:02 +0000

I still use Vim a lot, even though for work I use a fork of VSCode, like most people. Why? Because it's something I feel I can understand - it's simple and runs everywhere. It's the world of shells and text files. The work setup is a huge GUI with dozens of extensions, and now a whole other layer of non deterministic AI stuff. Useful, but it's a different kind of tool, one which relies on constant support from a large system.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services"

thenoblesunfish — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:53:40 +0000

People don't like these checks. Ok. But. Parents worry about their kids being exposed to porn and social media. They want someone to do something about it. That political force is real, and someone is going to take advantage of it. What tools can they ask for if not these checks everyone agrees they hate? That's what I hope for in these types of comment threads.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension"

thenoblesunfish — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:20:04 +0000

Just to make sure it's somewhere in these comments: the fundamental issue is people trying to measure something they don't understand. That is not new. The article gives an interesting exploration of how things break down in a new way when people focus too much on metrics instead of (IMO) the more robust approach of getting people who care to try to make something that feels quality. We're building crap, yes, but I blame the people who spend their time measuring "velocity" like it's a well defined term, not the coding tools being used to play the game.

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

thenoblesunfish — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:22:55 +0000

I was hoping for more on "... The only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely." What do the laws say on this? What data is this? I would have assumed that just like a bouncer can check my ID and hand it back to me, a digital system can verify my identity and not hold onto everything (e.g. the actual photo of my ID).

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

thenoblesunfish — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 07:01:06 +0000

Okay, funny. What does it prove? Is this a more general issue? How would you make the model better?

New comment by thenoblesunfish in "“Nothing” is the secret to structuring your work"

thenoblesunfish — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:34:18 +0000

I personally find the same approach very effective. It forces me to know where to look for things, and to document things because I cannot hold onto the fiction of being able to hold it all in mind.

But the real advice here is "think about what you're doing". Any system, whether it's "clear your workspace" or "arrange absolutely everything so its visible" probably works, because you're acting deliberately.