Hacker News: theobreuerweil

New comment by theobreuerweil in "What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves"

theobreuerweil — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:55:34 +0000

I’m sure that he/she would ride a lot more if it cost nothing, but I think the point is valid: even if Uber could 10x or 100x productivity, they could not do the same with income, because there is a limit to how much people actually need to go places.

New comment by theobreuerweil in "Building for an audience of one: starting and finishing side projects with AI"

theobreuerweil — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 13:15:15 +0000

I do think about this a lot. On the one hand, you might be right, and it may not matter at all. On the other, we often do that kind of stuff because it makes it harder to slip up by accident and/or makes the code easier to read and understand. These things are surely helpful to AI agents in the same way that they are useful to people?

I guess it depends on whether the extra time you could invest in that kind of thing pays back in terms of context windows, code quality or speed of AI code generation.

New comment by theobreuerweil in "Make product worse, get money"

theobreuerweil — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 10:23:22 +0000

Even if the information is technically available, a business can sit there optimising for a specific problem while individuals have to deal with tens or hundreds of separate problems every day. We have to satisfice and finer details like this are usually ignored.

New comment by theobreuerweil in "Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders"

theobreuerweil — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 20:58:24 +0000

It’s very possible that things were always this way, you’re right. My own perception is that politics has become more divisive and less respectful in my own lifetime, and I happen to think that social media makes this worse, but that’s admittedly just an opinion.

To the emotional statement: I think I’d get a reaction if rather than saying “I don’t think Go is a good language” I said something like “Go is objectively the worst programming language ever devised”. I get your point but if you feel emotional about something then say so - IMO the parent comment did much more than that.

New comment by theobreuerweil in "Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders"

theobreuerweil — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 20:49:34 +0000

There is indeed a difference and I don’t think we’re disagreeing on that.

New comment by theobreuerweil in "Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders"

theobreuerweil — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 15:04:19 +0000

This is exactly what I was trying to point out. You've made some reasonable points here, but that doesn't offer any evidence for the hyperbolic statement that Israel is pure and undiluted evil. Israel could be a bad place without that statement being true.

This might seem like a silly distinction to some but what I find depressing about modern culture wars is how "we disagree on these points" seems to morph into "you and everything you represent is terrible". Nuance matters.

New comment by theobreuerweil in "Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders"

theobreuerweil — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 14:59:42 +0000

That might be true but, even if it is, it's a far cry from the statement that the Israeli government is singularly evil.

New comment by theobreuerweil in "Israel demanded Google and Amazon use secret 'wink' to sidestep legal orders"

theobreuerweil — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 13:54:09 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by theobreuerweil in "FSF announces Librephone project"

theobreuerweil — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 11:26:44 +0000

Wow skimmed that part - yeah I guess fair enough

New comment by theobreuerweil in "FSF announces Librephone project"

theobreuerweil — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 10:26:09 +0000

I personally think it's unfair to accuse this person of sexism. I didn't even know he was talking about a woman until you pointed it out. It's possible that this comment comes from a place of sexism, and it's possible that it doesn't. It's uncharitable to just assume the former.

New comment by theobreuerweil in "GPT-5"

theobreuerweil — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 22:22:52 +0000

The models may be writing the code but I would be surprised if they were contributing to the underlying science, which feels like the hard part

New comment by theobreuerweil in "Get the location of the ISS using DNS"

theobreuerweil — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 16:30:38 +0000

If that’s a pun, it’s next level

New comment by theobreuerweil in "Ask HN: Why hasn't Apple bought a cell carrier like AT&T or Verizon?"

theobreuerweil — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 06:32:03 +0000

To the extent that a character makes a joke about his relationship getting serious enough that they started sharing an iCloud account

New comment by theobreuerweil in "Why do LLMs have emergent properties?"

theobreuerweil — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:52:03 +0000

I understood it to mean properties of large-scale systems that are not properties of its components. Like in thermodynamics: zooming in to a molecular level, you can reverse time without anything seeming off. Suddenly you get a trillion molecules and things like entropy appear, and time is not reversible at all.

New comment by theobreuerweil in "When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI"

theobreuerweil — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 19:22:35 +0000

I think the comment is referring to “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”.

New comment by theobreuerweil in "TikTok says it is restoring service for U.S. users"

theobreuerweil — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 21:02:56 +0000

This seems not to be an opinion that other people hold, but I never saw social media as “free speech” given that some third party can decides which parts of what you say get promoted.

If you sent letters to people via a middleman who decided which of those to forward onwards, you’d see that as censorship. I appreciate that that’s an over-simplified example - it’s meant to be a reductio ad absurdum. But control of the algorithm effectively regulates free speech, IMO.

Also (for clarity) the fact that China happens to be involved is not relevant to my point!

New comment by theobreuerweil in "The egg or the chicken? An ancient unicellular says egg"

theobreuerweil — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 00:42:43 +0000

It’s funny, I always thought it was obviously egg. Assuming evolution, the first recognisable “chicken” must have been the product of a mutation, hence the egg from which it hatched was the origin of the first ever chicken.

New comment by theobreuerweil in "The feds are coming for John Deere over the right to repair"

theobreuerweil — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 22:13:16 +0000

You may be right, I’ve no idea. For me it’s the principle more than the specific amount. I can’t understand why a manufacturer is entitled to charge you to use something that you supposedly own. Car manufacturers charging to unlock seat heating is a good example.

New comment by theobreuerweil in "The feds are coming for John Deere over the right to repair"

theobreuerweil — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 12:19:13 +0000

When you pay for goods or services, you should expect to receive something. If you pay extra for leather seats, you’re getting leather seats. If you pay for DLC as part of a game, you’re subsidising the cost of the developer adding more stuff to the game. The pricing of digital products and add-ons may not always be fair but you should be getting access to something valuable that you didn’t already have, i.e. something that costs money to develop and/or host.

In this case, you already bought and paid for the additional RAM. The manufacturer is refusing to let you use it until you pay additional money, even though you theoretically own it already. That’s not providing a service, it’s just extortion.

If you could somehow prove that the additional RAM was not factored into the original cost of what you bought then this might be fair (albeit wasteful) - but I doubt it…

New comment by theobreuerweil in "Amusing Ourselves to Death (2009)"

theobreuerweil — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 07:15:51 +0000

There is a middle ground between woodworking and TikTok, no? People enjoyed talking to each other and had fun before we had technology.

It’s easy to see social media as harmless, and maybe it is, but it also has the potential to act as a powerful tool for serving propaganda and brainwashing.

I’m not suggesting an actual conspiracy theory here but it’s concerning that a few huge companies have the power to broadcast (and control) the flow of information to a majority of population, who will consume that information by and large without suspicion.

If for some reason Facebook or TikTok really wanted to meaningfully shift public opinion, they probably could, and in any direction they might choose.