Hacker News: timcobb

New comment by timcobb in "Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent"

timcobb — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:08:54 +0000

It's telling, IMO, that Western cultures deals with suicidality with hotlines you can call. It's like some joke from gonzo journalism come to fruition. I don't know what the answer is, but as a person who's been suicidal, for me it wasn't a hotline. It's even more fitting, if not kind of perfect, that said hotlines farm your data and sell it. :chef's kiss: what else is there to say. Like just about everything else, callous people make money while vulnerable, sensitive people pay up. Beautiful world we live in ;). Please drink responsibly!

New comment by timcobb in "Bun's experimental Rust rewrite hits 99.8% test compatibility on Linux x64 glibc"

timcobb — Sat, 09 May 2026 22:51:05 +0000

The Ubutnu coreutils thing last week really soured me on 99.8% test compatibility Rust rewrites :|. I clicked through to the tweet linked here and it was kind of like shudder I feel quite opposite now when I see this kind of thing. I'm like *looking for exit*

New comment by timcobb in "Dirtyfrag: Universal Linux LPE"

timcobb — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:59:53 +0000

> Do you think this is inherent or an artifact of prompting?

Not sure! I mean, look at this sibling comment for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48062797. Not my experience, but apparently others have this experience.

> But what if a coding agent was prompted to be more curious during development?

I've tried using the language of curiosity. My qualitative take was that it did have a positive impact, but not much. And I can only tinker with system prompting so much, before I get drawn into LLM driving :)

> which is that everyone's style of work is going to converge

yeah I imagine even people's styles of thinking will converge as a result of this, more so than from reading other people's prose or programs. I think I saw something on HN to this effect within the last month, too.

New comment by timcobb in "Dirty Frag: Universal Linux LPE"

timcobb — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:58:51 +0000

> The LLM catches things I would have overlooked. I ask for a new feature in a certain file, and the LLM suggests fixing a tangentially related file to accommodate the new feature without breaking something e

What are you using? Do you think this behavior is in response to prompting? My goal at times is to "rabbit hole" the LLM to get it to go down rabbit holes and find bigger and bigger picture issues until it homes in on something fundamentally broken that could have big impact if fixed. But it's not trivial to push the agent in that direction for me.

New comment by timcobb in "Dirty Frag: Universal Linux LPE"

timcobb — Fri, 08 May 2026 04:26:57 +0000

> When your workflow consists of asking questions and getting answers immediately, you don't get to see what's nearby.

Very much aligns with my experience. For me this is the most unsatisfying thing about AI-based workflows in general, they miss stuff humans would never miss.

All the time I wonder what am I missing that's right nearby? It's remarkable how many times I have to ask Claude code to fully ingest something before it actually puts it into context. It always tries to laser through to target it's looking for, which is often not what you want it to look for, at least not all you want it to look for. Getting these models to open up their field of vision is tough.

New comment by timcobb in "Telus Uses AI to Alter Call-Agent Accents"

timcobb — Wed, 06 May 2026 13:38:06 +0000

Right but it's not like they don't know about flying and can't be instructed and coached? I don't mean to me dismissive, maybe (quite possibly) things are more complicated than that, but ...? Like, okay when an Indian person is working for an Indian airline they're instructed "hey, here's the departures binder." But when they're hired by Lufthansa they get oriented using whatever system and processes are in place at that company. And "hey, don't be rude. To western people, here's what that means beyond what's intuitive to you." How does their previous experience with a binder mean they can't relate to you on a support call?

New comment by timcobb in "Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement"

timcobb — Wed, 06 May 2026 13:16:55 +0000

Okay, sure, but I'm talking about being satisfied. I understand reality and that I may not get the satisfaction I would like. And specifically the example of Al Capone who was, yeah, got for tax evasion, but at least was treated ultimately like the criminal he was.

New comment by timcobb in "Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement"

timcobb — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:14:30 +0000

Right but Al Capone did jail time, here Zuck gets to break and enter into people's homes, take their stuff, then haggle for it after-the-fact, all the while keeping the civilization-domination apparatus that he built using the stuff he stole? That is super not fair. Ordinary people could certainly not get away with that.

New comment by timcobb in "Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement"

timcobb — Wed, 06 May 2026 05:12:38 +0000

Okay but... I am very unimpressed by this. How is it that he then gets to still be an AI monopolist/hegemonist? How's that fair? He basically force-acquired all this stuff without asking, now he's haggling for it later. Where are the criminal charges? Where is the deprivement of, if not freedom, then equity assets.

New comment by timcobb in "Telus Uses AI to Alter Call-Agent Accents"

timcobb — Wed, 06 May 2026 03:57:08 +0000

How unique are our problems? They have utilities, airlines, etc in India. Everything you'd talk to a support agent with is basically the same globally, and if not, can easily be explained to a person who hasn't been living in a yurt and burning yak dung for fuel; and tbh I think you could explain return processes to those folks as well.

New comment by timcobb in "For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day"

timcobb — Sun, 03 May 2026 17:54:35 +0000

What is there to say except everyone is different and to each their own! I can't imagine wanting to listen to Phish for extended periods of time, muchless while working. But it's beautiful that someone else might. I am sorry for your loss original poster.

New comment by timcobb in "Open Design: Use Your Coding Agent as a Design Engine"

timcobb — Sun, 03 May 2026 01:44:32 +0000

Everything is already pretty homogenous I wouldn't blame AI for this.

New comment by timcobb in "New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming"

timcobb — Sat, 02 May 2026 01:33:15 +0000

What about before your 40s?

New comment by timcobb in "Joby kicks off NYC electric air taxi demos with historic JFK flight"

timcobb — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:22:20 +0000

> Nobody claimed these were existential threats.

Strawman: yes, but the point stands in its milder form that noise etc isn't substantial economic disruptive.

But yeah the reality is that no one is going to be digging in NY substantially soon/ever because if you look at precedent that's been the case for the last 100 years. And building a tunnel to JFK would be huge

New comment by timcobb in "Joby kicks off NYC electric air taxi demos with historic JFK flight"

timcobb — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 05:35:16 +0000

People disrupt Manhattan for novelty (eg. marathon) and civic/political (eg. no car zones) purposes all the time. Manhattan is hardly a purely reasonable place, in fact it's far from it. All kinds of nonsense takes place in nyc all the time. If nyc was driven by cold economic reason it would be boring and lame compared to what it is today.

New comment by timcobb in "Joby kicks off NYC electric air taxi demos with historic JFK flight"

timcobb — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 05:30:38 +0000

Op's example was underground. Moses built above ground, thereby requiring the ruthlessness. Not sure the same ruthlessness would be needed with tunnels.

New comment by timcobb in "Craig Venter has died"

timcobb — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 03:02:08 +0000

RIP Craig Venter.

I remember being in 5th grade and hearing about the Human Genome Project. It was presented as a radical undertaking. 30 years later, look how far we've come. Just the other day I was reading about the UK Biobank leaks (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47875843), and it was mentioned that some large number of complete human genomes were leaking out. And I thought wow, back in the day people thought Craig Venter was out there.

Thank you Craig Venter!

New comment by timcobb in "Bugs Rust won't catch"

timcobb — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:28:48 +0000

Right but coming from macOS, how do I know that the Linux distro I pick doesn't have this god-forsaken stuff in it? Before this thread I didn't know Canonical was so... busted. What else do I not know? With macOS, I think I can be sure that this kind of stuff won't be in the core shell commands :).

When I do `man builtin` on macOS now, I get:

``` HISTORY The builtin manual page first appeared in FreeBSD 3.4. ```

which is what I expected, and I don't expect those to be pulled out from under me and replaced with the sort of nonsense we have here today.

New comment by timcobb in "Ghostty is leaving GitHub"

timcobb — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:25:56 +0000

I didn't? What's the answer? Sentimentality? Inertia?

New comment by timcobb in "Bugs Rust won't catch"

timcobb — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 07:40:27 +0000

This seems to be the case, yes. Before reading this post I was a lot more open minded about the "rewrite it in Rust" scene but now I'm just kind of in a horrorpit wondering whether I'll be stuck on macOS forever :(.