Hacker News: toddmerrill

New comment by toddmerrill in "Dutch 'idealist' bank ASN blocks non-Google Android, including GrapheneOS"

toddmerrill — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 22:01:52 +0000

From what I saw, if an organization can demonstrate a positive social impact and a business plan for paying them back, they have a good chance of getting funding. Judging from the number of customers they lend to, I have real doubts that this represents a large percentage of their customer base, or is on anyone's radar there.

New comment by toddmerrill in "Dutch 'idealist' bank ASN blocks non-Google Android, including GrapheneOS"

toddmerrill — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 15:50:11 +0000

No. It may have been part of the founding of the bank back in the day, but I worked an intensive five years at Triodos and this is the first time I've even heard that word. No one I worked with or saw in the organization was related to that movement. It was clear to everyone there that as a bank we focus on providing a service that is socially positive for the community, and the people there did take that very seriously, but from what I've seen Dutch society has that to some extent embedded in its fabric.

New comment by toddmerrill in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

toddmerrill — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:37:45 +0000

This is an optical illusion. If I stare at it and mentally expect a direction, I can make the wheels appear to turn either way.

New comment by toddmerrill in "The Zig project's rationale for their anti-AI contribution policy"

toddmerrill — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:47:27 +0000

Same experience. I've been writing code for many decades, but that experience doesn't mean I can remember what I read when reviewing generated code. I write small, focused commits, but I have to take a day off each week to make changes by hand just to mentally keep up with my own codeset knowledge, and I still find structures that surprise me. It's not necessarily that the code quality is poor, but it's not like I (thought) I had designed it. It's lead to a weakening of my confidence when adding to or changing existing architecture.

New comment by toddmerrill in "1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6"

toddmerrill — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 12:19:14 +0000

My experience also. The claude code document feature is a real missed opportunity. As you can see in this discussion, we all have to do it manually if we want it to work.

New comment by toddmerrill in "Cats became our companions way later than you think"

toddmerrill — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 12:53:43 +0000

I agree. I would guess that "most people" would think that cats were domesticated in Egypt because of their cat worship - as the article mentions. Turns out we the people were right. From the article's perspective "most people" apparently means "most scientists".

New comment by toddmerrill in "Two billion email addresses were exposed"

toddmerrill — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 14:07:40 +0000

I do this also. I started doing it with physical mail before email existed to sort out the junk mail, so first and last name always contained a reference to the company you were dealing with. Paul Allen back in the 80s said in a Seattle Times interview that it was how he handled it.

New comment by toddmerrill in "DropLost. Find all of your dead Dropbox public account links on the web"

toddmerrill — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 09:05:45 +0000

Awesome! Exactly what I needed.