Hacker News: totallykvothe

New comment by totallykvothe in "Human Judgment as a Specification"

totallykvothe — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 17:44:54 +0000

Bad faith argument. You know this comparison is ridiculous

New comment by totallykvothe in "We mourn our craft"

totallykvothe — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 04:47:35 +0000

I highly doubt this specific person has looked down on others for also mourning the death of their craft. You can't rightly call someone a hypocrite and cite "developers" as your source.

New comment by totallykvothe in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

totallykvothe — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 03:48:46 +0000

I and one or two others are _the_ AI use experts at my org, and I was by far the earliest adopter here. So I don't really have anyone else with significantly different experiences than me that I could ask.

New comment by totallykvothe in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

totallykvothe — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 03:46:24 +0000

I don't think I'd be a good judge because I don't have the years of familiarity and expertise in his repos that I do at my job. A lot of the value of me specifically vs an LLM at my job is that I have the tribal knowledge and the LLM does not. We have gotten a lot better at documentation, but I don't think we can _ever_ truly eliminate that factor.

New comment by totallykvothe in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

totallykvothe — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 03:02:57 +0000

I don't understand the stance that AI currently is able to automate away non-trivial coding tasks. I've tried this consistently since GPT 3.5 came out, with every single SOTA model up to GPT 5.1 Codex Max and Opus 4.5. Every single time, I get something that works, yes, but then when I start self-reviewing the code, preparing to submit it to coworkers, I end up rewriting about 70% of the thing. So many important details are subpar about the AI solution, and many times fundamental architectural issues cripple any attempt at prompting my way out of it, even though I've been quite involved step-by-step through the whole prototyping phase.

I just have to conclude 1 of 2 things:

1) I'm not good at prompting, even though I am one of the earliest AI in coding adopters I know, and have been consistent for years. So I find this hard to accept.

2) Other people are just less picky than I am, or they have a less thorough review culture that lets subpar code slide more often.

I'm not sure what else I can take from the situation. For context, I work on a 15 year old Java Spring + React (with some old pages still in Thymeleaf) web application. There are many sub-services, two separate databases,and this application needs to also 2-way interface with customer hardware. So, not a simple project, but still. I can't imagine it's way more complicated than most enterprise/legacy projects...

New comment by totallykvothe in "Stepping down as Mockito maintainer after ten years"

totallykvothe — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 21:21:29 +0000

Mockito allows one to write mocks in tests for code that doesn't use dependency injection and isn't properly testable in any other way.

On the one hand, you should just design things to be testable from the start. On the other... I'm already working in this codebase with 20 years of legacy untestable design...

New comment by totallykvothe in "Perl's decline was cultural"

totallykvothe — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 01:22:33 +0000

The original statement wasn't that the sigils are unconventional. They are. It was that they were "subtle". They are not.

New comment by totallykvothe in "Perl's decline was cultural"

totallykvothe — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 19:17:20 +0000

That's not super subtle any more than it's super subtle that "*" performs multiplication and "+" performs addition. Sometimes you just need to learn the language.

This is not a general defense of Perl, which is many times absolutely unreadable, but this example is perfectly comprehensible if you actually are trying to write Perl and not superimpose some other language on it.*

New comment by totallykvothe in "From blood sugar to brain relief: GLP-1 therapy slashes migraine frequency"

totallykvothe — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 23:21:20 +0000

I had very similar issues, both as a kid and an adult. I now take 500mg of Magnesium (Malate or Glycinate. NOT Citrate, as that is a laxative) nearly every night, and my headaches are almost completely gone now. I still get one every once in a while, but it's infrequent enough that I no longer worry about my use of Ibuprofen to manage it.

New comment by totallykvothe in "Homeschooling hits record numbers"

totallykvothe — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 21:00:41 +0000

The most popular argument against homeschooling appears to be "the world sucks, so we should make kids worlds suck so they're prepared for it", which is absolutely an abusive way to think and those who use this argument need to sit and think about what it means, then be ashamed.

New comment by totallykvothe in "Homeschooling hits record numbers"

totallykvothe — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 20:56:55 +0000

You can't use the word segregation wrt people and then pretend it's surprising or unreasonable when someone assumes you're talking about racism.

New comment by totallykvothe in "The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia"

totallykvothe — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 17:59:32 +0000

I'll agree on all but one point. The cotton/linen notes feel so much better in the hand than the candy wrapper plastic of Canadian bills. I know it's a dumb reason, but I just hate the feeling.

New comment by totallykvothe in "Montana becomes first state to enshrine 'right to compute' into law"

totallykvothe — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:24:45 +0000

That's ridiculous. Nobody gets healthcare equivalent to a third world country unless they just don't try. (Think, an addict or mentally ill person, which is still not a good thing, but much smaller of a carve-out than you've represented)

New comment by totallykvothe in "How functional programming shaped and twisted front end development"

totallykvothe — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 15:53:33 +0000

That's not what the article was about though. It wasn't only a complaint about not using built in niceties of the platform. It was an assertion that the reason we aren't is because of some kind of functional bro boogeyman.

New comment by totallykvothe in "Jiratui – A Textual UI for interacting with Atlassian Jira from your shell"

totallykvothe — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 23:51:42 +0000

Why the snark? It's a valid preference and he wasn't demanding anything.

New comment by totallykvothe in "Étoilé – desktop built on GNUStep"

totallykvothe — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 03:56:14 +0000

What are your gripes with Elementary? I personally use KDE now, but I used to use Elementary a while ago, and it was very polished

New comment by totallykvothe in "AnduinOS"

totallykvothe — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 22:47:25 +0000

"The ISO is only 2GB"

0_o

New comment by totallykvothe in "Nobody’s buying homes, nobody’s switching jobs, America’s mobility is stalling"

totallykvothe — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 03:56:24 +0000

And add to that an unsupportable tax burden to disincentivize large firms buying up hundreds or thousands of homes and then renting them.

New comment by totallykvothe in "Jujutsu and Radicle"

totallykvothe — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 23:45:34 +0000

I tried it and decided not to switch because there was simply no way to resolve the line endings problem on Windows and sync up jj with our git repo

New comment by totallykvothe in "Claude Code is all you need"

totallykvothe — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 04:36:40 +0000

In what world is this an appropriate thing to say to someone?