Hacker News: turtletontine

New comment by turtletontine in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

turtletontine — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:54:50 +0000

> Bob's weekly updates to his supervisor were indistinguishable from Alice's. The questions were similar. The progress was similar. The trajectory, from the outside, was identical.

I don’t believe this. Totally plausible that someone would be able to produce passable work with LLMs at a similar pace to a curious and talented scientist. But if you, their advisor, are sitting down and talking with them every week? It’s obvious how much they care or understand, I can’t believe you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between these students.

New comment by turtletontine in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

turtletontine — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:36:12 +0000

Or just delete your Instagram account. Really, it’s easier than you think it is. You might find you don’t even miss it.

New comment by turtletontine in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"

turtletontine — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:16:42 +0000

> These two sentences highlight the underlying problem: Developers without an ethical backbone, or who are powerless to push back on unethical projects.

One reason your boss is eager to replace everyone with language models, they won’t have any “ethical backbone” :’)

New comment by turtletontine in "Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

turtletontine — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:30:42 +0000

It’s not that simple. Trump admin requested a massive cut to NASA’s budget, which after much delay Congress finally rejected. Isaacman’s path to NASA administrator was also, erm, circuitous. Having a competent and knowledgeable NASA head was not really Trump admin’s priority.

New comment by turtletontine in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

turtletontine — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 05:42:29 +0000

Someone please answer my obvious question. We sent successful missions to the moon sixty years ago. What heat shield material was used for the Apollo capsules, and why would we need something different now? Are the Artemis mission parameters totally different in a way that requires a new design? Or was Apollo incredibly dangerous and we got lucky they didn’t all fail catastrophically? The article mentions Orion is much heavier than the Apollo capsules, does that really require a totally novel heat shield that takes $billions to develop?

New comment by turtletontine in "Neovim 0.12.0"

turtletontine — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 23:43:24 +0000

I understand the annoyance, but my workflow for years has been running (n)vim in tmux. So I never need to run terminal commands from the editor, that’s what other tmux panes/windows are for.

New comment by turtletontine in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

turtletontine — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 22:34:48 +0000

I’ve come to think of interviews with people like Sam Altman as “freestyle science fiction.” They’re just saying stuff off the top of their head. Like you say, that often entails vague ideas from other sci fi percolating up and out, with no consideration of if they actually make sense. And like most freestyle, it’s usually pretty bad.

New comment by turtletontine in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

turtletontine — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 22:31:38 +0000

That post does not appear to address or acknowledge any of these problems: 1) thermal management in space, 2) radiation degrading the onboard silicon, 3) you can’t upgrade data centers in orbit

New comment by turtletontine in "My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)"

turtletontine — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 21:57:41 +0000

I feel like I’ve seen more and more people recently fall for this trick. No, LLMs are not “empathetic” or “patient”, and no, they do not have emotions. They’re incredibly huge piles of numbers following their incentives. Their behavior convincingly reproduces human behavior, and they express what looks like human emotions… because their training data is full of humans expressing emotions? Sure, sometimes it’s helpful for their outputs to exhibit a certain affect or “personality”. But falling for the act, and really attributing human emotions to them seems, is alarming to me.

New comment by turtletontine in "Slop is everywhere for those with eyes to see"

turtletontine — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 21:19:04 +0000

The authors point is not that these things are “slop” in and of themselves, it’s that the demand for each of these so outpaces supply that the market is full of low quality (sometimes fraudulent) knock offs. AKA… slop.

New comment by turtletontine in "How have prices changed in a year? NPR checked 114 items at Walmart"

turtletontine — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:37:53 +0000

Great example. The population as a whole is richer like you say, and also the richest 10% account for half of consumer spending, compared to 36% 30 years ago. [1] So yes, consuming spending has become more of a metric of the wealthy’s spending habits.

No single metric tells the whole story, and by taking them in isolation it’s quite easy to lose the forest for the trees.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...

New comment by turtletontine in "How have prices changed in a year? NPR checked 114 items at Walmart"

turtletontine — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:49:14 +0000

Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending. Consumer spending can therefore easily look great while most people are struggling to get by. There really is no “overall economy”, there are many many different stories happening all at once, and focusing on simple metrics lets you easily fool yourself.

New comment by turtletontine in "AI coding assistants are getting worse?"

turtletontine — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 23:09:30 +0000

On the bright side, I do think at some point after the bubble pops, we’ll have high quality open source models that you can run locally. Most other tech company business plans follow the enshittification cycle [1], but the interchangeability of LLMs makes it hard to imagine they can be monopolized in the same way.

1: I mean this in the strict sense of Cory Doctorow’s theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification?wprov=sfti1#H...)

New comment by turtletontine in "Kernel bugs hide for 2 years on average. Some hide for 20"

turtletontine — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:15:50 +0000

> …lurked for years and even decades. Heartbleed comes to mind.

I don’t know much about Heartbleed, but Wikipedia says:

> Heartbleed is a security bug… It was introduced into the software in 2012 and publicly disclosed in April 2014.

Two years doesn’t sound like “years or even decades” to me? But again, I don’t know much about Heartbleed so I may be missing something. It does say it was also patched in 2014, not just discovered then.

New comment by turtletontine in "State of the Fin 2026-01-06"

turtletontine — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:13:23 +0000

I have Kodi running on a raspberry pi plugged into my Google TV. The Jellyfin plugin for Kodi works flawlessly so far for me. It’s just great! Sure if I could put Jellyfin directly on the TV, that would save me the RPi. But not a big deal for me.

New comment by turtletontine in "Linear Address Spaces: Unsafe at any speed (2022)"

turtletontine — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:57:30 +0000

Tbh I can imagine this catching on if one of the big cloud providers endorses it. Including hardware support in a future version of AWS Graviton, or Azure cloud with a bunch of foundational software already developed to work with it. If one of those hyper scalers puts in the work, it could get to the point where you can launch a simple container running Postgres or whatever, with the full stack adapted to work with CHERI.

New comment by turtletontine in "The C3 Programming Language"

turtletontine — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 21:25:41 +0000

I think there is an important difference here from both Option and Result: the C3 optional doesn’t allow an arbitrary error type, it’s just a C-style integer error code. I think that makes a lot of sense and fits perfectly with their “evolution, not revolution” philosophy. And the fact that the syntax is ‘type?’ rather than ‘Optional’ also eases any confusion.

New comment by turtletontine in "Clicks Communicator"

turtletontine — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 03:33:45 +0000

Is there any potential market of parents like this: "my child wants a real phone, but I won't give them one because they'll melt their brain with tiktok and instagram"? I'm not a parent, but I imagine I'd feel something like this.

New comment by turtletontine in "Rich Hickey: Thanks AI"

turtletontine — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 01:39:33 +0000

Many people are, indeed, being forced to use AI by their ignorant boss, who often blame their own employees for the AI’s shortcomings. Not all bosses everywhere of course, and it’s often just pressure to use AI instead of force.

Given how gleefully transparent corporate America is being that the plan is basically “fire everyone and replace them with AI”, you can’t blame anyone for seeing their boss pushing AI as a bad sign.

So you’re certainly right about this: AI doesn’t do things, people do things with AI. But it sure feels like a few people are going to use AI to get very very rich, while the rest of us lose our jobs.

New comment by turtletontine in "No, it's not a battleship"

turtletontine — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 21:30:34 +0000

Source?