Hacker News: unlikelytomato

New comment by unlikelytomato in "Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra"

unlikelytomato — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:01:58 +0000

That is not my memory at all. I remember him saying to not do all of the things but just do some of them & we will all be much better off.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "Apple announces changes for apps in the European Union"

unlikelytomato — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:28:09 +0000

For desktop and server, sure. MacBook is superior for everything that matters in a laptop. The touchpad alone is a dream. compare that to constant pain for the thousands of hours I will use the device over it's lifetime.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "Completing a computer science degree on Coursera"

unlikelytomato — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:21:11 +0000

and yet, the collective industry has still continued to expand for decades because people overwhelmingly cannot consistently do these tasks without their code collapsing on itself.

imagine if people regularly had tires fall off on their way home from the mechanic. or regularly having to get bones rebroken to set them correctly.

I can agree that much of the work is not true "engineering" but most of what I've seen produced over the years is closer to fraud than anything else.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration"

unlikelytomato — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:23:07 +0000

Good engineers would communicate effectively of something is impacting the product. Good product understands how to judge that impact and prioritize it. Frankly, if the engineers are making enough tech debt that they don't want to play in their own sandbox as part of regular practice, maybe they should walk.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "Workers are spending over 6 hours a week botsitting AI, fueling job frustration"

unlikelytomato — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:33:47 +0000

Perhaps those “good engineers” need a reminder of who enables their situation to exist at all.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "I want to live like Costco people"

unlikelytomato — Fri, 08 May 2026 05:17:07 +0000

Family and neighbors shared Costco memberships when I was growing up. It's still accessible today to anyone who wants it

New comment by unlikelytomato in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

unlikelytomato — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 01:15:40 +0000

I very much miss the ability to never use my phone on a charging cable. Just swap the battery on an external charger and go. 5 seconds to charge to full. It was freeing and simple

New comment by unlikelytomato in "GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks"

unlikelytomato — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:52:21 +0000

as a local LLM novice, do you have any recommended reading to bootstrap me on selecting hardware? It has been quite confusing bring a latecomer to this game. Googling yields me a lot of outdated info.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first"

unlikelytomato — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 03:09:33 +0000

This is why I'm confused when people say it isn't ready to replace most of the programmer workforce.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "I dumped Windows 11 for Linux, and you should too"

unlikelytomato — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:10:16 +0000

The real issue is the lack of support. Real users buy those support packages from vendors. They bring their PC in to be fixed at their local shop. They might Google a problem and find a solution occasionally of they are feeling spicy but how often do you get screenshots to get something to work in a Linux GUI? Web browser only laptops are great until your uncle gets a "killer deal" on some random printer on Facebook marketplace and they can't get it to work. Or a webcam. Or a Bluetooth headset. Or a game controller. Scanner. etc etc.

On top of all of this, they will just give up and buy a new machine and return it if that doesn't fix their issue.

Linux provides virtually nothing on any of those fronts unless you get a private level 8 tech support contact provided by your grandson. Who wants to be 24/7 on call for their extended family?

New comment by unlikelytomato in "2026: The Year of Java in the Terminal?"

unlikelytomato — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 19:00:35 +0000

Regarding slow startups, I am not sure this applies to any use cases I can think of where it would not also be a concern in python, etc. JVM startup times have never meaningfully impacted my workflow in the last 15 years.

The why is quite simple, in my opinion. I see java devs reaching for other accepted tools for such things and opening a whole can of worms by introducing a new language that is only "required" by convention. I would love a rich java ecosystem of TUI/CLI libraries to reuse all of my existing business logic and company libraries. The lack of extremely streamlined wrappers is the only barrier. In my work environment, this would be a great addition.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "'Do not trust your eyes': AI generates surge in expense fraud"

unlikelytomato — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 19:36:56 +0000

In my experience, this form of expense management is a relatively new development. Not so long ago, I had a company linked corporate card. Credit card transactions are already labeled with the type of purchase. You have to submit a report that corresponds to the actual charged amount. Additionally, they get all the bills with their hotel partner to cross reference the transactions with the credit card and the submitted expense. Flights etc worked the same way. Those are now additionally tracked in the company travel relationship portals which accomplish the block chain without the block chain. None of this requires a global immutable currency ledger or anything like that to accomplish their goal: just get some reasonable transaction validation long enough to process the expense then never look at it past an audit. Later, they also made people eat from the same hotel and negate the issue for meal expenses. It's just not a technology problem. If it were, they would just demand more granularity from the credit card company and the employee and reject things out of policy.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "'Do not trust your eyes': AI generates surge in expense fraud"

unlikelytomato — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 15:49:15 +0000

Alternatively, companies will just go back to corporate cards with very strict vendor rules. When vendor rules are not enough, they will go back to extremely tight per diem and simply not care of the expense was strictly real or not. I can't see any advantage to using a whole new currency and exchange that every vendor in the world is now going to have to support for this to be useful vs these simple measures.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "Android's sideloading limits are its most anti-consumer move"

unlikelytomato — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 17:55:03 +0000

I get where you are coming from. However, language like this matters when it comes to legislation. People outside there space will be guided by the sideload language to think it's just "something extra on the side so why should I care?"

New comment by unlikelytomato in "No I don't want to turn on Windows Backup with One Drive"

unlikelytomato — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 20:14:36 +0000

Does a premium hardware solution exist that competes with MacBook on practical battery life?

New comment by unlikelytomato in "No I don't want to turn on Windows Backup with One Drive"

unlikelytomato — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 20:12:37 +0000

I have extreme doubts that there is any meaningful number of windows users holding out on trying macos based on such a thing.

The users are much more simple than this. Most have never even tried Mac. If they want to, they will just buy one the next time they need a computer and accept the new experience as being the new norm.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "I spent the day teaching seniors how to use an iPhone"

unlikelytomato — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 09:08:27 +0000

I got stuck in a fullscreen YouTube video the first time I tried an iPhone. Simplicity is relative. For years, the lack of a back button resulted in this weird behavior of having to learn how each app wants you to navigate it. Even now that everyone has settled into the same list of 5ish methodologies, it can be cumbersome to figure out.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "Don't avoid workplace politics"

unlikelytomato — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 23:11:05 +0000

It's always golf... or something much more NSFW....

New comment by unlikelytomato in "ChatGPT Pulse"

unlikelytomato — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 02:44:52 +0000

I can see how these things are convenient, if it succeeds. I struggle because my personal workflow is to always keep two copies of a repo up at once. One is deep thought vs drone work. I have always just done these kinds of background tasks whenever I am in meetings, compiling etc. I haver not seen much productivity boost due to this. oddly, you would think being able to further offload during that time would help, but reviewing the agent output ends up being far more costly (and makes the context switch significantly harder, for some reason). It's just not proving to be useful consistently, for me.

New comment by unlikelytomato in "Want to piss off your IT department? Are the links not malicious looking enough?"

unlikelytomato — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 02:42:56 +0000

They block this and force it to show up in my inbox