Hacker News: v3xro

New comment by v3xro in "I Quit. The Clankers Won"

v3xro — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:37:50 +0000

> I think I'm mostly just mourning the fact that I got to do my hobby as a career for the past 15 years, but that’s ending. I can still code at home.

It could hardly have been a hobby if people were willing to pay you for it (and good rates too)?

I will rephrase it like this - the market has shifted away from providing value to the customers of said companies to pumping itself instead and it does not need to employ people for that. Simple as.

New comment by v3xro in "I'm Not Consulting an LLM"

v3xro — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:19:44 +0000

No, you outsource it because it's not your core competency. I think humans should be able to do anything and not narrowly specialise as narrow specialisation leads to tunnel vision. Sometimes you need to outsource to someone because of legal reasons (and rightly so, mostly because the complexities involved do require someone who is a professional in that area). Can some things be simplified? Of course they can, and there are many barriers that prevent such simplification. But it's absolutely insane to say - nah, we don't need to think at all, and something else can do all the work.

New comment by v3xro in "I'm Not Consulting an LLM"

v3xro — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:16:53 +0000

> Not being sneered at by some insecure kid is nice.

How very adult of you.

New comment by v3xro in "We might all be AI engineers now"

v3xro — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 10:42:46 +0000

The only way I see out of this crisis (yes I'm not on the token-using side of this) is strict liability for companies making software products (just like in the physical world). Then it doesn't matter if the token-generator spits out code or a software engineer spits out code - the company's incentives are aligned such that if something breaks it's on them to fix it and sort out any externalities caused. This will probably mean no vibe-coded side hustles but I personally am OK with that.

New comment by v3xro in "You don't have to"

v3xro — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 13:48:21 +0000

This really resonated with me, thank you for writing it <3

> Companies value velocity and new launches and shipping first at all costs because of course they do; it’s table stakes. Speed of delivery is basically the number one corporate value of every organization whether they admit to it or not.

Yeah this one is again one of the causes of where we are today (alongside profit extraction, or perhaps because of it). It used to be the case that you would find companies that would offer quality at a slightly higher price, and people would be more than willing to pay for it. Now the feeling is that this is all marketing driven and there is no 'higher quality' because everyone gave up and went after speed of delivery. And well, as the old saying goes, that's valuable when you're catching fleas.

New comment by v3xro in "Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo"

v3xro — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 09:34:49 +0000

There's nothing to recover from, what are you even talking about? I'm not a token user (and I can't make predictions about the future and whether it will force me to use token but still). That the industry is collectively having a delusion about what constitutes good software (in all senses of the word - functionality and consequences for society) is clear to see, something I too fear we might never recover from, but I stand quite clearly on the side of people not of corporations hoping to extract more more more.

New comment by v3xro in "Nobody knows what programming will look like in two years"

v3xro — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 13:35:09 +0000

Really? I will most likely be using IntelliJ 2027.x with whatever the latest plugins are for the programming languages I write by hand.

New comment by v3xro in "I guess I kinda get why people hate AI"

v3xro — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:16:12 +0000

> If I can somehow hate a machine that has basically stopped me from having to write boring boilerplate code, of course others are going to hate it!

Poor author, never tried expressive high-level languages with metaprogramming facilities that do not result in boring and repetitive boilerplate.

New comment by v3xro in "Don't fall into the anti-AI hype"

v3xro — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 10:03:03 +0000

What hype? I have and will continue to be anti-BigAI from the very beginning. Until the mechanism is no longer that of a probabilistic model, the data gathering that of massive copyright infringment and the runtime that of a "let us burn more fossil fuels to power as many transistors as we can" I will continue to avoid it without any regrets about missed "productivity" or whatever.

New comment by v3xro in "No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter"

v3xro — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 09:24:48 +0000

That's not a technical problem though is it? I don't see legal scenarios where unverified machine translation is acceptable - you need to get a certified translator to sign off on any translations and I also don't see how changing that would be a good thing.

New comment by v3xro in "The highest quality codebase"

v3xro — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 10:23:42 +0000

Would be nice if every article about LLM/AI had that as a tag so you could skip past them...

New comment by v3xro in "Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality'"

v3xro — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 11:47:17 +0000

Just like the digits of PI...

New comment by v3xro in "Digital ID, a new way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet"

v3xro — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:12:35 +0000

Again, citing the UK here, if you go to your doctor and get a prescription, all you need to pick it up is your name + address (said verbally over the counter) - no ID needed. I do not have statistics for the false pickup rates but I very much doubt it is anything to worry about.

New comment by v3xro in "Digital ID, a new way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet"

v3xro — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:09:43 +0000

When buying alcohol in a physical store, in the UK we have the "Challenge 21/25" schemes https://www.drinkaware.co.uk/facts/information-about-alcohol... such that yes if you look very young the cashier/automated checkout assistant will ask for your ID but in most cases, they will approve without checking anything. I do not see any positives to requiring identification for all transactions.

New comment by v3xro in "Android developer verification: Early access starts"

v3xro — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:06:24 +0000

What prohibits Google from offering a way to register your long-term app signing key without identity verification, publishing apps that are still verified by their automated tooling and then opting in to the usual denylisting/app store banning methods if those apps are malicious? This identity verification requirement is basically just an easy way for illiberal governments to find ways to crack down on apps they do not like (such as say, ICEBlock or whatever)

New comment by v3xro in "We chose OCaml to write Stategraph"

v3xro — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 23:04:04 +0000

Perhaps the focus of the team behind the compiler has changed over the years - but there is still backwards compatibility (via TaSTy), the new syntax changes are not mandatory (for the moment) and when they do become so there will be a fully automatic (and correct) rewrite. There are new libraries exploring "direct style" but you can still use cats-effect or ZIO if you prefer. If anything, Scala has a "too much choice" problem (and kinda a community one).

New comment by v3xro in "The AI coding trap"

v3xro — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 19:10:03 +0000

To add to the above - I see a parallel to the "if you are a good and diligent developer there is nothing to stop you from writing secure C code" argument. Which is to say - sure, if you also put in extra effort to avoid all the unsafe bits that lead to use-after-free or race conditions it's also possible to write perfect assembly, but in practice we have found that using memory safe languages leads to a huge reduction of safety bugs in production. I think we will find similarly that not using AI will lead to a huge reduction of bugs in production later on when we have enough data to compare to human-generated systems. If that's a pre-existing bias, then so be it.

New comment by v3xro in "Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers"

v3xro — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 19:46:57 +0000

There are already hefty fines for owners of businesses where the people are not working "legally". There's a "share code" that employers are supposed to check to verify visas. All the laws and machinery is already there and it does not look particularly high-cost to me.

New comment by v3xro in "Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers"

v3xro — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 19:45:10 +0000

> living at taxpayers' expense

Presumably the form for applying for benefits has a reasonably high bar for identifying the fact that you are in fact legally present in the country? Or how else do you imagine people living at "taxpayer's expense"? Just begging on the streets?

New comment by v3xro in "Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers"

v3xro — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 19:43:17 +0000

And even then you're never asked for it if you look over 25. Which is fair - if in doubt, verify, but usually you don't need to give over your *identity* to a place that serves alcohol.