Hacker News: watt

New comment by watt in "We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code"

watt — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:12:51 +0000

Oh, it's Mandala effect now? I could swear it was Mandela before.

New comment by watt in "Thinking Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning"

watt — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:24:43 +0000

Says who? Trillionaire capitalist overlords?

New comment by watt in "Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons"

watt — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:15:20 +0000

Read Tonsky for that. https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ a disgrace. https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/writing_direction@2x.webp...

New comment by watt in "The engine of Germany's wealth is blocking its future"

watt — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:49:56 +0000

In 2010 I was paying 10 cents per kWh. In 2025 I am paying 36 cents per kWh. What ever happened in these 15 years, it is an absolute death spiral.

New comment by watt in "The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler"

watt — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:58:38 +0000

until the day you accidentally run it in your home directory without any arguments.

New comment by watt in "The JavaScript Oxidation Compiler"

watt — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:56:17 +0000

would you enjoy it if running "rm" in any folder recursively deleted all files in it?

New comment by watt in "When etcd crashes, check your disks first"

watt — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 18:17:08 +0000

Sounds to me that etcd has data handoff consistency issues, and is just flying by seat of its pants: in other words, the moment IO subsystem hiccups, it just shits the bed?

New comment by watt in "AI has fixed my productivity"

watt — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:14:07 +0000

I ship 0 projects and now with AI I can ship thousand times more in the same time frame!

New comment by watt in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

watt — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:57:11 +0000

In other news, Project Gutenberg not completely censored in Germany. Well done, Germany. https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html

And the works that previously had lead to Project Gutenberg being unavailable from Germany IP addresses will go into public domain in 2027.

New comment by watt in "I'm not worried about AI job loss"

watt — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 08:31:06 +0000

Unless I misunderstand your metaphor, there is nothing you can do about the steamroller, it is going to roll, no matter what.

New comment by watt in "Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues"

watt — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 09:45:20 +0000

Remember how long it took for them to give up on that stupid touchbar and "butterfly" keyboard. Don't hold your breath.

New comment by watt in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

watt — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:08:58 +0000

If, as another comment states, the countries with highest birth rates are Chad, Somalia, Congo, Afghanistan and Yemen, how does that square with your "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe" assertion?

New comment by watt in "Glang"

watt — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 09:14:17 +0000

indeed: https://github.com/pouyathe/glang/blob/main/source/dub/sourc...

New comment by watt in "Apple's MacBook Pro DFU port documentation is wrong"

watt — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 10:01:28 +0000

The author just wants to apply system update, and it should "just work". The DFU part is just a distraction, what happened to "just works", as they point out in the article. We should not even _know_ anything about DFU unless we actually _are_ updating firmware.

New comment by watt in "My iPhone 16 Pro Max produces garbage output when running MLX LLMs"

watt — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:41:06 +0000

Does it bother anyone else that the author drops "MiniMax" there in the article without bothering to explain or footnote what that is? (I could look it up, but I think article authors should call out these things).

New comment by watt in "Surface Tension of Software"

watt — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 10:49:06 +0000

I do see how it does, in a way. That something the designer thought is "invalid state" turns out a valid and possible state in real world. In terms or UI/UX, it's the uncomfortable long pause before something happens and screen renders (lack of feedback, feeling that system hangs). Or, content flicker when window is resized or dragged. Just because somebody thought "oh, this clearly is invalid state and can be ignored".

The real world and user experience requirements have a way of intruding on these underspecified models of how the world "should" be.

New comment by watt in "John Searle has died"

watt — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 10:45:45 +0000

I'll posit that the distinction does not matter: the whole Chinese Room line of discourse has been counterproductive to putting in actual work.

New comment by watt in "Taylor Otwell: What 14 Years of Laravel Taught Me About Maintainability"

watt — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 10:49:21 +0000

Very poor audio quality, not listenable. Why do folks insist screaming into microphone and overloading the recording where it just nasty clipping?

New comment by watt in "Grug Brain Dev as LLM"

watt — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 08:57:40 +0000

It's cute when somebody very smart pretends to be "grug brain" but loses it's appeal when somebody pretty obviously not smart at all is exposed for what they are.

New comment by watt in "Universe expected to decay in 10⁷⁸ years, much sooner than previously thought"

watt — Mon, 12 May 2025 10:35:53 +0000

Crack on with it and don't keep us in the dark!