Hacker News: wduquette

New comment by wduquette in "An architectural comparison of Obsidian Canvas and Heptabase"

wduquette — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 17:17:46 +0000

Tinderbox has been providing this kind of card-centric structure for a very long time now.

New comment by wduquette in "CNC Stone Carving"

wduquette — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 17:15:28 +0000

Remember that this is a Catholic church, the church the monks worship in. Its primary role is to be a house for the Holy Eucharist and a place for the worship of God. The devotion in its creation is part of that; the beauty it embodies is in aid of that. For the monks, the emotional resonance stems from all of that, but is not in fact the point.

I realize most folks here have a different world view; but in the end, this building has no point whatsoever apart from how the monks see it.

New comment by wduquette in "CNC Stone Carving"

wduquette — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 17:07:35 +0000

Who's to say they don't? I'd guess the monks are using CNC for standard elements, while statuary is done by hand. (Though possibly not by the monks.)

New comment by wduquette in "The compiler was supposed to end programming too"

wduquette — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 18:26:29 +0000

A compiler is expected to take a precise input and reliably produce a precise output, repeatably. If LLMs could do that they'd be compilers, and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

New comment by wduquette in "What Is Gridifcation"

wduquette — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 18:23:16 +0000

TLDR: Autotune for tempo is now a thing.

New comment by wduquette in "A city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't"

wduquette — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 14:21:41 +0000

Might you have trouble digging the foundation for such a tall building directly over the existing platform and tunnels?

New comment by wduquette in "Using Theme park rides and smartphones for demonstrating Newtonian mechanics"

wduquette — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:58:27 +0000

Two of my kids have worked summers at the local theme part. The headline on this HN post sounds a lot more like what they experienced, i.e., smashed smartphones under the rollercoaster tracks, than it sounds like the actual paper.

New comment by wduquette in "Tcl/Tk 9.1"

wduquette — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 01:03:17 +0000

Thanks!

New comment by wduquette in "Tcl/Tk 9.1"

wduquette — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 01:02:36 +0000

Not really. Snit’s included in Tcllib; find the Tcllib docs and look at the Snit man page and Snit FAQ.

New comment by wduquette in "Tcl/Tk 9.1"

wduquette — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:05:00 +0000

One can create amazing ergonomic scripting APIs in TCL; I've done that. One can also rapidly create horrors without end. I've seen that, too. With great power comes great responsiblity.

New comment by wduquette in "Tcl/Tk 9.1"

wduquette — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:02:54 +0000

All of which I used many years to go to write "Snit", a quite nice object system for coding up Tcl objects and Tk widgets. Snit's a TCL library that takes a nice, easily readable description of your desired object type (the instance variables, the methods, and so forth), translates it immediately into standard TCL, and then evaluates that to define your type. Basically, it's a macro system for defining object types. (I say "object types" rather than "classes" because there is no inheritance.)

New comment by wduquette in "The Apocalypse Will Not Be Sexy"

wduquette — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:42:00 +0000

If it hasn't happened yet, it will happen in the future. There are so many failure modes, from trusting AI outputs too far (see the reports of the death of school children in Iran at the beginning of the war) to bad actors using AI for hacking to AI actors themselves doing unexpected things.

New comment by wduquette in "The Apocalypse Will Not Be Sexy"

wduquette — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:09:24 +0000

Organizations that don't get hacked, potentially losing data, costing large sums and money, and inconveniencing customers. They benefit. Remember them?

New comment by wduquette in "We know what a world without work looks like"

wduquette — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 18:27:08 +0000

It's not even clear that the AI data centers required to run all this will be economically viable in the long term. But again, the interesting part of the article comes after the discussion of any new kind of economy.

New comment by wduquette in "We know what a world without work looks like"

wduquette — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:08:28 +0000

The point of the article isn't that we will have no need to work; that remains an open question. The body of the article is exploring previous societies or segments of society in which no one needed to have a job, and how they lived their lives, as a way of pondering what a post-work world would look like. It's not particular pollyannic in tone once you get past the opening paragraphs.

New comment by wduquette in "Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer"

wduquette — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 17:04:29 +0000

A craftsman differs from an artist in exactly this: an artist produces beauty while a craftsman produces an artifact that serves its purpose beautifully and robustly. The two can be combined, of course.

New comment by wduquette in "Don't call yourself an artisanal programmer"

wduquette — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 17:02:06 +0000

Agreed. In my view, using AI to write code is neither engineering nor craftsmanship, but an abrogation of the responsibility to deliver a quality product. It isn’t engineering, it’s management, and these days (given the quantity of code agents spew out) it’s management without responsible oversight. Seriously, I’m distressed at how the industry is drinking the poison kool-aid.

New comment by wduquette in "Schemy Lisp En DOS"

wduquette — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:02:46 +0000

To be fair, Borland pushed MS out of the way first, IIRC. Borland was affordable; Microsoft Pascal and C were not. I miss Borland; they did good work.

New comment by wduquette in "AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts"

wduquette — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:01:38 +0000

It occurs to me that letting AI agent process your incoming e-mail really isn't that different in principle than letting incoming e-mail include scripts to run at your console. Why are people so eager to rush into this brave new world?

New comment by wduquette in "AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts"

wduquette — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:46:39 +0000

I anticipate a lengthy series of catastrophes initiated by AI agents with too much power and too little sense. Today the agent accidentally deletes your repo; tomorrow we lose a day's worth of banking transactions; Friday the cell phone network goes down. Such things, if sufficiently destructive, could result in widespread hunger, etc.

But killing all humans? Not likely.