Hacker News: zaphar

New comment by zaphar in "AI is forcing us to pay off 40 years of technical debt"

zaphar — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 19:21:33 +0000

Or to restate another way, most modern programming languages are a highly specialized and specific dialect of english. Perhaps it's possible that with AI we will find a new but equally specialized and specific enough dialect of english for interacting with it when generating code. But then you just re-invented a new programming language for people to learn.

New comment by zaphar in "A wave of plastic-free coffee pods and machines"

zaphar — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 15:41:22 +0000

I mean, among real coffee snobs the status symbol is mostly not using a Keurig or Lavazza machine at all. Pour overs, Espresso machines, most status symbol coffee equipment is pretty light on the plastic already.

New comment by zaphar in "New 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6"

zaphar — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:26:04 +0000

Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.

New comment by zaphar in "Here Be Monsters: What Do You Still Need to Know When Agents Do the Work?"

zaphar — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 14:35:25 +0000

I would argue that recognizing if the agent is an adversary also requires breadth and a willingness to dive deep when you need to. Both things that the article highlights.

Before agents that is what every high performing person I've ever worked with was like. It was the kind of person I wanted to hire when I was in charge of that sort of thing. Enough breadth to know where to dive deep and enough willingness and curiosity to dive deep.

New comment by zaphar in "Here Be Monsters: What Do You Still Need to Know When Agents Do the Work?"

zaphar — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 14:10:43 +0000

I think this is probably a good way to think about it. Breadth is going to be important if you want to reasonably navigate the new world. In an emergency even if you are using an agent you will be much quicker if you know what questions to ask the agent and how to guide it.

New comment by zaphar in "Sebastian Raschka's from-scratch video course on building reasoning models"

zaphar — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 17:52:15 +0000

You sound like you are projecting a bunch of motivations and assumptions about character onto other people. But you projecting such things onto another person is a terrible way to begin to understand something.

There are genuinely people who enjoy learning how something works by doing smaller scale versions of it themselves. This site happens to have a much higher average percentage of them than most other places.

New comment by zaphar in "Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone"

zaphar — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 18:34:26 +0000

I don't personally want them to stop. I like what they produce and how they produce it. As long as there are enough people like me there will be a market for this.

New comment by zaphar in "Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone"

zaphar — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 18:32:43 +0000

Since part of what I'm purposely purchasing from Google or Apple is a more secure by default system I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My wallet vote is effectively for something different than yours.

New comment by zaphar in "Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone"

zaphar — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:27:51 +0000

No it's not. You can vote with your wallet right now. Nothing is stopping you.

New comment by zaphar in "The Decoherence Trap"

zaphar — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:34:31 +0000

The article was absolutely talking about individual ships though. His analogy was about a long-lived codebase under constant change.

New comment by zaphar in "The Decoherence Trap"

zaphar — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:19:34 +0000

We did not take the black pearl and continuously evolve it directly into the USS Iowa. That is the analogy the article is making. You are objecting to something that isn't in the article.

New comment by zaphar in "Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design"

zaphar — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 13:02:05 +0000

    Notifications arrive in a post box

This is genius. Absolute genius. There when you are ready to peruse but not in your face constantly.

New comment by zaphar in "Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome"

zaphar — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 15:10:16 +0000

For what it's worth Firefox is my daily driver and I've never run into a site that was broken in it. Safari I definitely have.

New comment by zaphar in "Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?"

zaphar — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 11:41:43 +0000

I score way above average on reading skill and I can still tell that many rationalist articles have a word count higher than the subject matter itself requires. If the point of a rationalist article is to exclude people by requiring them to have a willingness to absorb long overly verbose writing then they have succeeded admirably. But that is still bad writing.

New comment by zaphar in "Redesigning source control at Anthropic"

zaphar — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:06:59 +0000

For anthropic internal use it means more revenue not less.

New comment by zaphar in "Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome"

zaphar — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:41:12 +0000

It's cute that you think they have level of sophistication in their strategy.

New comment by zaphar in "Apple's new 'Switch to Safari' campaign details why you should ditch Chrome"

zaphar — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:40:09 +0000

I use safari regularly and it has not really kept up. All kinds of stuff that is partly broken for rendering. Especially on heavily dynamic sites. Chrome at least works for any web standard which IE did not.

New comment by zaphar in "11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker"

zaphar — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 11:49:34 +0000

Old C software is generally more trustworthy than new C software. I don't think this rule of thumb transfers across languages very well. And the definition of new vs old has a fairly large effect. If a language has been under constant change it doesn't matter when it was started a large part of the codebase is "new".

New comment by zaphar in "Theranos.world"

zaphar — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 14:47:19 +0000

I think we said the same thing? Understanding why you perceive someone that way involves understanding not their tone but primarily the content of what they said. Tone is more often misunderstood than people think.

New comment by zaphar in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

zaphar — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:28:30 +0000

I'm not necessarily an AI booster but I don't think it's at all true that "humans would follow the spirit of the trial process" Some of them will. But I've met far too many humans in all areas of life who will happily follow the letter and not the spirit. Sometimes out of malicious compliance, sometimes out of sheer exhaustion, sometimes because they can't tell the difference between the letter and the spirit and sometimes for a whole host of other reasons like laziness. There will be a not insignificant number of humans are not at this vary moment following the spirit of the thing.