Hacker News: zombittack

New comment by zombittack in "Waymo in Toronto"

zombittack — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:38:05 +0000

I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving. Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime. Absolutely stupid for a city or state government to approve autonomous systems in their municipalities without first enacting very strict and very punitive laws around these systems. This goes for surveillance, sidewalk delivery bots, and especially driverless cars.

I only say this hoping Toronto is not like "The Wild West" and hopefully has protections around these tech companies stealing jobs and hording wealth in the interest of public efficiencies.

New comment by zombittack in "I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard"

zombittack — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 17:52:32 +0000

Man I hate this argument. You're comparing cognition to reproduction. You're giving examples of duplication but comparing them to unique artifacts. It's not the same and you must understand this.

On top of this is the gross ethical concerns where all AI companies were allowed to steal all of this information/wisdom/art to train these models. At least with the power looms, a few skilled craftsmen were hired to help design them. This is blatant intellectual theft we're choosing to ignore because we're addicted to cheap products.

We choose temporary sensory pleasure over a healthy society.

New comment by zombittack in "The last time my family was replaced by technology"

zombittack — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:59:13 +0000

sorry I think this is a false equivalency. This isn't the career path of programming getting replaced by a new technology. This is technology replacing career paths.

We're all familiar with the term "knowledge worker." What happens when that field is broadly removed? It will be a reverse-trend of telling all ex-coal miners to become software engineers. Except here's the rub: going from a software engineer to something requiring a human only for their dexterity is typically a massive earnings decrease. So, in effect, as Brian Merchant and others put it, this is not just a shift but a massive plan of wage theft.

Looking at it from the optimistic side as my bosses frame it: we're all moving up in the ranks! Well, my team already has a PM. She's already trying to vibe code her PRDs. Thankfully, right now, they suck. But they won't forever because all of us engineers are being forced to train our replacement. There can only be so many strategists, project managers, designers, etc. This isn't simply the technology changing and us adapting, this is a massive reduction in workforce requirements ACROSS industries. Hype bros thinking we'll all have jobs once the AI is good enough to replace us are simply hallucinating as bad as the frontier models of 2024.

New comment by zombittack in "Western Sahara"

zombittack — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:48:15 +0000

mrcodydahler just did a video on this!

https://www.tiktok.com/@mrcodydahler/video/76701977955375710...

New comment by zombittack in "AI companies spend record sums on Washington lobbying"

zombittack — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:45:28 +0000

You would think if the general public actually wanted this, lobbying wouldn't be necessary. Call your reps. Let them know how you feel about intellectual property theft, wage theft, ecological impacts, and the intentional erosion of the voting power of the majority in modern democracy.

New comment by zombittack in "Disney erased FiveThirtyEight"

zombittack — Tue, 19 May 2026 22:03:20 +0000

At this point in my life I have zero patience or sympathy for the story of a man selling his company to a massive conglomerate and then feeling betrayed or somehow sad/regretful when said conglomerate destroys it or weaponizes it. I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. They don't care about us. That means even you, Nate Silver. Btw was a big fan back then! Signal and the Noise was a great book.

New comment by zombittack in "Uber Torches 2026 AI Budget on Claude Code in Four Months"

zombittack — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:30:04 +0000

dead internet, mon frère.

New comment by zombittack in "Learn HTML + CSS with a text adventure course"

zombittack — Wed, 09 Nov 2022 12:57:32 +0000

"Most coding courses suck" What a terrible opener, friend.

New comment by zombittack in "Asking for help: Please encourage Microsoft to add AAAA records for artefacts"

zombittack — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 12:16:26 +0000

https://feedback.azure.com/d365community/

This is where I've been directed to offer feedback. Higher votes get attention, that's the idea. I've had Microsoft account reps for previous company's enterprise agreements direct me there so I assume they watch it.

A Deep Dive on a Thin Watch

zombittack — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 11:58:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-richard-mille-rm-up-01-a-very-deep-dive-on-a-very-thin-watch

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32107187

Points: 37

# Comments: 8

New comment by zombittack in "AltWinDirStat"

zombittack — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 10:31:55 +0000

fwiw, we went from in-memory to sqlite and had massive performance gains for a language model trie we were working with in an app. Best part: cross-platform! I just find this so odd, the gall of the forker who literally started with someone else's code then, after asking about a collab, told them "sorry, I think better." So weird. Ah well, 7 years old, I'm sure they've both gotten over it.