Hacker News: zxexz

New comment by zxexz in "The phone book that led us to Assad's spy chief in hiding"

zxexz — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 03:36:13 +0000

Not relevant at all, but I find that interesting and funny. As a rule of thumb I tend to accept unknown callers after 3 missed calls in rapid succession. Everybody I know closely knows this, and its come in useful. Though tbh I’d it’s a recognizable localish area code I usually pick up on the 2nd call in rapid succession.

New comment by zxexz in "A pharmacy chain in Vermont implemented AI for efficiency"

zxexz — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 02:55:05 +0000

I think in this case - where an editorialized title is better representative of the article, but the published title is too long - it’s usually left to someone like you to give a suggestion, publicly, which is then seen by @dang or their kith, who can then actually make spot adjustments. I personally approve of your editorialization, but that’s worth naught but a canker in a hedge

New comment by zxexz in "I wrote an bash enumerator because I was sick of xargs"

zxexz — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 06:15:11 +0000

I don’t want to be a downer here, but the structure of this repo and the verbosity+language of the docs feel 80% vibecoded. Not that that’s wrong; I just feel kinda gullible for even clicking on this.

One uses xargs or parallel only a few times before they remember some of the quirks that but them. And then they become cautious. And then it’s muscle memory. And if it’s not an often occurrence, they learn to check the man page.

Anyways, in a world of “vibecoding” why add another “tool” to the mix when the LLMs have been trained on all our stackoverflow-posted grievances to begin with?

New comment by zxexz in "ECHR confirms ethical veganism is a protected philosophical belief"

zxexz — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 04:05:37 +0000

I wish this form of Veganism was more well-known. I know a few Vegans who went down a similar path and who were told by a few people they were no longer Vegan. They took the easier path and stopped calling themselves Vegans, which I thought was sad given their objectives when becoming Vegan were clear from the get-go.

New comment by zxexz in "Show HN: Adrafinil – keep a lid-closed Mac awake only while agents work"

zxexz — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:38:31 +0000

Caffeinate is burned into my muscle memory at this point. I attribute that to the realization that you could repeat opt flags. There's something catchy about

caffeinate -dimsum

New comment by zxexz in "Dostoyevsky isn't difficult"

zxexz — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:52:45 +0000

Bookish teens will read them anyway.

Giving them the option to do so in school, I would imagine would be met thankfully by them if done well, and a "no thanks" from the less-bookish - who very possibly will go on to read them later on in life.

New comment by zxexz in "PostgreSQL is enough (2024)"

zxexz — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:46:07 +0000

Yeah. Redis (valkey now for me mostly) is where I go for that extra oomph if the patterns make sense (or some level of scripting for dev work makes sense; the lua integrations is chef's kiss.).

New comment by zxexz in "PostgreSQL is enough (2024)"

zxexz — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:42:39 +0000

Yeah that's super frustrating. It sounds like a classic IT dev issue when IT is ops though to me - and I'm happy to be wrong.

I personally believe (notice the caveat here) that debugging relatively well designed databases on a good RDBMS is an easy task, if given access to logs, data (or even a redacted replica), and docs. Choose the docs along with one of the first two and it shouldnt remain a mystery for long. I've worked with postgresql a lot over the last couple decades, and even the most convoluted live-in-prod bug isn't wasn't half as bad as the vibe coded nonsense I see and debug weekly (not hating on AI; fwiw this is more a symptom of process/lack there of around integration of the tech IMO).

New comment by zxexz in "AWS Lambda MicroVMs for isolated execution of user and AI-generated code"

zxexz — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 03:33:20 +0000

What does that...mean?

New comment by zxexz in "15-minute at-home Lyme disease tick test"

zxexz — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 08:21:18 +0000

I always thought that too. I spend a lot of time outside and check rigorously. Very often I find a recently attached tick. Found a fully-engorged deer tick half-detached not too long ago - pulled it off jaw-intact. In treatment for early-mid stage disseminated Lyme again, for the third time. Certainly a hidden tax one pays living in New England...I've recently put a lot more effort into things like permethrin.

From what I understand, you're spot on with your last note. Larval stage can be extremely hard to see even when fully engorged. Adult-stage ticks (at least Deer Ticks) are the size of a large grain of cooked brown rice. I've seen fully engorged nymph-stage that rival the size of a grape...

New comment by zxexz in "Midjourney Medical"

zxexz — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 05:25:59 +0000

slide 28

https://s27.q4cdn.com/524696391/files/doc_presentations/2026...

New comment by zxexz in "Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable"

zxexz — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:39:09 +0000

If that's all it took to make Deepseek so good, I'll gladly ship High-Flyer all my personal 150k claude/chatgpt conversations in exchange for Deepseek 5 (and a rack of B200s or Ascend chips)

New comment by zxexz in "A Matter Wi-Fi Light Bulb in Rust on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W"

zxexz — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 05:23:08 +0000

What I'll never understand about this whole thing is why most people seem to easily tolerate the rigamarole of maintaining an entire host SBC OS and sending or even cross compiling binaries to it, for microprocessor work. I much prefer maintaining a dev env on machine(s) and sending and flashing a binary over the wire. Maybe I just dislike state, but the pico (and several other MCU ecosystems these days) make it so easy to

New comment by zxexz in "The Smallest Brain You Can Build: A Perceptron in Python"

zxexz — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 05:15:09 +0000

I still find his pattern recognition book useful and informative. It may be dense, but some of us consider that a positive for 'reference' literature. That book was one of very few that still holds up well fr when it was published - truly in on of the last "dark ages" of ML.

I think those down voting you are perhaps overly eager. I upvoted. Grab "Deep Learning" - you'll find it useful, imteresting, and likely less 'dense' in the negative sense!

New comment by zxexz in "Do transformers need three projections? Systematic study of QKV variants"

zxexz — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 01:40:58 +0000

Not to sound facetious, but perhaps enough runs at different param/token sizings to define a curve?

New comment by zxexz in "AI Engineers aren't safe from being replaced by AI"

zxexz — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:22:50 +0000

For some of us that day can't come soon enough @}-;-'---

New comment by zxexz in "Accelerando (2005)"

zxexz — Sun, 17 May 2026 07:51:59 +0000

I feel the need to link the top level comment[0] the venerable cstross posted the time I submitted the same link a few years ago.

I also want to quote a comment of his on THIS posting of the link[1], just because he said he is chill being quoted on his referenced comment.

And finally, I want to state here that I fullheartedly agree with aforementioned comment and I too crave a banksian fully automated luxury gay space communism future.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828666

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163649

New comment by zxexz in "AI assistance when contributing to the Linux kernel"

zxexz — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:45:09 +0000

I like this. It's just saying you have responsibility for the tools you wield. It's concise.

Side note, I'm not sure why I feel weird about having the string "Assisted-by: AGENT_NAME:MODEL_VERSION" [TOOL1] [TOOL2] in the kernel docs source :D. Mostly joking. But if the Linux kernel has it now, I guess it's the inflection point for...something.

New comment by zxexz in "Running Tesla Model 3's computer on my desk using parts from crashed cars"

zxexz — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:00:37 +0000

Sorry, what are you talking about? Just release it? Are you talking about trying to make money off it? Are you claiming you reverse engineered ecu tuning software you paid for?

New comment by zxexz in "Google closes deal to acquire Wiz"

zxexz — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:25:12 +0000

Nothing wrong with Google taking a Wiz