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OhMeadhbhon The Lisp curse, now coming to your ecosystem

Yes. Lisp's curse is you sort of have to know what you're doing to get the most out of it. If you don't want to learn computer science, there are other programming languages available.

OhMeadhbhon Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

weird. I had the opposite experience. but I'm comparing 25MHz 68k hardware with 40MHz Sparc. I remember it being at least as fast and no spinny pizza disk pointers.

OhMeadhbhon Digital minimalism

Yup. I do use a "real" browser from time to time. Mostly firefox w/ a hopelessly outdated version of uBlock Origin and Vanadium on the mobile phone. Firefox is not without its issues, but reader view seems to improve most sites. I'm sure chrome has an equivalent.

I do text browsers because I live my life in a terminal and it's easier than double-clicking on another part of the screen and waiting for the graphical browser to launch. I also only have 16Gb of RAM, so I can only have a few browser windows open at a time.

And yeah... using a mapping site on a text only browser would suck.

OhMeadhbhon Show HN: Subvocal – Talk to your computer without making noise

In order to read the site contents, you have to have contents to read. Instead there was a graph that moved around a bit when you scrolled down. Then there was a picture of a couple of dudes. Then there was a pair of glasses that rotated when you scrolled down. I generally read text, not pictures of dudes and eyewear.

It needs a sentence or two at the top of the page explaining what the app does and why I should be interested.

I'm viewing the content on a desktop web browser, not an iPhone. Maybe Safari renders this differently. In that case you should have text at the top saying "you need to have an iPhone to view this content."

OhMeadhbhon Postman silently auto-installs AI plugins and attempts to share all API data

I think if you're using Postman, you don't care about sharing your data with random other people/companies on the intarwebs.

OhMeadhbhon Nvidia – open-source auto-ontology

I always giggle when software engineers use the term "ontology."

OhMeadhbhon AI is destroying my CS degree

   What are you going to do with your new-found CS knowledge?
   Are you going  to make the next google?  Are  you going to
   get  a  job  at  the local  insurance  company  processing
   claims?  Teaching yourself without a  degree is a bad path
   if you want to do grad school.

   Maybe you want to understand how software works so you can
   have a  better understanding of the  world and participate
   more fully in society?  Well... I can't argue with that.

   I'm bearish  on using AI  to teach yourself CS  because AI
   doesn't teach people CS.  If  you learn something about CS
   because you're looking at the  output of an AI model, it's
   sort of a side-effect.

   We probably have a very different idea about what "CS" is.
   I think  of it  as an  organized exploration  of notation,
   processes  and  proofs  related  to a  branch  of  applied
   mathematics  whose subject  is  general purpose  computing
   devices.  Asking  an AI "give  me a function  to calculate
   the fibonacci  sequence in rust"  isn't going to  help you
   understand a)  where the fibonacci sequence  came from, b)
   what recursion is (and why  and how it was introduced) and
   c) how  the lexemes  in a programming  language map  to an
   abstract process which when reified delivers the fibonnaci
   sequence.

   I've picked a pretty simple example as a straw-man, mostly
   because I think it //should// be knocked down.  If this is
   what you're  doing to "learn  CS" then more power  to you,
   but you're probably not doing yourself any favours.

   You  probably  can  use  AI with  prompts  like  "generate
   example code that implements  the abstract factory pattern
   and explain how each function  relates to the pattern" and
   get a  fairly decent explanation.  Modern  agents can keep
   enough of a  context you can ask it  some decent questions
   if its examples aren't entirely clear.

   I've  used  and  seen  other people  use  Claude  Code  to
   interatively  generate design  work.   Mostly APIs.   It's
   hardly ever right the first time and Claude Code sometimes
   barfs if  you ask it  to explain  why it did  a particular
   thing.  But it's  mostly decent and in a few  cases it has
   pointed out a few ragged edges I didn't notice.

   But... I learned how to map between human requirements and
   software on my  own.  I don't know if  someone could learn
   expert level design by examining the output of a tool that
   was trained on mediocre code.

   And Claude Code really doesn't understand how to interpret
   my prompts  about TLA+  and Coq/Roq.  It  doesn't generate
   complete  BS.   I'm  thinking   there's  just  not  enough
   training data included.

   In  the old  days, if  you went  to a  decent school  like
   Harvard or  Yale or CMU,  you could be  reasonably assured
   the education  wouldn't be  bad. [[1]]  You could go  to a
   cheaper  state state  school and  get a  decent education,
   though there  was always the  chance you would get  a crap
   instructor or two.

   There's  an idea  that you  can  teach most  people to  be
   effective software developers by  putting them in front of
   a terminal  with a man page  and a c compiler.   I believe
   this is  bullshit.  This technique will  work for //some//
   people, but not as many as sitting you in a class-room and
   having an expert  explain what the important  bits are and
   stepping you through the reasoning of why.

   I think "learning by AI"  may work for //some// people, if
   they  figure  out  how  to ask  the  right  questions.   I
   recommend reading decent books like Gries' "The Science of
   Programming" or Knuth's "Literate Programming."  (You also
   have  to  read  SICP  because  it  defines  a  base  level
   understanding  that all  those  CS  grads have  supposedly
   learned.)

   But I'm  reminded of the  end of the movie  Hidden Dragon,
   Crouching Tiger (spoilers ahead)  where it is revealed the
   antagonist learned kung fu from  a well regarded book, but
   since  they  couldn't  read,   they  only  looked  at  the
   pictures.   They   understood  the   forms  but   not  the
   motivations  for  why  the   forms  were  developed.   The
   antagonist  was  a  formatable  foe,  but  was  eventually
   defeated  because that  minor  difference  in context  was
   sufficient to lead to their defeat.

   I  don't think  you can  learn  to be  an expert  computer
   scientist exclusively by reading  books / papers.  But you
   can come  close.  I  don't think  you can  learn to  be an
   expert computer scientist exclusively by asking AI to give
   you example code, explaining  it and critiquing your code.
   Mostly  because "being  an expert  computer scientist"  is
   less about being a 10x  coder and more about understanding
   the  relations  between  abstract concepts,  notation  and
   symbolic   manipulation,   how   concrete   problems   are
   represented and  manipulated and  how this all  relates to
   concretization using computing machinery.

   AI gives you an answer,  not the understanding embedded in
   the text from which the answer was derived.

   But if you do it right and you ask AI the right questions,
   that understanding can be revealed.

   I think my sense  is that it is very easy  to use AI wrong
   and  difficult(ish)  to use  AI  as  a learning  tool.   I
   sincerely  wish you  well and  would love  to read  a blog
   about your experience.

   1. Do not ask about MIT.  They're beyond salvaging.

OhMeadhbhon AI is destroying my CS degree

   File under "old man yells at clouds."

   I think it's worth asking what  a CS degree is for.  Is it
   to teach you how to  code and make you obviously hire-able
   by industry?  Maybe  it's to teach you how  to think about
   data and code?   If you think it's the former,  then AI is
   probably going  to be a  problem for you.  If  the latter,
   it's neutral to somewhat good.

   I've  been hiring  CS  grads for  4  decades (yikes!)  and
   there's  definitely  been  a   shift.   Not  all  existing
   programs are  bad.  Not all  young software devs  are bad.
   But...  the  percentage  of  recent  grads  that  seem  to
   understand  what data  processing  systems  are about  has
   definitely fallen.

   Us  old farts  in industry  must share  some of  the blame
   here.   Our industry  seems  to be  pretty  boom or  bust.
   Someone comes in with a stack of money and tells people to
   build { the web | blockchain | AI | virtual worlds | etc }
   and suddenly  there's a  rush.  At the  start of  the gold
   rush, we're not sure how  to build everything that's going
   to be the next google [[1]] so we fill the room with young
   kids  who have  seen  some recent  tooling  and will  work
   cheap.   We  don't  develop  them.  We  want  them  to  be
   compliant drones  dancing to  a tune played  by a  CTO and
   VP/Eng who got their jobs  because they're the children of
   the fund investors who gave the startup a bunch of money.

   And then  we go back  to Universities and tell  them "OMG!
   Your not bar-raising your grads by teaching them __fill in
   the blank__!" [[2]]

   So... I  don't doubt  it looks like  AI is  destroying the
   degree.   But maybe  it's just  making it  hard to  ignore
   previous problems with the uni to industry pipeline.

   And I didn't  mention the Mythical Man Month  once in this
   comment.  I'm getting better.

   1. I'm not  sure too many people want to  be Google at the
      moment, but  over the last 25  years, they've certainly
      done well.

   2. I'm  intentionally misspelling  "you're" because  in my
      time in industry,  I've found only about  15% of people
      would pass a 7th grade spelling test.

OhMeadhbhon Show HN: Subvocal – Talk to your computer without making noise

Spent 30 seconds scrolling down to try to figure out what this is. Eventually clicked away from the site because it was taking too long to get to the point. I'm sure it's great and I understand it's something to do with glasses and subvocalizations, but consider a one sentence contextualization at the top of the page.

OhMeadhbhon Mossad Has Devices Like the Exploding Pagers in "Every Country You Can Imagine" (2025)

The funny bit is that when I got a big-screen TV 10 years ago, I ripped it apart and desoldered the microphone from the control board. I also removed the microphone from the remote control when I got a chromecast. It just seemed easier than reversing the code and recompiling w/ a root cert I control (so I could MiTM the stream coming from the TV.)

I think I'm lucky... my TV doesn't seem to try to connect to open wi-fi networks. You have to explicitly give it an SSID and tell it to connect. I have chosen not to do that.

I think my SCAAAS service would advertise "Sure we spy on you, but we're too incompetent to do anything with the data."

OhMeadhbhon Digital minimalism

I appreciate everyone has a different definition of "minimalism" and that I'm a bit of an outlier. But my version of minimalism includes a) using a dumb phone, b) doing most of my browsing via a text based browser in a terminal and c) I've heard of social media, but don't see the point (though you could argue that maybe the HN comments section is sort of like social media.)

Which is not to diminish the author's point (which I interpret as twitter is a cess-pit and think hard about what social media you want to engage in and the interface you want to use.) My point is you don't have to spend time on twitter to benefit from this world-view.

OhMeadhbhon Linode Security Incident

I know I'll get downvoted for this, but here goes. I was in a position to see some of the mythos derived results early. In my organization everyone was running around with their hair on fire. I asked whether or not any of the vulnerabilities mythos found were also found with existing static analysis tools. The result was blink blink "what are static analysis tools?"

I'm not saying mythos didn't find anything new, but several people who should have known better were not using SAST/DAST tools to find potential vulnerabilities before pushing their code into the great unknown. One person I talked to said they didn't bother because GitHub automatically runs SAST tools against pull requests. I looked. Their CICD pipeline had no such tool configured. I'm pretty sure it's more appropriate to say GitHub CAN run SAST/DAST tools, if you configure it, but it won't run SAST/DAST tools by default.

This was a very small sample, but I wonder how common this type of confusion is.

OhMeadhbhon Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

Talking about DPS... People will tell you that the Quartz/PDF rendering engine is just the same as DPS, but they're wrong. NEWS was... delightful. It was close enough to DPS as to make little difference, but running on SPARC processor. I just looked at some NeWS screen-shots and they look much worse than I remember. Greyscale NeXTStep on the mono monitor was a tough act to follow. Even the colour NeXTStations weren't as sharp.

OhMeadhbhon Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

I'm reporting what I remember hearing. Around this time there were people who would code in C, but use a C++ compiler to get the few features that weren't present in C compilers yet. I'm thinking of things like "const" and double-slash-to-the-end-of-line comments.

OhMeadhbhon Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

name one.

OhMeadhbhon Mossad Has Devices Like the Exploding Pagers in "Every Country You Can Imagine" (2025)

Maybe ODMs can monetize this service. Pay me X amount for the part or X + Y amount to ensure some third-party didn't embed a back door or explosive in your part.

OhMeadhbhon Mossad Has Devices Like the Exploding Pagers in "Every Country You Can Imagine" (2025)

There's probably an argument that it's okay when states do objectionable things. Certainly there are large portions of the population that are opposed to actions their states take on their behalf? What's the difference between the US bombing an Iranian pre-school and ISIS decapitating journalists? Mostly that one is sanctioned by a powerful state and the other is not.

OhMeadhbhon Mossad Has Devices Like the Exploding Pagers in "Every Country You Can Imagine" (2025)

Maybe we could do a survey of old mobile phones and pagers to see how many of them have explosives in them. I never thought of myself as a terrorist but if one of my phones wound up with a small bit of C4 in it, that would be a finding.

OhMeadhbhon The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI

Sure. But when you're trying to convince other people you know what you're talking about, confidence is probably about 50% of the game. To be sure, you need some skill, but given candidates who are a "grade a coder with zero confidence" and a "grade b coder with moderate confidence" and "grade c coder with extreme confidence," I am confident in saying the grade c coder will get hired 50% of the time.

It turns out that software engineering in large organizations is a process greatly influenced by human psychology.

Also, "confidence w/o ability" is the core of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You have to know a fair amount to understand how shit you are at things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

OhMeadhbhon The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI

I suspect the speaker was "diet pepsi hitler" before becoming "crack hitler."

OhMeadhbhon The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI

This reminds me of an observation a flat-mate made when I was at university: Drugs amplify your personality. If you were cool before-hand, you would be more cool on drugs. If you were an asshole, you would be more of an asshole on drugs.

I've noticed the same thing about agentic coding. Not really the agents, but the way people responded to agents. If you were the kind of coder who was a little unsure of yourself, agents made you more unsure of yourself. If you were confident with your abilities, you were more confident.

By the transitive nature of HN comments, we can therefore conclude that LLM coding agents are drugs.

I am now wondering if there's a conversation to be had about Dunning-Kruger and Impostor Syndrome. In the modern agentic era, is it better to hire people who know less than experts, though clearly somewhere above complete novice? Perhaps this is why I find it difficult to find a job. Perhaps I am "overfit" to the world before descriptive ambiguity was an advantage?

I am reminded of the words of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs: "act like a dumb-sh*t and they'll treat you like an equal."

Anyway... yes... I agree with @freefaler on this one. AI is a qualia amplifier.

OhMeadhbhon Apple Music 404 Not Found

Alas, it renders less well on my favourite browser, lynx.

OhMeadhbhon Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

In '93 I was (among other things) the Vice President of DaNG (Dallas area NeXT Group). At one of our meetings we had a couple of kids come in and show off this FPS they were working on... I thought it was great they were building games for NeXTStep, but was surprised to hear they wrote it in C++ instead of Objective-C. They said they did C++ 'cause that made it easier to port to DOS.

OhMeadhbhon Behind the scenes at the NeXT Computer office

Just get a modern Mac and remove half the RAM. That should get you the same experience. The visual design was first class, but I remember when I went from NeXTStep to NEWS to X11 and was very relieved to not have to have my mouse spin for minutes at a time.

OhMeadhbhon Listen and read USA nuclear forces Emergency Action Messages, heard on 11175 kHz

Isn't that what Detachment 2702 does?

OhMeadhbhon What does the (Fire)fox say?

Somewhat funny I get a 403 when I try to access it via Lynx. Works fine under EWW, so I suspect they suspect browsers flying the Lynx flag are bots. But for a moment I was thinking they really only wanted people running Firefox to be able to access the Mozilla blog.

OhMeadhbhon Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (WASM/WebPort)

Works under a recent Firefox on Linux. A touch slow, but certainly playable.

OhMeadhbhon Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 series

The words "full backwards compatible" are not entirely true in my experience.

OhMeadhbhon Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 series

Sure, but all the software I want to run uses X instead of Wayland. And it would be cool if we could get reliable key remapping under systemd and wayland.

OhMeadhbhon Linux support is coming to Snapdragon X2 series

Hmm... no news on whether there's X11 support or if we're stuck with just wayland.