bartread

> but the AI lead to amplification of the good and the bad in people.

LLMs absolutely project who we are back at us.

Well... yeah, but, it's more than an opinion: the dead have been radiocarbon dated, which is how we know they didn't all die at the same time as originally believed.

And if they died at different times, especially when most of them died before the Romans arrived, then the whole big battle theory just sort of falls apart from there.

Man, I was about to go on a proper rant and claim that the site didn’t have every battle because it’s missing the battle of Maiden Castle…

I claim no great historical authority here but, since I grew up mostly within sight of the hillfort, we were taught about its history at school to an extent that, at the time, felt unrelenting, cruelly repetitive, and utterly tedious. In reality though, it probably lasted for a single term at the fag end of 1985 when we learned about the Celts[0].

But what we learned was that General Vespasian captured Maiden Castle after a brutal one day battle in AD 43 in which Maiden Castle’s Celtic defenders were slaughtered in what amounted to a one-sided rout due to the superior weapons, tactics, and discipline of the Romans. This is what I remembered, but I wanted to look it up to ensure my facts were straight.

Welp… TIL because subsequent investigation and analysis has shown that it didn’t happen at all so, no, dear reader, my “facts” were not straight.

There never was any big battle.

There might have been the odd smaller skirmish during the Roman period, but the bodies we found that were all supposed to have died in the big battle actually span several generations, dying at different times over a period of a couple of hundred years, and the evidence of violence in their deaths was in the vast majority of cases inter-tribal and occurred before the Romans even showed up.

Maiden Castle had already fallen into decline by the time the Romans arrived and was mostly abandoned for a long period until a temple (that you can still visit the ruins of) was built early in the 4th century.

So the reason the battle of Maiden Castle doesn’t appear on the site isn’t because the site is carelessly built AI-slop but because no such battle ever happened.

I have been… disillusioned. Hats off to the human behind the AI that built the site.

[0] I remember this with such precision because it was the first period of history we learned about at middle school, and matters didn’t improve significantly, because next it was the domestic matters of the bleeding Victorians, and lots of episodes of “How we used to live”.

Is that a thing? I ask because I and my best friend have vivid memories of my step dad, who used to be a postman, cycling home from town with 4 - 5m timbers under one arm. This would have been late 80s/early 90s. He’d call out and wave to people he knew with his “free” hand as he passed as well.

If even moving a plank of wood is illegal I can’t imagine how he got away with that, unmolested by plod, for so many years.

I think with Anthropic the only way you get control of data residency is to use their models via another platform, so I tend to agree with you.

IIRC OpenAI do offer data residency controls but only to enterprise customers and subject to minimum spend.

I get what you mean, but I've always taken the view that code is malleable as compared to other forms of engineering that involve creation of something physical - a bridge, a railway, an aircraft, a car, or whatever (even something like building a house, depending on size, construction methods, materials, etc.) - so I've never really subscribed to the point of view that it's "hard" to make changes to a software system, including distributed software systems, no matter how large or complex, as compared to how hard it is to make changes to something that is physically built.

With that being said, I think it was Fred Brooks that observed (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that software systems are the most complex systems human beings create, and this was all the way back in the 1970s, so there is something to the point of view that making changes to software systems can be difficult.

Nonetheless, I think LLMs and agents have taken software systems from being quite malleable to being really very malleable indeed, and in that sense I absolutely agree with you.

Yeah, it happens.

I was fire-wardening at a carol service about 15 years ago (think ~850 year old gothic stone church with thousands of candles spread around on every available flat surface - looked amazing, potentially catastrophic).

I was sat near the back with a bucket of sand under my seat, and a guy sat in the middle of the row just across the aisle from me, who would have been around 40 or so, had a heart attack and died.

No warning, no history, just gone, and leaving a fairly young family behind. It was honestly shocking.

> in the world of "I'll just have my agent rebuild it" makes that sort of change a whole lot easier to deal with

Easier in terms of effort and time, but it still costs, and it still adds drag.

The fact that I can do housekeeping much more easily with agents doesn’t make me want to do more of it. The whole point is to free up my time, energy, and thinking for things that are more worthwhile, interesting, and value-adding. That’s my mentality both at home and at work.

If you’re building a framework or a library, whether open source or commercial, and you think agentic and AI native development gives you more license for breaking changes and churn because your users can just fix it up with their agents, then I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you because that blade cuts on both sides.

If you can keep churning and breaking stuff, then I can get fed up, drop your shit like a hot rock, and build it myself. And I will.

I’ve just rebuilt my personal site from scratch after getting cheesed off with the framework I used and it didn’t take very long. What’s actually taken longer is making all the improvements I would have liked to make but were too much hassle before, so one needs to relearn shipping discipline, but that’s OK.

Same goes at work. Even major stack changes, like migrating database engine, are so much easier. Yes, you still need to be methodical and disciplined - in fact I’d argue agents make that more important than ever in many enterprise contexts - but it is still so much easier. I’m seeing projects left and right that in the old world would have taken weeks or months executed in days or weeks. It’s wild times.

Exactly: limiting access is fine, lack of contingencies is not.

Some systems and services still only allow for one owner though (I'm not going to name names), which can be a big problem when MFA is mandated. From what the poster I responded to said, I'd be very surprised if that were the case for them though - just slightly daft policy.

Great example of performative enterprise security practice that contributes to degraded security posture, I suppose. Best of luck.

I'm going to guess if you did it on the video card and simply disabled those enhancements it would be considerably more energy efficient than doing it on the CPU as well which (a) means your laptop battery lasts longer on a charge, and (b) also opens up the possibility of not needing a particularly powerful CPU in order to juice the resolution, because the video hardware is doing the work for you.

From a programming perspective I do completely get the desire to have the CPU do all the work though - if you want absolutely everything under your control it's easier, and especially if your game is single-threaded.

Portia jumping spiders are incredibly smart. People have done experiments where they place the spiders in a complex environment with food in a hard to access location and they basically just sit there looking around until they've figured out a route to get the food. It takes them a while, I guess because they can only process so much information at a time, but they're remarkably good at doing it.

> Because there's literally a market carve-out for city-driving electric cars like the Leaf and the BMW i-series.

And? Do you think these cars are incapable of highway driving? What do you think happens when manufacturers release cars that are terribly noisy in the cabin at highway speeds?

I’ll tell you: what’s always happened. Reviewevers and consumers will slag them off and people will vote with their wallets.

A lightweight car is not a car that inherently has to be unpleasant to drive at speed.

And you think cost cutting is new? Robert McNamara and his “whizz kids” near ruined the reputation of the Ford Motor Company due to quality issues stemming from his relentless cost cutting in the 1950s and 1960s. What he and, really, what the rest of Detroit were doing enabled the success of Japanese manufacturers in the USA because they made a higher quality product and charged less for it.

> And these days the over-reliance on plastics for structure and cost reduction

People have been complaining about this since the 1980s. Plastics have been used extensively in cars for decades, including in ways that compromise the durability of critical components and sensors. This is not a new problem.

It is sheer ignorance to claim that any car weighing less than a ton will inherently be unpleasant to drive at highway speeds.

Yes, and if you’d read my comment properly you’d have realised I briefly surveyed some of the factors that influence cabin noise perception (though by no means all of them), and I also mentioned that many other manufacturers were making similar vehicles that performed well at motorway speeds, so I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say here.

> I doubt a sub-1 tonne car is going to be pleasant to drive at highway speeds

Why would you think that? Well, you sort of explain it, but you don’t have any evidence or experience to back it up, so I’m still not sure why you think it?

Back in the day (think 1990s) plenty of small European hatchbacks weighed less than or around 1000kg, and noise at highway speeds was not a problem: Peugeot, Citroen, Renault, VW, Fiat, and others all had small hatchbacks that were absolutely fine, and perfectly comfortable, at motorway speeds for long distances.

My first car was a used 1998 Renault Clio: depending on which engine and trim level you bought they either weighed a bit less than 1000kg, or a bit more. I looked mine up and it weighed 1050kg.

I did about 50,000 miles in that car, including lots of long journeys. Back then I had a far too heavy right foot - which eventually got me a speeding fine - and even then noise wasn’t an issue on the motorway.

There’s so much more to how noisy a car is inside than merely sound insulation. Aerodynamics are a huge component, but so are shut lines, seals, and panel gaps. Materials and surface finishes also matter. Even things like the shape of the wing mirrors, or how the shape of the front corners and headlights direct air around and past the wing mirrors[0], can have a massive impact on whether or not a car is noisy at speed within the cabin.

This is Hacker News. We all to a greater or lesser extent work or dabble in incredibly detail oriented disciplines. Why would you assume disciplines outside those in majority representation here aren’t equally, or even more, detailed?

[0] I want to say either the Nissan Note or the Nissan Leaf had nobbly protrusions on its headlights specifically to reduce cabin noise by changing the way air flowed around the wing mirrors.

> My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.

Confession time.

I used to be prone to giving things slightly silly names, particularly unrecoverable structured exceptions. Examples include PancakeLandingException, ReallyBadException, CataclysmicException, ApocalypticDeathException, and the like.

And then years and years ago I used to work for a company called Redgate and I started a tradition of slightly silly messages when early access builds of our .NET products would expire, all based on Monty Python sketches and quotes. So, obviously, the dead parrot sketch featured in there.

So far, so harmless, but this did come to a head somewhat spectacularly and in a couple of different ways.

Firstly, in 2009 one of my colleagues used a modified quote from The Life of Brian as an expiry message on a build. Somebody who appeared to be some sort of religious zealot complained loudly to the company. We were both in LA at the time, with a couple of other colleagues, attending build 2009, so we woke up to a chain of something like 50 panicked emails in our inboxes with people expressing differing levels of outrage and/or amusement whilst discussing various grovelling apology options... until someone figured out that it was actually an elaborate troll that we'd swallowed hook, line, and sinker. I can't remember the name of the person who caught us out but, hats off, well played, sir, well played. It did unfortunately mean we became a bit more cautious and business-like with our early access build expiry messages.

Secondly, and this one needs a bit of context setting... I've always been a fan of descriptive and explicit error messages: there should be enough information in any error message that most of the time the user can figure out what's wrong and fix their own problem OR at least so that if they get in touch with support, then support can quickly figure out the problem and get back to them with a solution. I'm not a fan of unhelpful, information poor, obfuscatory, or cryptic error messages.

But when I wanted to cause an application to exit because there'd been an error related to tampering with our licensing code I played somewhat against type. I wanted error messages that would uniquely identify what had happened, making it easy for us to figure out, whilst giving the user no clue (because I wanted to make it very slightly harder for hackers/crackers - but let's be real: this would never have actually stopped anyone). So I used successive lines of dialogue from a scene in House where House is trying to guess who Wilson's girlfriend is. I have no clear recollection of why I chose this dialogue to reproduce, but... I did.

Anyway, this did lead to some slightly confused support requests coming in from users mostly trying to use the tools legitimately in slightly unusual scenarios, but nothing that was overly burdensome. That was until early 2011, when Greg Young - he of event sourcing fame - posted the following gist because he'd encountered an error that said, "Because I wanna ask you about your girlfriend. I must know who she is, or you would've told me her name.": https://gist.github.com/gregoryyoung/871736.

Not at all creepy, right? And, of course, it went viral on twitter. Cue another massive email thread although, this time round, people just thought it was funny. However, we did decide to make the error messages a bit more boring and, in the end, I just gave them numbers.

Mostly I'm just glad the error Greg got wasn't the final line of dialogue in the exchange between House and Wilson: "Yo mamma." That would have been bad.

This is an absolutely chaotic suggestion, and I've very much enjoyed it.

No, but CNN linked its shutdown to budget cuts (also mentioned on the Wikipedia page).

This is hilarious but that API Design Review meeting is stressful AF. I can't have that on speaker anywhere near me and concentrate on anything else meaningful. Human voices are incredibly distracting unless there are enough of them to create a general background wall of sound - if I can pick out what individuals are saying, that's no bueno.

I agree on the coffee machine. On the thermostat, not so much. We keep pretty irregular hours so being able to control the thermostat remotely, so the house isn’t being heated unnecessarily but is warm on our return, is useful.

I wonder how much water ingress is an issue and what measures have been taken to prevent the tunnels filling with water? Perhaps something about the geology prevents it from happening, but I’d normally expected some sort of sump pump evening for a lot of cellars.

Man, some of the comments this is getting are absolutely wild.

OP, I’m sorry this is happening to you. It must be incredibly frustrating to have people ripping off something you’ve worked on for many years and pass it off as their own work. I would be furious in your position.

I wish I could do something directly to help you but the best I can offer is to echo the best advice others have already given you: it’s time to get a lawyer. That is the one guaranteed route to get GitHub to sit up and take the action they should already have taken on your behalf.

> You want to sue people for blocking ads? Did I read this correctly?

That is an extremely disingenuous and bad faith interpretation of what OP has said and I think you know it. You want to be edgy? Go comment on Reddit.

OP is rightly frustrated that their copyrighted work, that they’ve been working on full time for over a decade, is simply being ripped off by people and GitHub refuses to do anything about it.

I agree with both you and the person you’re responding to.

> even small niche subreddits are facebook / tiktok tier with low effort meme posts

Completely agree.

There's a few niche subs I hang out in but, for me, the standout in terms of quality decline is r/DIYUK. The difference between that sub in 2019/2020 vs today is stark.

It's pretty common to scroll through several pages of repetitive one-line "jokes" before getting to anything remotely resembling a real answer.

Mods seem relatively inactive and there are only 4 of them anyway, which is nowhere near enough to keep on top of the volume of posts and comments nowadays. Really it needs either a lot more mods, or some form of LLM-backed automation, to weed out the low effort comments.

It's become a bit of a wasteland in terms of a lot of the regular contributors who used to give good, well thought out answers, have tapped out. I complained about this the other week and got downvoted and accussed of "showboating" which, honestly, I'm not even sure what the commenter who said that meant in the context of the discussion that we were having.

It's a real shame because there aren't really any good UK-focussed DIY-oriented discussion forums any more: all the others degraded and became toxic, which is where r/DIYUK won, because it resisted that trend for longer. No more, sadly. DIYnot always stood out as a place that was more about battling egos than providing meaningful help and advice and, although r/DIYUK hasn't gone in quite that direction, it is sadly headed down an equally useless and destructive path quality-wise.

You don’t sound salty: you’re speaking from a place of ignorance and offering an opinion based on literally no evidence whatsoever so you merely sound uninformed.

In the UK, for example, we don’t suffer from a dearth of innovation. What actually happens is that successful companies get hoovered up by foreign, and particularly US, investors. It’s extremely frustrating.

For myself, I’m pleased to see events like this happening in other European countries.

I also don’t get what the problem is. Claude’s plan mode is great, especially when you add interviewing into the equation. It means I can get to a point where I’m confident all the changes proposed make sense, and that I understand them, before anything is actually changed.

I feel like this post is hawking for commercial reasons more than it’s based in reality, especially a reality that takes into account the extremely varied experiences engineers seem to have with agents. Not to mention it ignores capabilities that, for example, Claude’s VS Code addin have had for ages (specifically select and annotate in plan mode, as I mentioned in another comment).

As such I’m not inclined to take it very seriously. More than that, the “X is dead” trope was overdone 10 years ago and I don’t think it’s been long enough to warrant a resurgence.

> This cut-and-paste workflow felt clunky and made it arduous to work through an idea while keeping track of the current plan.

I mean, it is, and if that were the workflow I’d be very fed up of it by now, but the plan mode in Claude’s VS Code extension has supported select and annotate directly since at the very least early 2026.

> Transputer ISA cards when someone buys one

Your use of “when” is interesting - suggests it’s not that occasional. Wonder what people are doing with these nowadays.

Yes, I mean DataGrid. .NET 2.0 wasn't released until October 2005 so I think your remembrance of dates is a little bit off (understandable: it's now a long time ago).

In any case that didn't really matter. In mid-2004, when I started, the company was still targeting .NET 1.0 for all apps because it meant we could guarantee customers would have that runtime installed on their machines without the need for another dependency. The business model was download -> try -> buy so we wanted as little friction as possible and having a newer version of .NET that might require another download and install wasn't worth the dropout rate we'd experience.

That being said, .NET 1.0 also meant we were using Visual Studio.NET 2002 which was... incredibly painful to work with. I'd come from the world of IntelliJ IDEA which had all manner of code navigation, inspection, refactoring, and testing functionality built in. Not to mention Java already had generics and a much better and more comprehensive framework class library and more mature OSS scene covering whatever was missing from that. .NET 1.0 and VS2002 had none of it and, I forget, was it that VS2002 had no extension model or was it just that ReSharper didn't support it? Either way it felt like stepping back into the mid 1990s and I wasn't happy.

Eventually, sometime in summer or autumn of 2005, I managed to persuade leadership that at least allowing us to use .NET 1.1 and Visual Studio.NET 2003 would be a good idea, and would enable us to use ReSharper, which at least brought us on par with IntelliJ IDEA circa 2003 or so. I can't remember but it might have been that .NET 1.1 had been rolled out over Windows Update or enough service packs for Windows 2000 or Windows XP that we deemed the likely loss of purchases to be negligible.

Our first products developed with .NET 2.0 we didn't start working on until the back half of 2006 and this was really only because we were developing products that plugged in to SQL Server Management Studio which, again IIRC (long time ago), was based on the Visual Studio 2005 shell and required .NET 2.0.

We were always lagging on .NET versions because we wanted to make sure someone could just download, install, and run our products without needing to do anything else.