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bertylicious

223 karma · joined October 21, 2018

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bertylicious··on Tell HN: Scribd Breached
I think they are referring to the reports of people suddenly meeting on the streets and hanging out together back then.
bertylicious··on Parser Combinators
Regex is overkill for this. Just split the input string on '<' and '>'.
bertylicious··on Tesla Roadster
I wasn't talking about recognizing something as cool or whatever. I'm talking about giving Elon $250K without getting anything back. No rational person would do this - only a fan would.

What's TDS?

bertylicious··on Tesla Roadster
I was a little kid the last time I dreamt about flying cars. Then I grew up and realized it's a silly idea.

Also if it was just a demo for space mining, why is it marketed as a car for consumers and why can I buy a $250K reservation to maybe (!) buy one for an unknown price and with an unknown set of features at an unknown point of time in the future?

I think it's very simply just a scam to extract money from Elon's fans.

bertylicious··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
Did you know there have been literal slave markets in the past? And they still exist today (e.g. in Lybia). Please explain how this is "not universally bad". Actually don't. Spare us your disgusting mental gymnastics that you shamelessly try to disguise as autism.
bertylicious··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
There is no moral or philosophical debate to be had here. It's morally wrong to do this and in my opinion that's clear as day. Putting yourself in a dangerous situation and provoking a "self-defense" scenario like that only serves as a thinly veiled excuse to murder people you consider inferior.

Do you often have violent power fantasies? Do you find yourself daydreaming about them regularly?

bertylicious··on Launch HN: RonanRX (YC S26) – Personalized Peptides and GLP-1s
What exactly are these benefits beyond weight loss?
bertylicious··on GPU World
But the contest does not ask what needs to happen to achieve even and fair distribution of wealth, it specifically asks what might happen after we reached that point. That kind of blindness towards today's political and socio-economic conditions has always been very typical for this kind of techno optimism. I believe it actually prevents revolutionary thought by assuming some kind of revolution has already occurred somehow in order to then attribute all following societal progress to the technology alone.
bertylicious··on A migrant surge tests Spain's open policies
By your definition a migrant needs to cross borders and successfully settle on the other site. What do you call the people being forced back or stuck in holding facilities and internation camps then?
bertylicious··on A migrant surge tests Spain's open policies
You don't happen to have a reliable source for this ludicrous claim?
bertylicious··on The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras
> In theory the government is hired by sofereign to govern the country to the benefit of the people.

This kind of suggests that the people ever sat together and decided on a political system that would benefit them. The reality is that even the most egalitarian and liberal system has been put into place by the ruling class and naturally was designed to benefit them. I'd say this is and was true for at least all major western societies. "By the people, for the people" is propaganda to legitimize said political systems after the fact. And we believe it, because it's the ruling ideology.

bertylicious··on 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
Are you claiming that LLMs have an intent beyond producing the statistically most "correct" output? This sounds a bit like you are saying LLMs are conscious.
bertylicious··on 2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results
How would you define high-quality LLM output? How do you differentiate it from LLM slop?

I think all LLM output used "as is" for content/entertainment/art is slop.

bertylicious··on Bohemia Interactive: Cold War Assault Remastered Source Code on GitHub
Funny, I had a similar experience. I wrote a script that enabled players to "call in" mortar support, by looking at the target and selecting a distance. Also using shoddy trigonometry and also one of my earliest programming experiences. Very basic from today's perspective, but I was mighty proud back then and so hooked!
bertylicious··on Ask HN: Where is the programming profession going?
My impression is that smaller companies, that depend on rapid prototyping to gain clients, exert a lot of pressure onto their devs to use LLMs. At least that's the situation in the companies some friends of mine are working at.

I'm in a slow-moving, much bigger company. Lot's of talk about "AI" here and we can use copilot if we want to, but there is 0 pressure. I'm in a small team and one colleague uses copilot often. In the beginning there was a minor conflict between him and me, because I found the quality of the LLM code unacceptable and had to ask him to review it more carefully. I think that's settled now, but it makes me sad how a once motivated colleague now seems to try to cheat his way out of work.

I personally find it incredibly boring to write copilot prompts or read its answers full of boiler plate and sycophancy. I don't understand how anyone would want to replace the cognitive work of programming, that I find enjoyable for the most part, with the cognitive work of "talking" to an LLM.

Anyway, I think it will be like this at least for a little while longer: only vibe coding allowed in small companies and less vibe coding the bigger the company is.

But before vibe coding can take over the slow-moving big companies, all the accumulated technical debt will come back to haunt us and vibe-free software will be the new fad. That's what I hope at least.

bertylicious··on Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem
No. They cut on maintenance to make line go up. And then they deconstructed existing switches, signal boxes, train lines, and train stations to cut costs even more. This is not an EU problem or a regulations problem or labour cost problem. These are the fruits of privatisation and capitalism.
bertylicious··on AI agent runs amok in Fedora and elsewhere
Have you read the PR discussion?
bertylicious··on The SpaceX Squeeze
Link is paywalled and archive.ph does not work on it. Could you please summarize the argument?
bertylicious··on .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
My mistake. I see my oversight now. `Either String String` is not equivalent to `String | String`, but to `Left String | Right String`. The same must be done for the C# version.

You are correct that this requires support for disjoint unions (aka tagged unions), which Haskell always had and C# will soon have.

bertylicious··on .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
My mistake. I see my oversight now. `Either String String` is not equivalent to `String | String`, but to `Left String | Right String`. The same must be done for the C# version.
bertylicious··on .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
Have you considered trying them out (maybe in F#) to understand why they are so popular in many other languages?
bertylicious··on .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
I think it's almost always about making code more concise and programming more ergonomic. Assembly could already solve all the problems higher-level languages can solve. Yet we didn't discard them as useless.
bertylicious··on .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
But you can have an `Either String String` which is what GP was talking about.
bertylicious··on .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
No, it's a union of a left value (that happens to be a string) and a right value (that happens to be a string). But the compiler-generated code can't tell them apart.
bertylicious··on .NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
I don't think it's a matter of the type of problem and I always found it weird how F# is being framed as being only useful for "math-heavy" problems.

What matters is what libraries you are gonna use for your solution. If most of them are C#-only and don't have an F# equivalent then you'll lose the ergonomics and conveniences that make F# so easy to work with.

bertylicious··on Is AI Profitable Yet?
What's the company's name? And why the unnecessary secrecy in the first place? It's a publicly traded company so this information is public by definition.
bertylicious··on Appearing productive in the workplace
Could you please show us an example of the change made to one of these if statements? I'm curious, because it seems absolutely wild to me to end up in such a situation (where that many changes are required and the usual refactoring tools of modern IDEs are insufficient) in the first place.
bertylicious··on All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)
I'm not impressed with your comment.
bertylicious··on All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)
What about shadows? The UV-C light can't reach everywhere, right? What about the back and undersides of product packaging you want to sterilise?
bertylicious··on US – Iran negotiations end with no deal reached
Interesting. It seems like you're one of those persons that actually believe what Trump and Hegseth are saying regarding the war. Is that so?
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