bitbasher

In case anyone missed it, there was an HN post about writing a web application in C using CGI a day or two ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50058528

There's something about "ai generated condolences" that really rubs me the wrong way. It's sorta like those old e-cards people used to generate and send via email.

It's trained on massive amounts of public code, so its output is (at best) average-- like the code it was trained on. My issue isn't really the output itself, but the mindset that accepts average output as good enough. People who make that choice will keep producing below-average software, and that's what the rest of us will have to live with.

It isn’t about valuing the final product. If you really cared about it, the code would not have stopped you doing it by hand.

In my experience, people like programming with agents because they are lazy or bad programmers (or both).

Maybe I am in the minority, but I don’f find Lunduke’s videos any worse than theo/t3.gg, primeagen or dhh.

To make matters worse, ai is literally the first two letters of your name. I'm sorry Aiden.

> GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Fortran, Go, Rust, and many other languages.

Heh, it's cute GDB introduces itself. We all know what you are. You've earned your place in history.

Skip the backpack, just wear kevlar to class.

It's amazing how split-brained the tech industry can be sometimes.

On the one hand, a majority of developers oppose mass data collection and privacy-invasive technologies like ad tech. Many of those same developers also oppose crypto projects because of their energy consumption and environmental impact.

And yet, those same developers have embraced frontier language models--technologies that have simultaneously scraped vast amounts of the world's data, raise serious privacy concerns, and consume massive amounts of energy.

I have all but too many recommendations... perhaps I should write about them and share it.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the state of the industry and my feelings about it. I realized the time I most enjoyed and was happiest was when I was early in my career, learned a lot and tried to actively be a better software engineer.

I decided to "go back" to that place. I've started reading engineering books, using physical media instead of digital media, etc.

In addition to learning, I've been writing programs that are 'useless' but things I want to make (even if no one ever sees them). I'm also building a product with unconventional technologies simply because I enjoy it and think it's a better way of doing things.

I've essentially gone back to me, circa 2004.

Strange… I have purchased more technical books this year (and read them) than the last five years combined.

If an infinite loop can be both:

1. An infinite busy loop.

2. A thread yield/sleep.

It is by definition undefined behavior. You don't know what you're going to get!

I've found duckduckgo to be a pretty good replacement these days. A few years ago I found myself using !g often to hop over to google, but these days I've been getting by without any !g ... I'm not sure if it's because duckduckgo has gotten better or google has gotten worse, but either way it's welcome.

I don't think it's so crazy to resist television, radio or the internet. Our literacy rates would likely be a lot higher!

It only costs $40,000.

This is why I prefer simpler setups for personal use/hosting. Something like cgit that has no accounts has much less surface area for this kind of issue.

Those are all terrible things but none of them are racist, unless the word has a new meaning.

Disgusting? Xenophobic? Sure.

Why is building a wall racist?

That doesn't make it any less interesting :)

Here I was thinking 1MB still feels way too large.

What does the average zigger do?

Wish the article was written by a human. When I read lines like: “Agents draft. I approve. Agents execute.”

I convulse a bit.

A simple qemu virtual machine is nice and quick to spin up. I mainly work inside an openbsd or linux virtual machine. I use a different vm for each project and I have a "sandbox" vm I use to run random things I download/test.

Decent updates but still lacks a lot of small polish. One thing that annoys me is the mouse cursor. I wish it would disappear when typing or idle.

Yes— this is annoying. At first I thought my sound wasn’t working. Took a while to figure it out…

We had a "Karl" at my first engineering job. Karl happened to be our team lead, but he produced a lot of Karl code. Many expletives and facepalms in that office. It got so bad, a member on our team that was highly religious asked to have their own office (and he got it).

I do all of my code by hand. I don't even use an LSP. It makes sense as long as it makes sense to you.

You don't need to change the way you do things because of some perceived thing you're missing out on. That is what the AI companies want you to feel and think because it benefits them.

This applies to more than AI, but programming language choices and more. Heck, it even applies to social issues and politics :)

Make your own choices and walk your own path.

I recently read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It was oddly sad to read.

The enthusiasm and optimistic view of open source and the future of software and craftsmanship. Looking at it in 2026.. incredibly sad.

Forget the bazaar. Back to the cathedral.

Funny how I could tell without reading anything. I immediately lost interest upon noticing.