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ctrlkctrls

22 karma · joined May 27, 2026

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ctrlkctrls··on AI is ruining haunted houses
No. Halloween has long passed from being a pre-christian Celtic harvest feast day to a tacky plastic costume and kids sugar festival. Nothing sacred before AI about Halloween. And seriously, AI ruining Halloween is just silly.

I see this thread as a manifesting of fear that AI will inevitably own software engineering. We'll hang on to some of the peripheral areas for a few years but it's over. Seeing reminders of this in the AI images generated for decoration must be hard for some.

ctrlkctrls··on The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
Again, no, "what to build" is the humans input, but it's not just grunt work that modern AI tooling is good at... Architecture and what to avoid are also strengths of AI.
ctrlkctrls··on The baffling intelligence of a single cell (2024)
Cells are amazing. Even mitochondria are amazing, BUT let's not get carried away with the sci-fi nonsense. You're projecting computer science on to biology because "we're all programmers here" and to the HN crowd (myself included) we like to see the world through comp-sci metaphors. But that's just hyperbolic and inaccurate.
ctrlkctrls··on The baffling intelligence of a single cell (2024)
God (any god) is a comforting mythology to help explain the things in life that are hard to come to terms with, but it's a mythology, it's no different to believing in Harry Potter, or Dionysus.

Bringing the concept of God into a biology discussion is sort of embarrassing. "Intelligent design" is for the unimaginative mind. We must always be open to being wrong, evolution fits what we know now, but I'm sure in a century we'll have a better understanding and it'll be a more complete understanding, but what it won't need is a divine eternal.

The world's not flat, there is no god. Can we get back to science now.

ctrlkctrls··on Build your own decision model
The difference is in the training, or more accurately what data the model is trained on.
ctrlkctrls··on How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn't
You also get Jason Arday with DEI so not sure that's the answer. I'm sure Watson wasn't the first person of either gender to take credit for more than their rightful amount. DEI is just another example of institutional isms - putting people in positions that they have no rightful claim to just because they belong to one of the protected classes is a terrible answer.
ctrlkctrls··on The mental health of young men is declining. Experts warn it could get worse
Spot the non-programmer in the room :) The two negatives apply to different things. One is how they feel about the mental health situation and the other is the mental health situation so it reads just fine. Of course it could be reworded but was it really that hard to parse?
ctrlkctrls··on The mental health of young men is declining. Experts warn it could get worse
Curious why dating is a non-starter. Looks - or rather appeal - is always a distribution and probably similar between men and women so historically there's always been a match for anyone. Mostly. What's different now? Have expectations changed in either gender (or both).
ctrlkctrls··on I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken
People just want to give up all responsibility these days. If you use the model to do harm to someone else or commit a crime I would think it a lot more reasonable that you be held responsible, instead of making yourself the victim and blaming the manufacturer.
ctrlkctrls··on Tells of a Slop UI
We're down this now? Come on. A landing page doesn't need a ton of design for a company as well known as Cloudflare.

The site is just fine.

Stop already with the AI doomerism.

ctrlkctrls··on How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs
And I'm sure elevator operators stood pressing buttons long after they didn't need to...

We're going through a change in software development. People can either move with the times or hang on to their old way of working and age out of the workforce. Either through biological age or just being left behind by those moving with the times.

There will always be those that still think they can code better/faster than the models. It's a combination of professional arrogance, and struggling to let go of a skill that took them decades to acquire which lost its value in a few short years.

It's hard on people, it's hard for those with lots of experience because they are being left behind, and it's hard on the juniors that went into CS thinking it'll be a well paid job for life only to find they aren't needed anymore.

It will take longer than we think. Those of us in the industry have a few years yet, things always change more slowly than anticipated, but all these HN'ers still whining about their emotional attachment to code/coding that can be trivially recreated are just in denial. Are models perfect today? No of course not. Just like most programmers. But they are already better than the majority, and they are just getting better. Coding is over. Software development is of course just fine. We'll just learn new and better ways of solving human centric problems using computers. Just like all the assembly programmers did.

The value of Instagram was never the code. The code was just a means to an end. Well, the means have changed.

I feel for those who lose their livelihoods. That is obviously awful and no amount of "things change" rhetoric will ease that pain, and I have no ideas for those. Sleep under your desk and buy the market with every cent you earn for as long as you continue to earn and hope the market grows 10x in 10 years like Musk predicts and just hope to be on the right side of the industrial change.

ctrlkctrls··on Grok 4.7
Judging by Elon's staggering success in all of his ventures I'd say you're out of touch.
ctrlkctrls··on Vibe Coding is the new Internet Dating?
At work I have to deliver and if I don't use AI I'll be an outlier and "managed out".

In my spare time I can choose to tinker with software but it sort of feels pointless now.

To not accept the new reality is to bury one's head in the sand hoping it'll all just go away. Software development has been commoditized and the level of abstraction just slid up one more ring. Like when we went from Assembly to C, then C to high level languages. Now cc is Claude Code not C compiler. It's just what it is today. Adapt or age out, they are the only options now...

ctrlkctrls··on Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil
Everywhere is a colony if the out of Africa theory is to be believed. The native peoples displaced by Europeans migrating from Asia.
ctrlkctrls··on Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX
Didn't Kamprad have some pretty strong ties to the Nazi party? Yet you have a bad taste in your mouth because Cursor gets bought by SpaceX!

Virtue signaling in glass houses...

ctrlkctrls··on Don't you mean extinct?
Exactly, it's pretty obvious, and definitely as you sail, not aggressive (someone melts a little too easily) The comment was naive to the point of denial.

This is the future. Adapt or die.

ctrlkctrls··on I'm So Tired of Ads
"mind rape". How absurd and inflammatory. The notion of consent here is just ridiculous. Nobody is forcing you to use the Internet, you're happy enough to consume free online services, but then melt down when you see an ad.
ctrlkctrls··on Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
channeling Rocky (extraterrestrial) there I see :)
ctrlkctrls··on Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit
it doesn't matter the reason. This is a race and nobody will care or remember how the winners got there.

Mistral looks like it's fading away to irrelevance unless they can play alongside the similar sized models, or have some unique advantage other than being in Europe, for Europe. I was really excited for them back when they were startup that had the biggest European venture round ever. This space will have a few winners, and many losers. Google, plus either Anthropic or OpenAI most likely. Big models will see breakthroughs in inference performance/cost fall precipitously and small models will only exist on devices (Pixels and iPhones, cars, watches, bluetooth speakers, etc)

ctrlkctrls··on DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
The world seems to be fragmenting, into those that see the value in the latest from Google, and those that resist changes like this. I search for how much oil does my <ICE vehicle> take" and get the exact answer in a single sentence, or I suppose I could click the links and wade through all the validation for choosing <ICE vehicle> and how often one should change the oil, and which brand of oil that blog is pushing etc etc.

I love Google's AI answers and their AI Mode tab. DDG is just Bing or a search vendor proxy, so I've never understood the fascination. At least Perplexity is different to Google. DDG seeing a 28% increase is like Google saying they saw a drop of 0.0000000001% in traffic.

HN crowd forget that the world isn't like us, they didn't grow up with Yahoo and Alta Vista, with Excite etc etc. Our SOP is to resist all change, anytime Apple brings out a new version it'll be the end of Apple according to HN - Apple - the biggest company in the world - what do they know about UI, "Liquid Glass sucks!" :) :)

We're a community in danger of pushing out those new to the tech world, recent graduates will be made to feel unwelcome if we continue to trash everything that the biggest companies in the world do, like we always know better. I implore the community to be more positive about the future, about the technologies that will take us into that future.

ctrlkctrls··on The worst job interview I ever had
The "in" operator is not unusual or trivia, it's something people who code in python use all the time! Python does have a function (or more accurately a method), it's called __contains__ and it's invoked by "in". I would expect a python developer to be able to comment on whether python uses a fastsearch algorithm or not, they should be able to comment on BM and H algorithms.

Maybe this was a very junior position, but I'm with the interviewer here. Using regex would be very questionable - and a solid case of 1171.