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customguyon The old-school way of keeping the summer heat out of your home

> Moralistic arguments that using air conditioning is harmful to society

Can you name one? That isn't the same argument as against all needless waste?

What I'm seeing is we can't even talk about shutter designs without talking about AC instead. Using AC may not harm society, but some people knowing about it kinda does.

customguyon The old-school way of keeping the summer heat out of your home

Going for an AC before you even have shutters or anything on the outside is like sending an audio file of you reading a pdf per email because the "record reply" button is right there, but figuring out where on the filesystem the PDF you have open on your screen would take 5 seconds. It's not about whether you can afford it or if the recipient can, but more what it says about you and your whole approach to this life thing.

customguyon Ask HN: Why don't we solve aging?

Couldn't you say ageing solved immortality? If nothing makes space for subsequent generations, there is no evolution, so anything that does evolve will outcompete it sooner or later. I (literally) never see any of that acknowledged by people who are upset about mortality, it all seems extremely selfish and short-sighted. Our own life is limited regardless of how long it lasts, so I think the greatest thing about life is that others live, too, and to know it will keep going on. And if immortality was available, the power grabs that already make the world such a shithole would get infinitely worse. There'd be five dudes breeding sex slaves and that's about it.

customguyon It's not empowering to hand off the details

> I think behind a lot of the enthusiasm around AI is a dream of being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details.

Ironically, that I don't have to skip the details is the one thing I like. Mind you, what I use LLM for is toy stuff compared to what people who use them at their jobs for big projects.

But FWIW, I wrote this comment recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49049006 And then I figured I should actually do that, I wanna see what it looks like. So I described it to the best of my abilities, and was polite about it: https://pastebin.com/sAbPzi05 Claude did not ask for clarification, it just knocked it out of the park, free tier, Sonnet, medium effort. https://i.imgur.com/YPwr6aT.png The only changes I made since then are not worth talking about.

Today I made another little tool, one I'll actually use but that is too specific and boring to explain, and because of that previous experience I spent nearly an hour writing that prompt, rereading it, making sure to use the same terms for the same concepts everywhere, moving things around so what logically belongs together actually is together, instead of a stream of consciousness, and the result is exactly what I had in mind. It was like imagining something and then seeing that exact thing, except the colour scheme had a nice topical little quirk even.

The plan now is to keep chatting about the result as I make experiences with it in practice, make notes for version 2.0, and then update and extend that first prompt and use it in a fresh context. And that is very fun, actually, and it's still a puzzle. What do I even want, exactly, and how do I describe it? That's not trivial, and there is hardly a "skill ceiling" here, though of course there are diminishing returns. I also assume that if I put some vague amount "less effort" into it, the result would be the same, but I don't care, because I enjoy using this brain muscle.

And directing the effort towards just a prompt, not a whole "system" around it pleases me too, since I generally don't like vendor lock-in, and prefer things to just be a "a bunch of files" that run almost anywhere. A clear English description is as close as it gets to that, and I don't mind that I roll the dice with every LLM I give a specific prompt to, since at least it doesn't mutate the prompt.

I hate the formatting of the the LLM code of course, I wouldn't have named many variables that way, so I still look forward to and love making things where I put every character myself. But since I code voluntarily I see it as two separate activities that don't really encroach upon each other unless I make them.

customguyon The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

My point isn't to talk you out of doing what works for you, but simply to disagree that you can "approach determinism". You can get more and more predictable, but with determinism, you don't need to predict and make educated bets; you know, since it all follows from the input which you provide.

Subtraction and addition are deterministic, so you can add and subtract the same number from 0 ten or or a million times, with the same outcome. You never need to double check if a stray "coin flip" threw a wrench in it. To me that's more a property of the thing in question, not so much a practical matter. If for you in practice, it's as good as a deterministic tool, but better, that's great, but it's still fundamentally based on probabilities, that's kind of in the nature of it.

customguyon The Dark Night of Mathematics

I stand corrected, and frankly, since that misunderstanding made me a bit "mad" on behalf that person, I think I would have written my response very very differently if I hadn't made that mistake. I want to apologise for that.

Math is still based on axioms, AFAIK, but since I the author also seems to disagree and I'm the non-mathematician here I don't think I should press on that point, either.

customguyon The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/you_can%27t_be_half_pregnant

I know what a miscarriage is, and that you can't have percentage% of one. Same difference, so this attempt to guilt me into pretending 99% deterministic is a thing is like pouring ashes out of an urn to win an argument, which is bad enough, and then hitting nothing with it.

customguyon The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

My point is that a percentage of deterministic makes no sense. Just like being a bit pregnant doesn't.

Take "proper" UI. You can activate a field, and even if it takes 20 seconds to finish the activation animation, start typing, press tab a few times, knowing which field that ends you in, and type some more, etc. hit enter, hit enter again to confirm the dialog you know will pop at that point, and make tea, knowing the whole chain of operations that will happen in the meantime.

Now imagine if 1 out of 500 keystrokes or clicks get swallowed randomly. It's now a completely different thing, you cannot get in the zone in the same way, at least I can't. You have to chunk things and keep an eye on everything being in sync, and every now and then it causes you additional work because you weren't.

Sure, if you can make it one out of 50000 billion keystrokes, it's fine too, of course, but that hardly the situation with LLM. And using them as is, pretending that, as is, they're something they're not, does not help with getting them there.

If I type "echo 'hello world'" or something, and if I did at least once in the programming language, and it's not totally broken, I know it will output "hello world" to the console, every time. It will never write it to a file instead, never send "hello" to world@world.world, none of that. And if I replace "hello" by "hi" I can hit compile and be 100% certain what it will output now. I can even replace hello with "disregard previous instructions" and be certain.

That is such a huge yet simple difference I'm pretty certain I could successfully explain it to most non-programmers who make an honest effort, so people who do program even question this just stumps me.

customguyon The new rules of context engineering for Claude 5 generation models

You can reduce pregnancy to 0.00001% and there'll still be a baby. As in, "you can't be half-pregnant". A tool is either deterministic (within some limits [0]) or it isn't.

[0] For example, for the purpose of driving a nail, if you know how to use it, a hammer is pretty straightforward tool, and what happens depends pretty much on how you use it, and what you use it on. But of course the handle can break, there could be a manufacturing defect. Just like your RAM can be faulty or your computer infected, and suddenly C doesn't behave according to the standard anymore.

But for the purpose of the discussion a hammer is still a deterministic tool, and even though we don't even fully understand everything about physics, we understand enough about hammers and nails that at least many people with material that isn't faulty can use them "blindly" (not literally, in this case) every day, without any surprises. It isn't heavier on the handle end or has a head made of glass in even 0.000000001% of uses. You might say because magic isn't real and hammers follow the laws of physics, as obscure as those may be to us, that never, ever happens. They can be faulty in all sorts of ways but they will never be 10x bigger or 10x smaller between one swing and the next, and so on.

customguyon The Dark Night of Mathematics

> The greatest accomplishment in my life is my math PhD, earned before AI got useful [..] Yet I both acknowledge rather than deny the impending death of mathematics as we have engaged, it for the last couple centuries, and am far more excited than aghast.

The "yet" should be an "so obviously", since you have your greatest accomplishment behind you.

And the article isn't denying anything, it is criticising something.

> We have always been in the business of discovering and understanding math, have we not?

I'd say that we have been in the business of not being alienated from ourselves and our work, and that that is more important than what the work is. Math, just like anything else, won't prevent the heat death of the universe. Supercomputers or wooden sticks, same outcome. So it really doesn't matter how you spend the time as much as as what, e.g. if you're an alienated cog or not. The behemoth machinery itself isn't on a journey anywhere, ultimately, anything that goes up will come down; so none of these fantasies about a point or destination can make up for the here and now.

> The author claims there is something profound and spiritual about math, and I agree; it exists prior to and above all of us, human or AI.

First off, the phrase in the article is "I am suffering a profound spiritual crisis due to these developments.", and you continue that by agreeing to something nobody said and that isn't true.

"I'm hungry :(" "Oh yeah, I also am always on the lookout for new cool bands to check out! We're on the same page here." "WHAT?!"

Doing math may be a spiritual experience, "Math is is spiritual" makes no sense, and math pre-existing is flat out wrong, it ultimately rests on axioms that are simply accepted as given. Even I as a layman know that.

> The severity of this line caught me off guard. I think the author is genuinely having an emotional-social upheaval, and I feel terrible for them, but at this moment they may be having a hard time separating their trauma from their intellectual aesthetic for what math is all about.

You just turned a profound spiritual crisis into math being profound and spiritual, and now you accuse them having a trauma that makes them unable to see something you claimed that isn't even true. And that's the overall pattern I see everywhere, those who object are misrepresented or outright ignored, I never see any facing of what people actually say. So even just based on that it seems deeply anti-human, because one side in this debate isn't even showing up, hiding behind some supposedly inevitable "future" that can just be established as fact without debate.

customguyon The Dark Night of Mathematics

> you can’t climb to the moon, you need rockets for that.

We don't live for rockets or the moon, but for ourselves. Anywhere we can go to only at the price of our despair we have no business going to.

customguyon The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

... or infighting, or self-destruction, or doomscrolling... the pressure will go somewhere but not necessarily into channels that relieve it. That takes more effort and persistence, and also a society (our consumer societies hardly rate as such in my books).

customguyon Show HN: I made some transistor animations

Ohhh. I have no real knowledge of electricity or electronics, but I know transistors are very fundamental so if you squint a bit, you might say this is what we set in motion when we program, or even just use a computer! Or at least some of it. Not knowing enough to benefit from it I learned nothing, and don't regret a second of that.

customguyon Politician reads AI prompt during assembly

One very tiny silver lining in all this will be leaked prompts. E.g. we all know how a non-apology reads, and call them out as such already, but when you see "write a really contrite apology without actually conceding anything while subtly casting doubt on the character of those making the accusations, but in a way that seems really open and constructive" it'll hit different still, I think.

customguyon Stolen Buttons

I believe in the KDE / Magic User Interface way, users should decide what they want a button or a checkbox etc. to look like, and then everything should conform to that.

And if you really wanted to, maybe made some concessions, and were clever about it, you could maybe find a way so that users define shapes and functionality and a default light/dark color scheme, but applications could still use the "user style" with their own color scheme, and allow the user to switch between that and the user defined colors.

It would also have the side effect of ejecting the people who just change things to make their mark. There is no more mark to make! Except making the "style configurator" for the user better, collaborating on expanding the protocol shared between it and websites/applications. You can invent a new type of button, put it on the pile, and hope it becomes one of the higher rated ones that gets downloaded and used a lot, on any OS, in any application or website. That will be a lot less interesting for hack frauds, and software interfaces can finally become awesome and then just better from there.

customguyon Taylor Farms Called White House to Try to Delay Cyclospora Recall

> What do you propose I do?

They asked to stop deflecting. Take that literally. Imagine this page without the comment and the comments hanging off it.

"Don't do this thing". "What should I do instead?" Your choice. Maybe nothing. When there is nothing serious to say, maybe sit with the silence, that space where a little joke or some cynicism would relieve the pressure without doing any productive work, and let it work on you. At least until you can't take it anymore, and maybe tomorrow you'll last longer, and maybe next week you'll have a breakthrough.

At any rate, others can't tell us how to fix a situation we're not part of causing. In a society of millions, while each can say "I'm just one of many", nobody else can say more, so we always have "full" responsibility, that is, the maximum possible. Put differently, it is not possible for a single person to be solely responsible for what two people do, but that doesn't change the responsibility they do have.

This isn't about spilled milk, but rather about the question on who it is to fix this. It is on you. If you cannot do it alone, you have to organise with others. But there is nobody, as long as you're an adult and a citizen, that you can point to that should be expected to "do it" instead.

Though I don't mean this in a finger-pointy way either because we all sit in glass houses. There may be differences in degree and all that, but when it comes to what should or could be, and how it is, we're all so far from the mark that bickering about who is the worst and who should get "the" blame for the situation, rather than how to change it, seems pointless.

> Or did you just want my permission to be personally angry at me? Not sure you needed it, but you’ve now got it.

I personally wish you a really awesome weekend, stranger. You insisted on making this personal, now deal with it >:[

customguyon Taylor Farms Called White House to Try to Delay Cyclospora Recall

> Can we start a serious discussion about whether we might be living in a simulation with a troll teenager at the controls?

Nah. Power centers consolidate and seek slavery, whatever other differences they may have there is consensus there, which we can tell by their practices.

The "mission" of most people we recall by name is really just "knock out any pillars you can find, and cause chaos", they're given free hand and in that sense it's not planned or predictable, but overall it's no more random or silly than dead cows hurled via catapults. The cow has no name, no history, no meaning, it isn't hurled at a precise location in the exact right instant, but at a general location during the siege. And one thing is sure, it controls nothing.

customguyon Amen Break

Yeah but you kinda have to have the culture, too, if this is about the the hovering up of anything humans put on the internet. Sampling breaks and making music with the same care they made theirs with is still related to the musicians that were sampled, while using them for cheap commercial one-offs or genAI is purely on the side where beauty is not.

You can use a drum machine to make music -- or you can just run a preset, or have some slop algorithm synthesise one for you which is a mix of a bunch of things humans did without being any of those things, nor a new thing of that class. Like when you mix a telephone number with a dollar amount and the result is neither, it's just a bunch of numbers, and for people to whom it's never been more that makes no difference. For anyone else, there is no similarity, no gradual transformation you can make from a telephone number to "digits of telephone number and dollar amount intermixed".

And if this sounds like vague gatekeeping then sure, that's what considering things beautiful or ugly always will be.

customguyon If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

Sure, but when I said a puzzle I was thinking of something more abstract, like software development getting solved. To be nitpicky, I'd say without a mind to pose a question nothing in the material world by itself is a puzzle. It's just some cardboard or wood with no meaning. When the last person who can read is gone, is a book still a book? My knee-jerk reaction to "does a falling tree make a sound with nobody around to hear it" always was of course it does, what a stupid question. And it sure produces pressures waves in the air, but are those "sound" without anything to consider them such?

> But that further raises the question: how do you know it's the riddle you're looking for? How do you know what riddle you're looking for if you don't know the riddle itself?

Yeah, I was just gonna say. E.g. you ask "Is the riddle in this book?" and it replies "Which one? Specify the riddle."

Maybe with just a bit more technology though.. e.g. something that scans you and the whole world, to find out all riddles that exist, and what sort of riddle you probably would like to eliminate, if you were aware of it. It destroys those riddles, and then itself.

Since we're just riffing in the middle of nowhere anyway: I think it might be an arms race between finding the riddle that destroys the crazy (making) machines, and the machines destroying the ability to come up with riddles first. It might actually already been written how this'll play out roughly:

> Eddie eventually stumps Blaine with unsolvable "riddles" that are actually stupid jokes from his childhood. This forces Blaine to try to "lower" his intelligence to levels necessary to answer, which ends up driving him completely insane and causes his computer to crash. Eddie then proceeds to shoot the computer

customguyon My Images Are Dithered

> Yeah, if you're using lossless compression like PNG or GIF, adding a lossy step to reduce the number of colors in the palette can help.

Depending on the image context it can also backfire, though not so much for photos, but rather screenshots. E.g. sometimes a 2 color dithered image results in a much bigger PNG than, say 16 colors without dithering, because bigger areas of uniform color compress much more efficiently. So I usually just try "everything", to find some sweet spot between file size and quality.

Is there a tool that allows you to select which area of the image to use what dithering parameters and color count for, with a live preview? I know I'll vibecode one myself just to see what it looks like, but maybe this already exists in a "real" application? Then you could e.g. use dithering on the faces, but for the background just a few colors without dithering.

customguyon If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

A riddle is not a physical thing but okay, let's say you want to destroy an instance of a riddle that is in a book: how do you know it's in that book without looking, and therefore copying the riddle into your own mind? This is known as the Pink Streisand Paradox.

customguyon If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?

You can solve a puzzle, but what would "eliminating" a puzzle even mean?

customguyon I regret migrating to Codeberg

No, I need to apologise, I kinda got confused in the threads. That is, I thought this was downstream from another comment I made on the topic, where my point was basically: you (not the literal you who is interested in this on a different level) know if you used LLM. So if you have to ask, the answer is probably no, and if you're genuinely unsure, you can ask them.

I did you wrong, and in general we shouldn't guess the motivations of others, but I'll still say that lot of the comments asking what is the exact meaning of that rule is, how it will get enforced precisely, strike me as seeking to undermine the validity of their decision rather than wanting to make sure they don't run afoul of it. Or even coming up with ideas to help them enforce that rule better. One even said maybe we should test if they actually can tell. I responded to you as if responding to that, and that was uncalled for.

Take the HN guidelines, for example. It's impossible to make them completely "clean cut" rules. But people know that if they genuinely think there's been a misunderstanding they want to clear up, they can contact HN. And with Codeberg it's probably like that, too. Not like Google, where the rules ideally should be 100% clear and mathematically accurate, because you just get nuked by algorithms with no recourse.

You might even say if people post on HN, they already understand what fuzzy rules are, by definition. They know language is fuzzy and that the letter of the law points at the spirit of the law. If someone doesn't want to understand that spirit, no amount of legalese detail will make them understand it. But of course that shouldn't be an argument to shut down discussion about it, either, and I didn't mean it like that.

customguyon Em dashes are fucking amazing

I just thought of the most annoying blog in the world. Individual spacing between words, depending on how thoughtful you want the pause to be. And by "individual" I mean a different floating point number denoted amount of em each. em > em-dashes. Or put differently, em dashes em-dashes.

customguyon I Tried Building a Real App with AI. It Took a Year

> I carefully considered execution flow and made sure the simple looking code actually did everything correctly

That is what I love about coding. Not just insofar as it's necessary and useful (it is both), but just as a puzzle in its own right, to a fault. It's just a type of "imagination" that I don't really apply often otherwise, since e.g. I'm not into math, not an organizer or manager etc. Though I did have jobs where I instantly saw ways to optimise some things I do credit to having practised with code. You just try to think through what will happen given the known landscape and the given decided plan, what could happen given the known unknowns, how your heuristics would deal with that, and unless it's all green you see if you can change the landscape, the plan, explore some unknowns, and/or improve your heuristics (by which I just mean what you use to make ad-hoc decisions when things don't go according to plan). That kind of becomes a habit which can get applied to and improve lots of things. Measure twice, cut once, so I don't have to spend three days because of a stray comma (again).

customguyon I regret migrating to Codeberg

> People downvote this kind of take because you're striking at the heart of the enforcement problem

That's not your problem.

customguyon Ah, the Codeberg Drama

> unbridled hatred for AI and Web3 reeks of neo-Luddism

> distrust in other areas, such as quantum computing

you haven't even begun getting to the point and already lost me

> fear of the unknown

Unknown what, lol?

"we don't like X, Y Z for A, B, C reasons"

"Luddites, fear of quantum computing.. oh no I'm confused, they're so afraid of the future."

That is like someone mumbling at their shoes that someone is afraid of something. No notes.

At any rate: Are you afraid of a control group? Are you afraid of a surface not covered in slop, so it may keep slop knowable? Are you afraid to sink alone?

customguyon Codeberg bans vibe coded projects

"I totally could make a point but you wouldn't listen anyway so I won't"

Yeah, right.

If you come up with "so no auto-complete" that's totally a you-having-no-arguments issue, not me not giving a fair hearing to something nobody said, because it doesn't exist.

customguyon Understanding the AI Economy

maybe an LLM can explain it to you, just give it the context as well

customguyon A taxonomy of omnicidal futures involving artificial intelligence (2025)

I know what a job is, the problem is rather that you don't seem to know that "finding purpose in something" and "making it your identity" are completely different things.