HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

ehnto

16,266 karma · joined January 31, 2014

submissionscomments
ehnto··on Jelly Sheet
No, I am suggesting that tools progress but people will still use older tools for various reasons.

DAWs and photoshop/digital art tools are still hands on tools in my opinion, you still make all the decisions and do all the implementation.

ehnto··on Jelly Sheet
People still paint, despite photoshop. People still play instruments, despite Digital Audio Workstations.

There is art in the craft, and more importantly enjoyment in the craft.

I wouldn't AI generate a song because all of the fun for me and my friends is in the playing and watching. You will find that's true very often for creative people and those who enjoy their work.

If all you are doing is blasting out corporate assets, or persuing money, I don't think anyone cares what you are using, generate away.

ehnto··on Postman silently auto-installs AI plugins and attempts to share all API data
I also use Bruno and it's great. One amazing benefit it saves in human readable formats.

You can give an AI agent a documentation page and it will create the collection of routes pretty quickly in files you can commit to git.

ehnto··on Intel stock collapse worsens as $3.5T chip rout spreads
Not sure I would put the age cap at millennials, they very much had PCs and laptops at home, uni etc and lived before smartphones were a thing.
ehnto··on Trapped in the Technologist Factory
I have been doing some embedded work and can agree, the challenges are very different. But the challenges tend to be real world, physical challenges and so feel more real and rewarding. Versus the self-made challenges of regular software.
ehnto··on Japan's trains are great. Why is booking one so hard?
I think a lot of things stick around because they have a good bespoke manufactoring industry and maintenance practices. Old infrastructure and automations that were built during the bubble era still work and you can still get parts made for them.
ehnto··on Japan's trains are great. Why is booking one so hard?
Did that hotel accept USD for some reason? Otherwise yes it would be pretty far-fetched for them to exchange money for you, that's not strange.
ehnto··on Trapped in the Technologist Factory
If you are a technologist/generalist, aiming for small companies is a good strategy. If you're not in SV even better, you may end up in a real grass roots business and a really interesting problem domain that is ostensibly Not Software.

I personally, cannot stand the software for software industry. You, me, we have all built such arbitrary bullshit machines that link together in a web of unnecessary business. We lambast redundant jobs and useless management, but a moment of reflection for our industry and just how much software we have built for entirely self-serving purposes. So many man hours spent on the ephemeral whims of software. Sorry for the cynicism.

Less cynically, I feel the smaller the company, self-funded, the more likely a generalist will thrive and the business domain will be real-world and impactful. If it's venture funded and can pivot to advertising, it probably will. If you move away from tech hubs the wages are lower, but you might find a more fulfilling role.

ehnto··on Proton goes all in on using AI
That's fair. I would love for this to be studied one day, it would be good to know with some accuracy what proportion of creative/software is slop-factory versus novel, interesting work.
ehnto··on Northflank Breached
It would seem Google account details have been compromised or otherwise correlated, with not a peep from Google, we are getting reports of scam calls to people's real phone numbers about the "business opportunity" available in their attached Youtube properties.

Another possibility is advertising shadow profiles are able to correlate logged in accounts across YouTube and other properties.

ehnto··on Proton goes all in on using AI
Why not have the engineers, or "implementors", known for systems thinking, build things with AI? A team of product managers building things is like saying I want my factory floor manager on the tools, running the machines. The evolution of that role just lands you at a team of implementors again, who still need a leader. You already have that.

In a sense, you're demoting your managers to implementors, and getting rid of their leadership role altogether. Simultaneously getting rid of your prior engineers and all the domain and tribal knowledge they had built up.

ehnto··on Proton goes all in on using AI
Its going to be wildly distributed and varied so hard to spot, but look for companies where the main output was commodity B2B assets and you can see a real impact. Marketing copy, images, graphic design in the low and mid tiers. Real businesses supplied that stuff and even adopting AI wouldn't help, since their customers could just do it in house now.

There's heaps of companies between small and conglomerate and the middle area is where the commodity asset companies lived. Generating low stakes copy, art, apps and websites for small companies.

ehnto··on Proton goes all in on using AI
Tools have no morality but they do have effects and outcomes. That's where we make our judgement call on whether you're good or bad for using them.
ehnto··on Formlabs Studio 1 $699 Resin Printer
In general yes, resin and FDM printers both produce toxic VOCs.

But FormLabs for this printer and resin have focused on safetey and acquired a certification on their Alpha resins which show low VOCs that should be safe to print in an indoor room with low ventilation.

I still wouldn't, I would add ventilation and wear PPE, it's still going to be releasing some VOCs even if it comes under a tolerable limit. But I do appreciate what seems to be the first ever initiative in 3D printing to address the elephant in the room of VOCs directly at the material level.

ehnto··on Police are using AI to pull over drivers for 'suspicious' behavior
It shouldn't be that your options are a corpo-phone or a dumbphone though. Currently you can run something like Graphene and will probably be fine, but in NSW specifically there is law that could be used against you if you're suspected of crime.
ehnto··on Police are using AI to pull over drivers for 'suspicious' behavior
I did say "tucked neatly away", not "at the forefront of law enforcement".

Anyway, it's probably nothing. Let's ignore it until it becomes an issue.

ehnto··on Raspberry Pi Zero 3W and Pi 4 Model A spotted in device trees
At least most my ESP32s are off any net, and pretty low stakes applications.
ehnto··on Police are using AI to pull over drivers for 'suspicious' behavior
The Dedicated Encrypted Criminal Communication Device Prohibition Orders Bill 2022 introduced law that says it is illegal to posess a modified communication device (ambiguous) that is encrypted (or otherwise impedes law enforcement from snooping). It has some nuance to who it applies to in that you need to already be under suspicion of a serious crime, but there is a great deal of other pretty trivial things that can put you under suspicion. It's ambiguous enough (in my opinion) that it could pretty easily be targeted at a regular joe by an eager enforcer. I did not feel then nor now, that the qualifiers were sufficient enough to protect against abuse.
ehnto··on Police are using AI to pull over drivers for 'suspicious' behavior
Tucked away neatly in Australian law is the concept that a phone that is not iPhone or Android is a criminal device, similar to owning lockpicks. Something like GrapheneOS. I forget the exact term they used but it wasn't "jailbroken". The act of refraining from corporate tracking as illegal is in that way already codified.

That's why I feel it's super important hardware developers get on board with open source OS support for mobile, much like some are for Linux already. It should be the norm to not be tracked by corporate entities and advert networks, it should be the weird option to opt into that.

ehnto··on Cognitive Mercantilism: AI panic resembles fears of early capitalism
You could out-type other prompters though. Words Per Minute might end up back on my resume yet!
ehnto··on Tesla cancels Cybertruck in Australia and NZ after 7 years of deposits
Hopefully, but seeing some of the other American "trucks" hitting our pedestrians, sorry I mean hitting our roads, I wonder if anyone is really keeping that in check.
ehnto··on Show HN: A Truly Modular Keyboard
I think not-a-keyboard is probably the better use case. A modular plug and play, configurable keypad would be pretty useful for sim enthusiasts or various workstation uses. You could solve the "picking up" problem by putting the modules on a baseplate.
ehnto··on Show HN: A Truly Modular Keyboard
How small do CAN transceivers get?
ehnto··on OpenAI and Anthropic cut their LLM prices by up to 80% within a few months. Why?
Because enterprises have compliance and certification requirements, meaning the enterprise is essentially held hostage by providers on price.

You could argue it's worth that much because of the value that compliance brings the enterprise, but it's just another gouging excercise. Certainly nothing unique to AI companies.

ehnto··on What the heck is /pkg?
It is surprising to me that in such a tightly controlled experience, they haven't attempted to displace brew already.
ehnto··on IKEA – 3D Guide
A person's intent can be the problem though, we can criticise that. We're not factory bots here (yet), the community aspect is human in nature not just output focused.
ehnto··on IKEA – 3D Guide
I don't really get worked up over it, but I do have a preference for original writing these days. If it's someone's pet project or something creative, I prefer the authenticity of the creative's actual writing. AI writing is just so boring and sterile out of the box. You lose nuance and personality.

It is a bit different with translation, in that case AI translation might get closer to the original intent than manual translation by the author. But otherwise I want the words from their brain meats, not layers removed and cleansed by system prompts and training.

ehnto··on "Traditional, but Puzzling"
Reminds me of a more recent parking lot error. I have a parking card with attached account, and credit card for automatic payments. I also had a specific car and it's plate attached so I didn't have to tap the card.

I had to cancel the credit card so automatic payments decline, and I don't always drive the same car in which case I have to tap the parking card.

The result of all this:

When I leave the parking lot in a different car after paying manually at the gate, the message displayed is "Payment Declined: Exit permitted"

ehnto··on '500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds
I am pretty certain it was Global Illumination issues with their large always loaded world and the different indoor/outdoor transitions. They wouldn't have been using Unity or Unreal so it was probably trading off between one code only game library or writing their own, and yeah they probably just wanted to rather than fix the library.

He had help from another developer specifically for that issue.

ehnto··on '500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds
There is a place for stories we don't agree with or that illustrate aspects of our world we might not be happy about, and the creator isn't necessarily complicit just for telling it. I feel we shouldn't hit the writers of those stories for telling them, as not everyone tells a story because they personally support it's message or the status quo it illustrates.

I also think the enlightened have a habit of underestimating how much of an audience the status quo has, and I think that's an ignorance of its own.

And because it's the internet I feel the need to subtext that this is by no means a supportive comment toward Blows personal beliefs. I don't know what they are!

Page 1 of 34Next →