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richhhh

23 karma · joined December 18, 2020

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richhhh··on When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
What makes you certain that human thought is more than pattern matching?

As I understand it neuroscience hasn’t come up with a clear explanation of thought, much less a mind or consciousness. It seems to me complex pattern matching is a reasonable a cause of consciousness as anything else.

richhhh··on Show HN: Agentic Code Reviewer
Runs parallel code agent reviewers, groups and summarizes findings and optionally posts PR comments.
richhhh··on Before I forget how I got here
Before I forget how I got here, I wanted to write a post about the tools and workflows I've been experimenting with in my first year of vibe coding.

This is just one persons reflections. I'm curious to here what other people are doing, and thinking.

richhhh··on Neurodivergent Brains Build Better Systems (2025)
How did this wildly one sided and unsubstantiated post make it to HNs front page?
richhhh··on Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)
Anytime you need to change something you have to understand it first. I’ve not seen any evidence that this can be done without reading the code first.

I’ve personally never worked in an environment where code was only thrown out and replaced instead of modified.

richhhh··on Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)
It does if any of his customers ever care about maintaining the kind of code after his death.

Code is read more than it is written, and most of us don’t and wouldn’t write in this style. This could mean he’s much smarter than the rest of us, or he could just be a jerk doing his own thing. In either case I’ve never had a good experience working with coders who are this “clever”. Real brilliance is writing code anyone can understand that remains performant and well tested. This is more like the obfuscated Perl contest entries. I guess it’s cool that you can do it, but good sense dictates that you shouldn’t.

As to OPs endeavor to understand this style, it is an interesting learning approach, but I think reading a lot of code in many styles that are actually used by more than one guy is likely to get make you “smarter”.

richhhh··on Learning to read Arthur Whitney's C to become smart (2024)
Kerrnigan’s law seems to apply:

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?