tom_ · HackerLangs

5 hours agodiscuss

It is relevant to the politics of the United Kingdom. Say what you like about the UK, but - oh, hmm, wait a sec. I checked on Wikipedia, and out of 191 countries, the UK is currently 192nd. I also had a quick skim over some of the world history articles, and it turned out this so-called "place" was never mentioned. So, being honest, as Claude might say: you're absolutely right, as it might also say. I flagged this article, then I created another account and flagged it again. You should do the same.

tom_

11 hours agodiscuss

It's just less effort all round to have everybody using the same supported set of tools. I don't know if I've ever worked on a project that's gone so far as to actually mandate this, but a "should" (possibly in the RFC sense) is fair enough I think. Every project I've worked on has ended up with everybody eventually settling on using the same tools, because it's just overall less hassle that way.

(Regarding Emacs, I'm typically using it anyway for org-mode, so if I need to do some one-off edit or other - probably some keyboard macro thing - then I can just load the problem file into Emacs and save it back out again afterwards. I've only once been in the situation of neither being allowed to install it nor remotely connect to another machine to use it.)

tom_

16 hours agodiscuss

I type it in myself, but occasionally i do write notes out by hand if I'm thinking about something away from my desk.

tom_

yesterdaydiscuss

Add -1.f, or pick another handedness.

tom_

2 days agodiscuss

The iPhone is normal phone size width and depth, but it's meaningfully shorter than just about everything else. It doesn't sound like much on paper but I've always found it adds up once in a pocket. (All dimensions height x width x depth, in mm, rounded up to the nearest mm)

* iPhone Mini: 132 x 72 x 8 (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/111877)

These two alternatives are noticeably larger:

* Vivo X300: 151 × 72 × 8 (https://www.vivo.com/in/products/param/x300)

* Oppo X9S: 157 x 74 x 8 (https://www.oppo.com/en/smartphones/series-find-x/find-x9s/s...)

In fact, they're more like the size of the full size iPhone, which, if you're sticking with your iPhone Mini because the iPhone is annoyingly large, means they're too large.

* iPhone 17: 150 x 72 x 8 (https://www.apple.com/uk/iphone-17/specs/)

tom_

2 days agodiscuss

My current theory to explain this phenomenon: a lot of the posts I read on HN, possibly even the majority of them, are made by different people, and those different people sometimes have different opinions.

tom_

4 days agodiscuss

XBOX here presumably refers to the entire division, so it's not limited to just people playing on the games console.

tom_

7 days agodiscuss

One of the HN readership submitted it.

tom_

7 days agodiscuss

I expect the post is written for readers who care about or know the author.

tom_

11 days agodiscuss

Slightly struck by the term "builders" here. What is this trying to say, that, say, "developers" wouldn't?

("build" does seem to have been settled on as the word for the thing you do when you have the LLM write your code for you, but I'd have thought that "developer" is vague enough to cover both that and also doing it the old-fashioned way?)

tom_

12 days agodiscuss

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48612943

tom_

15 days agodiscuss

tom_

15 days agodiscuss

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2026-06/msg00...

tom_

15 days agodiscuss

I'm inclined to believe them too, so when he said he used LLMs to tweak the wording, I'll accept that was the case.

Perhaps the opening post was ill-phrased, but I think the second post clarifies it a bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48677597 - and I was certainly getting some vague LLM vibes from the writing, so I was curious about this too.

So, whatever it is in the LLM output that is detectable, it's clearly detectable, even with the latest LLMs, and even when it's present possibly only in trace quantities.

tom_

15 days agodiscuss

We shall see.

tom_

15 days agodiscuss

People clearly can, though, because they did.

tom_

16 days agodiscuss

And maybe reword the submission title while they're there, though the current one is well chosen for maximizing engagement I'm sure.

tom_

17 days agodiscuss

Amusingly, Chen's article refers to the Wikipedia page as evidence that Tony Krueger did the port. The article's evidence for that in its latest version? A link back to Chen's article...!

tom_

18 days agodiscuss

OP doesn't say they wrote it. They say they built it. This seems to be the word that people have settled on to describe having the llm put something together according to your requirements.

tom_

19 days agodiscuss

One man's attempt at a wry observation is another's shitty attitude, I suppose. It just struck me, as 2/3 of the target audiences mentioned are made up of people, and here is a doc that's been more than just breathed on by an LLM - and then we're to write config parsing by hand! The rationale is fine and all that, it just tickled me that here's an amusing example of having computers do people's work and having people do computers' work - playing (to my mind) to the strengths of neither.

(If the bots are allowed to modify the doc as they please, it's inevitable their writing style will seep in I suppose.)

If it'd be any consolation, the doc seemed fine, maybe even interesting, but the LLM writing style gives me a headache. I did notice a std::string by value that, according to the ref rules, could conceivably be a const std::string &, I think: https://gist.github.com/b7r6/5dde648f5dc1dea1e9039f2211f5d40... - whether this is worth caring about, given that it's apparently loading a file, I don't know, and there could be some other reason for this not evident in the code provided. (Or maybe I missed something, probably something obvious.)

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