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arscanon Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

My father was an unnamed DG marketing executive in the book, who joked that his greatest career regret was asking Kidder to be unnamed in case the book wasn’t any good (it won Kidder the Pulitzer). I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era.

arscanon ai;dr

This absolutely has been the case for me for the last few months. But what’s disheartening is that this signal will just be mimicked through simple prompting if too many people start tuning in to it. Or maybe that’s already happened?

arscanon The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

  Don't worry about the future
  Or worry, but know that worrying
  Is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing Bubble gum
  The real troubles in your life
  Are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind
  The kind that blindsides you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday

    - Everybody's free (to wear sunscreen)
         Baz Luhrmann
         (or maybe Mary Schmich)

arscanon Show HN: I Built a Sandbox for Agents

Having testimonials attributed to Gemini 3 Pro and Claude 4.5 Opus is... interesting. I'm curious what prompt was used to get those quotes.

arscanon ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

Structurally it’s about incentives not competency.

arscanon Doing the thing is doing the thing

This is very similar to [1] (as discussed here [2]). It is a good message though, which is why I remember the earlier post at all.

1. https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45939431

arscanon Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

TIL about the blank cards! Really glad I bothered to post about my experience with the Yoto.

arscanon Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids

We have a yoto for our son, and its a great experience, but be prepared for pricing of content to match what we used to page for cds/tapes. e.g., the pout-pout fish card is $8 USD for 10 minutes of content [1].

I think that's ok, as he actually would get a lot more than 10 minutes of use out of it, and its great to pay the creators while not having to worry about ads manipulating my kid. But it highlights how expectations for the pricing of audio/video content has changed (probably for the worse)... for me at least.

1. https://us.yotoplay.com/products/the-pout-pout-fish

arscanon Spherical Snake

It has something like that already[1]. I'm curious what's wrong with that.

1. https://github.com/kevinAlbs/SphericalSnake/blob/b907738476d...

arscanon Don't Become the Machine

> Try to find the most rewarding solution.

This sentence gave me pause and I’ll be chewing it over in my mind for awhile, I think.

arscanon Patterns.dev

Yeah, I would do a lot with plain objects, and using closures and iifes to do encapsulation and what-not. It was ugly and a bit of a pain, but once you learned how it all worked it made sense and was doable. I felt that classes were a bit of a bolt-on that violated my own internal understanding of how JavaScript worked, but by that point I was moving on to other stuff so never really got used to it.

arscanon GPT-5.2

I think you may have inadvertently misled readers in a different way. I feel misled after not catching the errors myself, assuming it was broadly correct, and then coming across this observation here. Might be worth mentioning this is better but still inaccurate. Just a bit of feedback, I appreciate you are willing to show non-cherry-picked examples and are engaging with this question here.

Edit: As mentioned by @tedsanders below, the post was edited to include clarifying language such as: “Both models make clear mistakes, but GPT‑5.2 shows better comprehension of the image.”

arscanon Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools

> “But memorable names help with marketing!”

> Sure, if you’re building a consumer product. Your HTTP client, cli utility helper, whatever library is not a consumer product. The people who will ever care about it just want to know what it does.

——

It sounds like the author doesn’t view themselves as a consumer in this relationship, that they are immune to marketing, and that what they are advocating for isn’t just another marketing tactic. I’m not sure if any of those are true.

My experience with areas that use functional names to describe things is that you end up in a sea of acronyms (the functional-based names are a mouthful!) and you end in an arguably worse situation (did you say ABDC or ADBC, those are two completely different things).

arscanon Patterns.dev

I haven’t done JavaScript in a long while, is using ‘class’ not a favored way of writing JS these days? I wrote JS heavily pre-class, and never really got comfortable using it before switching my focus to other languages.

arscanon Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain

> When it’s time to process your 20 different 3-second thoughts from throughout the day, is the easily distracted person actually going to sit down and work through all 20 of them at the end of the day without also getting distracted?

I think the idea is that the person would be happy to circle back and finish the first thing they started, but simply forget about it altogether, so they think they are done with tasks and go on to other ("unproductive") stuff. If they can inject the habit of always checking stuff off a list when finishing things, they'll see they never finished the first thing they started, and then take care of that.

Checking off things from the list is much more satisfactory than adding things to a list, so it makes sense to have input be as low friction as possible, while checking off can be a bit more work (pulling out a phone which has the list).

I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of this in reality. Just a thought.

arscanon 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

In grad school 15+ years ago I took a ‘user-centered innovation’ class and I wrote a paper on the topic of Kali and its predecessor: how gamers, not the game devs, made games built for IPX work across the internet. What is neat is early collab on the first ipx->tcp/ip bridge happened on Usenet, so you can find a record of the first doom deathmatch coordinated and played over the internet. I think I reached out to jay cotton (author of kali) via email and he answered my questions, so I’d try to track him down if I were you.

Sadly I didn’t make a backup of my paper (not sure how I managed to screw that up), so I no longer have it.

arscanon Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain

I think this could be useful for the type of person that uses uses todo lists to help them tackle lots of small tasks that they intend to do immediately but somehow get distracted mid-action from and never finish (and then forget about altogether). As described in this blog post that front-paged hn some time ago:

> When I notice a micro-task like this, my instinct is not to do it, but to put it in the todo list. Then I try to do it immediately. And if I get distracted halfway through, it’s still there, in the todo list.

https://borretti.me/article/notes-on-managing-adhd

The problem with this approach is that recording tasks become a good amount of relative overhead compared to the 'micro-task' if it involves pulling out your phone, and pulling out your phone also introduces a potential distraction. So, having something that is single purpose and as low-friction as possible is appealing.

I'm skeptical that this is actually any better than using a smart watch that you can dictate to though.

arscanon 30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness

The Kali TCP/IP IPX bridge allowed you to play this multiplayer over the internet, and the style of game was tolerant to low bandwidth and high pings. Which made this one of the first games that really provided a glimpse of the future of gaming (for better or worse, much of gaming has moved away from single person campaigns to multiplayer). I have so many great memories of this era in gaming because of this game and the handful of others that Kali supported (descent, doom 2).

arscanon I don't care how well your "AI" works

> It's really easy to use LLMs to shift work onto other people.

This is my biggest gripe with LLM use in practice.

arscanon Solving a million-step LLM task with zero errors

In case you want to know what’s going on in the left side of that chart, they gave a log scale in appendix a. I was thinking it was silly to not just use that version on the top, but I guess log scales make big differences ’feel’ smaller.

arscanon fuckborderradius.com

Was that the 3x3 table method, or was that for earlier browsers?

arscanon MCP-Scanner – Scan MCP Servers for vulnerabilities

I think an important thing to note is the MCP client is a distinct thing from the ‘LLM’ architecturally, though many LLM providers also have MCP client implementations (via their chat ui or desktop / cli implementations).

In general, I’d say it’s not a good idea to pass bearer tokens to the LLM provider and keep that to the MCP client. But your client has to be interoperable with the MCP server at the auth level, which is flakey at the moment across the ecosystem of generic MCP clients and servers as noted.

arscanon Meta is axing 600 roles across its AI division

This is true, but sadly the customer isn’t always the user and thus nonsensical products (now powered by AI!) continue to sell instead of being displaced quickly by something better.

arscanon A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

Even if it’s only 1 sentence per room (it’s not), that’s still 4000 sentences. I’d guess this is at least a few hundred pages of written work (without downloading it and just based on what you’ve shared). That seems pretty substantial to me.

Not sure what the length has to do with handcraftedness though. This comment is handcrafted even if it is short.

arscanon A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

Love it! It really is a good first program to write as a kid (at least those from a certain generation).

And my memory might be from our Apple 2gs and AppleScript, actually (hence my caveat in the comment). But I’m sure the program was just PRINTs, INPUTs, IFs and GOTOs :)

arscanon A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

Exactly, and in my sad and unfortunate case I had to support it because of that one stubborn client, even though the rest of the world moved on. Actually, it might have just been their CEO accessing the site from his home machine or something?

Oh, what the heck, it’s been 20 years. Vertex Pharmaceuticals: shame on you. In the mid-2000s you had very poor taste in browsers ;-)

arscanon A 4k-Room Text Adventure Written by One Human in QBasic No AI

The first program I ever wrote was a choose your own adventure, I think written on my family’s IBM PC jr in Basic. It’s pretty amazing how far a kid can get with GOTO statements and a lot of patience. But for some reason I couldn’t (or didn’t know how to) save it, so I’d work on it all day, have my sister and mom play it, and then shut off the computer thus losing my days work.

Or at least, that’s how I remember it. It’s been a good 40 years though and I wouldn’t be surprised if reality was quite a bit different.

Edit: I’ve been thinking about this a bit and honestly my motivation for writing software hasn’t really changed. The users, sure, but not the motivation. It’s just thrilling to share things I built with other people.

arscanon Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games

I think my shirts just automatically get inside-outted in my washer/dryer? I certainly don’t put them in that way, and it seems like I spend a lot of righting them when putting away laundry.

arscanon A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

Netscape 4 was the bane of my existence, moreso than IE6 ever was, as an important client standardized internally on that forever so our entire platform had to be completely compatible with it. At least with IE you could do things in a user friendly way (perhaps at 2x the development and maintenance cost). Netscape 4 simply didn’t have the capability to do things we wanted to do experience-wise (like getting pushed content, I think?) without doing some extremely crazy and brittle workarounds at best (making it feel more like 5x the cost).

Also, IE4 was such a magnificent leap forward in the web that effectively enabled support for modern apps, which bought IE a ton of goodwill from me that didn’t wear off for a decade or so.

arscanon Are hard drives getting better?

> The issue isn’t that the bathtub curve is wrong—it’s that it’s incomplete.

Well, yeah. The bathtub curve is a simplified model that is ‘wrong’, but it is also a very useful concept regarding time to failure (with some pretty big and obvious caveats) that you can broadly apply to many manufactured things.

Just like Newtonian physics breaks down when you get closer to the speed of light, the bathtub curve breaks down when you introduce firmware into the mix or create dependencies between units so they can fail together.

I know the article mentions these things, and I hate to be pedantic, but the bathtub curve is still a useful construct and is alive and well. Just use it properly.