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peacebeard

259 karma · joined June 9, 2023

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peacebeard··on The Emacsification of Software
Hmm, not quite an apology, but sort of a tacit acknowledgement that what you wrote wasn’t quite what you meant. Good enough for me.
peacebeard··on The Emacsification of Software
I'll re-quote it for you:

> Thinking that you're a programmer that doesn't want to constantly build software for your own sake is a delusion - it's like a cook that hopes to turn on the stove only in the restaurant, but won't touch a knife at home.

> Emacs is the cook's home kitchen.

The two sentences are adjacent. I read them as connected. If you meant them to be unrelated, I hope that this sheds light on our disagreement.

peacebeard··on The Emacsification of Software
"Emacs is a tool, not a religion" yeah that's my point. You framed not investing in it as a delusion. We can all agree on the importance of tooling. I am responding to the tone of the sermon you wrote.
peacebeard··on The Emacsification of Software
To summarize: your claim is that choosing to spend your energy on anything other than your emacs setup is a catastrophic failure in terms of ROI, a delusion, and a sort of dereliction of identity as a programmer. My rebuttal: dude, relax.
peacebeard··on The locals don't know
No fair! I live in a place with lots of tourism and the roads are terrible.
peacebeard··on Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
I’m not saying violence didnt happen, of course it did! I’m saying the evidence is not that neanderthals were simply eradicated like animals that were hunted to extinction and that multiple factors led to their gradual decline over time.
peacebeard··on Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
This is accurate for post history but evidence doesn't support this for prehistoric hunter gatherer tribes.
peacebeard··on Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
Ah yeah looks I wasn't on the mark here. The "outcompete" framing is more accurate for neanderthals but for many pleistocene extinctions "hunted to extinction" did happen in some cases so it was not a good comparison. Thanks!
peacebeard··on Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
Lions, bears, wolves, etc all survived us
peacebeard··on Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
Great question. When people say outcompete it can certainly include violence but we’re talking about populations spread over continents over thousands of years. Factors like technology, fertility, adaptability, etc. are more what people mean when they said outcompete.
peacebeard··on Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)
Common misconception, more likely outcompeted
peacebeard··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)
Just a heads up, getting a 522 error on your site
peacebeard··on I spent 6 years building my Kanban as I hated how managers run the boards
They weren’t shilling at all, it was a passive statement of fact. In fact, they didn’t mention LLMs at all and a kanban board could be built in a weekend without one so it’s not even clear if your comment is on topic
peacebeard··on If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
We were talking about covid era trends specifically. Covid peaked around 2020-2022 and it's difficult to determine what other trends during that time period are directly caused by covid, or correlated, or even unrelated. Long term generational trends don't tell us as much about what was or wasn't caused by Covid itself.
peacebeard··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
Money doesn’t buy happiness but it does buy groceries, day care, car insurance, etc.
peacebeard··on If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
COVID is highly correlated with many other things that would increase dangerous behavior. For example, COVID saw an increase in alcohol use, which in turn would result in increases in road rage and traffic fatalities. I think so much was going on at the time that it's hard to decide what is a first degree effect versus a downstream effect, or even unrelated to COVID and more related to, say, political turmoil of the time that was already ongoing.
peacebeard··on Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training
> Keyloggers, etc. are on all the computers you’re given.

I was curious about this claim and I dug up this article from 2024. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/internet-su...

It's an employee survey so it's not resistant to claims that the number is higher than people know. But I think saying "on all the computers you're given" is an exaggeration at best.

I did think it was interesting that "One in three [employees] have had activity from their employer’s online surveillance used in their performance reviews."

Sounds like if you're being surveilled by your employer there is a good chance you know about it.

I've never experienced anything like that, so it's sort of a window into another world from my perspective.

peacebeard··on Backpacks got worse on purpose
Yeah feels like the only way to find a quality product now is to find a good niche reviewer on YouTube and watch 5 hours of content.
peacebeard··on Backpacks got worse on purpose
Curious if the generic one had YKK zippers and the Jansport did not, since people frequently emphasize their value.
peacebeard··on Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (2019)
Not sure if you're misreading what I wrote or arguing in bad faith, but either way I'm done here.
peacebeard··on FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages
Personally, I have multiple messaging apps. I have notifications on for work slack, which is high signal, and I have notifications off for personal discord which is noisy and low priority.
peacebeard··on FBI used iPhone notification data to retrieve deleted Signal messages
Making the product worse for everybody because a minority can’t manage their own settings is a terrible strategy.
peacebeard··on Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (2019)
This comment doesn't respond to what I actually said. I said that heavy-handed CGI tends to read as CGI. You responded by "informing" me that more nuanced CGI is commonplace. Everybody knows that.
peacebeard··on White-Collar Workers Are Rebelling Against AI – 80% Refuse Adoption Mandates
For any tool, you want to measure the productivity gains, not the usage of the tool itself. Are these companies really that bad at measuring the work that gets done? You don't care how many times the hammer was used. You care that the house got built and the time it took to build it at what level of quality.
peacebeard··on Creating the Futurescape for the Fifth Element (2019)
In practice digital effects haven’t approached being convincing the way practical effects do. In many cases, especially when used liberally, digital effects still clock as amazing digital effects rather than reality. It can be enjoyable but I don’t see what would move forward other than recognizing cgi isnt the best solution for everything.
peacebeard··on OpenClaw privilege escalation vulnerability
Today I learned nobody agrees on what the word "probably" means.
peacebeard··on Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)
So in your view, even a useful innovative idea cannot gain traction without being overhyped?
peacebeard··on The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode
My comment makes no such assumption.
peacebeard··on The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode
The code has a stated goal of avoiding leaks, but then the actual implementation becomes broader than that. I see two possible explanations:

* The authors made the code very broad to improve its ability to achieve the stated goal

* The authors have an unstated goal

I think it's healthy to be skeptical but what I'm seeing is that the skeptics are pushing the boundaries of what's actually in the source. For example, you say "says on the tin" that it "pretends to be human" but it simply does not say that on the tin. It does say "Write commit messages as a human developer would" which is not the same thing as "Try to trick people into believing you're human." To convince people of your skepticism, it's best to stick to the facts.

peacebeard··on Slop is not necessarily the future
I think this is a false dichotomy. Maybe there is some theoretical developer who cares about their craft only due to platonic idealism, but most developers who care about their craft want their code to be correct, fast, maintainable, usable, etc. in ways that do indeed benefit its users. At worst, misalignment in priorities can come into play, but it's much more subtle than developers either caring or not caring about craft.
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