John Nagle

A developer wrote that we're happy to let AI do the parts of a job we don't want, then panic the moment it touches the parts we're proud of, like typing "generate 10 versions" instead of drawing them by hand.

One commenter didn't treat the framing as rhetorical: he pulled up an actual bill moving through Ohio's legislature that declares AI non-sentient and incapable of ever owning property, and suggested substituting "Negroes" for "AI systems" to see how the text reads.

A Hearst freelancer got a byline on a 64-page summer reading guide full of hallucinated books — work that used to take three interns and a fact-checking desk. Cory Doctorow's name for that setup: a "reverse centaur," where the machine drives and the human absorbs the blame.

On Hacker News, John Nagle, who read Doctorow's full book on the idea, said it undersells how cheaply AI now lets corporations run the kind of surveillance only a government once could afford.

The post's thesis: LLMs are "brilliant but clumsy," so wrap that non-determinism in formal tooling. Ragel spits out a 10,000-line correct parser instantly; Claude, told in all caps never to parse by hand, does it anyway, and once committed a build/ directory twice.

The sharpest reply says he misnamed the problem: an LLM's trouble was never determinism. Its input is natural language, which was never formally defined, "words have meaning," and no parser generator can replace the layer that guesses what you meant.

Starring the Computer logs specific machines per film and episode with screenshots, from the CDC 6600 to NeXT cubes. It's pure nostalgia reference — sortable by machine or year.

The insider gem: the AN/FSQ-7 panels from 1950s SAGE have appeared in a huge number of movies, still get rented out in LA — and those slanted panels aren't the computer, they're the modems.

Wolfe splits rendering into two jobs: driving explicit APIs like DirectX 12, Vulkan or Metal, and working the math of lighting on the GPU. His first suggested project is a path tracer via 'Ray Tracing in One Weekend,' before any real-time API.

He insists linear algebra, basic trig and a little calculus are all you need.

Commenters disagree: one whose college major was computer graphics called that math coverage far too thin, while a 25-year veteran said he would not enter the field today at all.