Thomas Ptacek

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I love Dan Luu. (https://t.co/3IBHmEpcyc) 1 Sept
This is a better album than I remember it being. 29 Aug
This is the second funniest thing that has happened in the last 10 years of cryptography, bested only by the recent IACR election where they screwed up the key… 29 Aug
Look I can't be the first person to point this out but obviously Ontario should rename itself "America" in retaliation. It's named for the lake! 28 Aug
Reader, I was not lucky. 26 Aug
Fans of Deirdre and David (and Chris Peikert, of course) will be psyched: the rare SCW episode where I get not one single line in. Theoretical advances for lat… 26 Aug
As a YIMBY housing activist (we are 4th and inches from eliminating SFZ in Oak Park, Illinois) my one complaint about the movement is that there's no effective… 26 Aug
PSA: Monkey Hooks (those wire hooks you stab into your wall to hang stuff) rule a lot. My whole life was a lie. Monkey Hook all the things. 26 Aug
I'm kind of amazed that this impeller-driven vaporized LN2 freezer even exists. 26 Aug
Oh, fuck. Dolly Parton. 25 Aug
I feel like I'm the crazy one here, because none of this surprises me or really even interests me all that much (I am presumably wrong not to be interested). T… 24 Aug
Oh, look, we found it. The cultural equivalent to the AI water use story. These groups are counting on you not knowing what actually happens when you donate a… 21 Aug
Actual sentence I just read: "A culture that condones keeping dysgenic inbred mutilated wolves in one's house to satisfy the pleasure of "caring" for an animal… 21 Aug
Meanwhile, things are staying super reasonable and grounded on HN. 21 Aug
Someone on HN seriously said, in defense of TUIs, that GUIs are bad because they look the same and you can't tell one from the other. Another person said you d… 21 Aug
Coding agents make every plugin interface you ever blew off trivially usable, which is a large productivity win. 19 Aug
Data centre opposition only pushes construction to the parts of America that regulate energy and pollution least. 10 Aug
The "private equity is buying up all the houses" argument is both wrong and an excuse for deferring zoning reform. 6 Aug
An open weights model from 2025 with a pentest harness could already escape a sandbox and hack most networks; the surprise says more about the sandbox than the model. 22 Jul
The part of a coding agent that actually acts on code is not AI at all — it is simple systems code wired to ground truth, the way a Makefile is. 2 Jun 2025
LLMs can write a large fraction of the tedious code a developer will ever need to write, and most code on most projects is tedious. 2 Jun 2025
Even if all progress on LLMs stopped today, LLMs would remain the second most important development in a software career spanning the mid-1990s to now. 2 Jun 2025