Hacker News: 0xffff2

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Waymo Premier"

0xffff2 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:33:09 +0000

One major reason is probably that most of the liability portion is going to be covering medical bills in the US. I only did a quick skim of the Wikipedia summary but it looks like Finland, like (almost?) all of Europe wouldn't have that particular liability?

Another reason might be that insurance costs vary widely in the US. I recently had a reason to get an insurance quote in Utah, and it was literally one third the price that I currently pay in California.

All that said, you do seem to enjoy remarkably cheap insurance over there from my perspective. I hardly think those two factors are enough to cover such a large difference.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Waymo Premier"

0xffff2 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:38:23 +0000

I shop around regularly. USAA isn't even remotely the cheapest option, and the handful of experiences I and family members have had suggest that they are just as shitty as any other insurance company when it comes to handling claims. I only stick with them because they are consistently within 20% of the cheapest option and I value having all of my banking and insurance handled in one place.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Waymo Premier"

0xffff2 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:08:00 +0000

Comprehensive, collision and 500k liability through USAA, $120/month. Deductibles are as high as they will allow, which is $1k IIRC. I was recently forced to consider a move to Utah. Thankfully I didn't end up moving, but a quote for the exact same coverage in SLC was just $40/month.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Waymo Premier"

0xffff2 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:24:42 +0000

Why?

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Waymo Premier"

0xffff2 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:18:59 +0000

I pay ~100/month per car for full coverage on two fairly new cars and $500k in liability from the auto policy plus a $1m umbrella policy. And that's in CA which is comically expensive. I find it very believable that you can get excellent liability only coverage on 3 cars for $100/month depending on the state and drivers.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Waymo Premier"

0xffff2 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:15:45 +0000

As an American I would also like to know... My actual expenses for my low end luxury car are nowhere near that high, and I live in CA which has massively inflated car expenses in practically all fronts.

Registration: $600/year

Insurance: $1,500/year

Gas: ~$2,700/year (15,000 miles @ 30mpg @ $5.50/gal)

Loan: ~$3,500/year if I had borrowed the entire price of the car on a 60 month loan and then kept the car for 15 years as the GP stated

Maintenance: Certainly less than $1,000/year, much less in most years.

And in some states registration and insurance could literally be a third of what I pay. Gas could easily be half. I can't imagine anyone is paying $12,000/year for any non-luxury vehicle.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Waymo Premier"

0xffff2 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:07:47 +0000

If two Waymo rides per day is covering your driving needs, there's no way you're spending $120/month on gas. Also, car insurance in CA is a huge ripoff, but I still don't pay anywhere near $180/month for very thorough coverage on my ~$40k car. Believable enough otherwise though.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Dopamine Fracking"

0xffff2 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:25:14 +0000

I grew up with the fake stuff, and have lately done quite a bit of taste testing of the various grades of real stuff. Grade A golden is the only one with a distinct enough difference in flavor for me to care, and even then it's very much an acquired taste, not immediately and distinctly better. Given the stark price difference, my conclusion is that the maple syrup elitism is a silly hobby horse for people with too much money.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

0xffff2 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:20:13 +0000

Way outside of my area of expertise, but a quick search suggests that exact numbers probably depend on exactly how you define the question, but it would be broadly reasonable to say that the balance is about 50/50 +/-5%, and trending towards the passive side over time.

Would you agree with that?

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

0xffff2 — Fri, 29 May 2026 04:54:58 +0000

I think it can be hard for anyone who hasn't done safety-critical software before to understand just how much testing goes into it. Even for non-human spaceflight, the stakes are so high, we have all of the testing you would expect as far as unit tests, system integration tests, end to end testing, but then we also have full human in the loop software sims, full hardware in the loop sims both at multiple levels of integration, and on and on. For every line of code I've written for a spacecraft, I'm 100% confident that if that line is responsible for a bug in flight, there are at least 10 other people who would share the blame with me.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

0xffff2 — Fri, 29 May 2026 04:10:22 +0000

Honestly, why? I can't speak for BO, but at NASA, we're all learning what the technology can and can't do just like everyone else. You can bet your ass that no one is vibe-coding any part of the rocket without thorough review of every line of code and thorough testing at multiple levels though.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

0xffff2 — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:46:46 +0000

Unless the comment was edited, the person you replied to never said anything about "despite"?

New comment by 0xffff2 in "SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)"

0xffff2 — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:44:25 +0000

California has mandated it for new construction for over a decade now. Of course old stock doesn't really ever turn over in California so it's entirely possible that we will never reach a point where a majority of SFH in California have sprinklers, but it's certainly possible to change for new homes.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Claude Opus 4.8"

0xffff2 — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:06:01 +0000

If we're making that distinction, I think it would be more accurate to say that many people in the field appear to believe that these models are sapient, even though they are clearly not sentient.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs"

0xffff2 — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:29:06 +0000

Both anecdotally for myself and from what I'm reading in the news, it seems just as likely that AI usage has already largely peaked.

There was a lot of hype and exploration of capabilities, but models aren't evolving fast enough to keep that going, so I'm settling down into a familiarity with what an LLM can and can't do that means I am using them less overall that I was 6 months ago when I was throwing everything under the sun at it just to see what happened.

Without either new model breakthroughs or dramatically _lower_ costs, I will be very surprised if the ultimate market doesn't end up within an order of magnitude of where it is today.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "The user is visibly frustrated"

0xffff2 — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:49:14 +0000

Plenty of people have personal projects where the purpose is the end result. One small recent example of my own, I'm a long-time Garmin watch user. I struggled with learning all of the details of their custom language, runtime and SDK in the pre-LLM world. With agentic AI tools, it was dramatically easier to write a watch face that looked the way I wanted. From there, I very much did learn a lot and do a lot of re-writing and tweaking to make the code actually somewhat good, but the custom watch face was the point for me. I really couldn't care less about Garmin's esoteric tech stack. The only reason I bothered with everything after the vibe-coding step was to try to optimize power consumption where I could.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

0xffff2 — Thu, 21 May 2026 18:01:53 +0000

A key component of the GPL is the requirement that source of code of programs that use the GPL code be made available. Without IP laws, how would you achieve that goal of the GPL?

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI"

0xffff2 — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:36:33 +0000

How does this work, concretely? Do you just upload your W2/1099s/etc and prompt it to "do my taxes"? I imagine it's not that easy, but filing my (trivial) taxes with any of the well known tax prep services is easy enough that the LLM version can't get very much more complex than "do my taxes" and still be an improvement.

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027"

0xffff2 — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:52:06 +0000

Take this with a mountain of salt since I've not at all an expert, but with a little help from AI, it seems like the exemption lives in 2023/1670 [0]. The LLM claims that this and the regulation you link are interconnected, with the recital of 2023/1542 explicitly linking them.

0: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

New comment by 0xffff2 in "Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027"

0xffff2 — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:13:22 +0000

>Unless your device complies to MIL-STD-810G CN1 and has the certification to back it up your product will be required to add user replaceable batteries

Can you provide your source for this? If nothing else, it's very surprising to me that an EU regulation uses a US standard as the baseline!

Edit: Having done a bit of reading on the standard, it also seems like the regulation needs quite a bit of detail if it really does rely on the MIL-STD, since the standard only defines test procedures, not pass/fail criteria?