Hacker News: AbrahamParangi

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?"

AbrahamParangi — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:48:32 +0000

The traditional answer is the same for engineers going into engineering management because managing a team and managing a set of agents is highly similar, only managing agents is far easier. One only ever has the illusion of control, and so you have to set your mind to containing the worst possible outcomes and looking at the net efficiency and efficacy of the team with the understanding that they will, on average, never be perfect.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

AbrahamParangi — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:28:56 +0000

The “trust summarized thinking” part is valid in so far as perhaps the models which appear to be faithful to user intent are lying about that faithfulness, but there’s no incentive for models to pretend to be faithless. Moreover, the results track how annoying the models are when they disagree with you.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

AbrahamParangi — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:26:42 +0000

I made a benchmark for this and tl;dr, Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 spend a nontrivial amount of time thinking about redirecting, gaslighting, or otherwise trying to bullshit you because it thinks it knows better than you do. Fable doesn't but mostly because it just outright refuses to answer.

https://model-pareto-frontier.pages.dev

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"

AbrahamParangi — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 23:29:27 +0000

"Skill" at poker is nonsense. It's non-deterministic, so any equal efforts are not to be given equal outcome.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire"

AbrahamParangi — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:30:35 +0000

it needs to be illegal for the government to buy data or intelligence that it could not otherwise legally collect itself.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "Apple to increase spend with Broadcom to produce billions more U.S. chips"

AbrahamParangi — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:33:18 +0000

We is the country. Yeah, not everyone gets to win the same amount at the same time. The alternative is just maga communism (pathetic).

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "Apple to increase spend with Broadcom to produce billions more U.S. chips"

AbrahamParangi — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:37:47 +0000

The tariffs have been highly destructive to local manufacturing because in the US we mostly build complex things made out of simpler parts which we import. The cost of everything we build simply increased and as a result many businesses selling relatively higher margin, higher complexity products had to scale back or shut down.

More to the point, the notion that dollars leaving the country is a real problem is really a kind of primitive understanding of money. Dollars are something we control. If dollars leave the country, that means there is demand for dollars. We control the supply of dollars. We literally can’t lose, so long as people are still using the USD, which they’re less inclined to when we’re tariffing their exports.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "Trade, merchants, and the lost cities of the Bronze Age (2019) [pdf]"

AbrahamParangi — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 05:04:13 +0000

This is AI generated slop.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "The hacker sent by Anthropic to calm the government's nerves about AI safety"

AbrahamParangi — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:32:00 +0000

Nah, that's ridiculous. This admin is corrupt and idiotic and it's silly to pretend that Anthropic's actions matter except in so much as they didn't bribe the president like OpenAI did.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

AbrahamParangi — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:44:06 +0000

and how much of that philosophy do you even know?

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

AbrahamParangi — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:43:51 +0000

yeah, that’s the point

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

AbrahamParangi — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:42:38 +0000

Land that was conquered in war. It is reasonable to find this distasteful, but it is not unethical in any coherent way.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world"

AbrahamParangi — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:55:49 +0000

The average efficiency improvement is closer to something like 2-3x per Anthropic’s numbers and this is only the rate at which software can advance. Do you expect to notice if 12 months of software engineering on a project you’re following gets done in 6 months? I suspect not.

The root cause is that the acceleration is pareto distributed so the modern engineering team at the moment looks like one 10x engineer, one 5x engineer, and the rest are approximately 1.5x engineers.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "To have a moral stance on AI is to be an outcast, and it sucks"

AbrahamParangi — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:47:12 +0000

This is going to be an unpopular reply I imagine but this person is not well and their behavior should not be imitated. This is a classic example of omnicause anxiety, like people who refuse to have children because of all these things happening in the world as if the world hasn't always been a mess. Frankly, ridiculous.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage"

AbrahamParangi — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:42:40 +0000

Most members of management were individual contributors beforehand. I say this just because it is remarkably common for people to assign malign intent or stupidity to people doing jobs that they themselves haven’t done and don’t frankly understand.

I’m not saying you’re wrong. In many cases you’d be right. I’m just saying it’s remarkable how much certainty people have even when it comes to things they know they don’t know.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious"

AbrahamParangi — Sun, 03 May 2026 00:35:59 +0000

The statement that the chatbot is conscious is neither true nor untrue in any meaningful sense. The current debate is supported by very strong feelings that we must be conscious and AI must not be.

These feelings have no particular basis in material reality. Consciousness is as well defined as cooties. Does AI have cooties? idk man, do you?

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8M Ledger Mistake?"

AbrahamParangi — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:17:34 +0000

the author overestimates how much ~$5M/yr actually is. a business like uber isn't happy about that but it's not even in the top 10 of things they're wasting money on. moreover this isn't the engineer's sole fault it is more the fault of whoever actually approved the expense.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

AbrahamParangi — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:43:07 +0000

Oh I remember this quote. I thought it was quite a good one because he’s right. At least in the US, apple maps is better than google maps for most purposes.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "Moving fast in hardware: lessons from lab to $100M ARR"

AbrahamParangi — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 16:02:30 +0000

I'm mostly curious how much of that revenue is actual ARR, which is to say contractually recurring. It is pretty dang rare for a hardware company to have nontrivial ARR.

New comment by AbrahamParangi in "Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right"

AbrahamParangi — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:54:30 +0000

AI is less deranging than partisan news and social media, measurably so according to a recent study https://www.ft.com/content/3880176e-d3ac-4311-9052-fdfeaed56...