Hacker News: AlexCoventry

New comment by AlexCoventry in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

AlexCoventry — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:04:57 +0000

> If all of us can go hunting in the woods and yet there is still game to be found, then there's no compelling reason to define and litigate who "owns" those woods.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

New comment by AlexCoventry in "Taste in the age of AI and LLMs"

AlexCoventry — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:56:40 +0000

Hmm, I still have some nonrefundable API credits with OpenAI. Maybe I should try to use them for my kernel.

FWIW, this talk[1] from NVIDIA/Meta from March claims that coding agents can often write correct implementations of of CUDA kernels, but that they're usually dog slow, like 100x slower than a kernel optimized by a skilled human.

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/on-demand/session/gtc26-s81653/

New comment by AlexCoventry in "Slightly safer vibecoding by adopting old hacker habits"

AlexCoventry — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:45:01 +0000

Yeah, it's easy to vibecode and review a docker sandbox, too. If you run containers with

   --runtime=runsc
   --cap-drop=ALL
   --security-opt no-new-privileges:true

it's pretty tight. That's how I use coding agents, FWIW.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"

AlexCoventry — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:35:04 +0000

Do you think they're lying about the vulnerabilities they claim Mythos has found? Seems like a very short-term play, if so.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "Good Taste the Only Real Moat Left"

AlexCoventry — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:13:00 +0000

Try using a coding agent to write an efficient GPU kernel. I guess they might get good at it soon, but they definitely aren't there yet.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

AlexCoventry — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:23:12 +0000

Giving up looking is not necessarily the same as not wanting a job.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools"

AlexCoventry — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 03:57:17 +0000

You can rent it, but it's basically worthless at this stage.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

AlexCoventry — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 01:38:45 +0000

> due to the way round-tripping tool-calls work, splitting code up into multiple files is counter-productive.

Can you expand on that?

New comment by AlexCoventry in "Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music"

AlexCoventry — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:47:01 +0000

Even complete legal novices like me know about the Sony/Betamax case, FWIW. It would shock me if a judge ruling on copyright implications of a technology didn't know about it.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "Goodbye to Sora"

AlexCoventry — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 02:26:38 +0000

> There's only one highly monetizable use for AI video generation

Yeah, marketing. Which is a huge market...

New comment by AlexCoventry in "Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised"

AlexCoventry — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:01:56 +0000

Supply-chain attacks long pre-date effective AI agentic coding, FWIW.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent"

AlexCoventry — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 17:43:54 +0000

You can argue a moral equivalence, I guess, but on a practical level, OpenAI's decision is more dangerous for everyone, because it will help to secure Trump as a dictator.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent"

AlexCoventry — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:31:50 +0000

OpenAI agreeing to operate as Trump's secret police materially impacts your security as a European, though, because it cements Trump's power.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent"

AlexCoventry — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 06:43:07 +0000

IMO, OpenAI have either implicitly committed to becoming the IT service for Trump's secret police, or they've willingly signed up for the harsh retaliation Anthropic's getting, knowing that the Trump administration will inevitably try to push OpenAI around in the same way, if they meaningfully refuse to assist in domestic mass surveillance efforts.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent"

AlexCoventry — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 02:48:12 +0000

It's very straightforward to instrument CC under tmux with send-keys and capturep. You could easily use that for distillation, IMO. There are also detailed I/O logs.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "Warranty Void If Regenerated"

AlexCoventry — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:38:25 +0000

FWIW, I read it before I learned that it was AI-generated, and I enjoyed it and thought it's possibly insightful.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "Autoresearch: Agents researching on single-GPU nanochat training automatically"

AlexCoventry — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:05:09 +0000

Wow, Gemini suggested a very similar experiment to me yesterday. Guess I know where it got the idea from, now. :-)

New comment by AlexCoventry in "A case for Go as the best language for AI agents"

AlexCoventry — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 20:35:24 +0000

That happens often enough that it might have its own token, if you BPE-encoded specifically for golang.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?"

AlexCoventry — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 06:38:20 +0000

IMO, you should do both. The cost of intellectual effort is dropping to zero, and getting an AI to scan through a transcript for relevant details is not going to cost much at all.

New comment by AlexCoventry in "How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?"

AlexCoventry — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 04:28:52 +0000

This was wishful thinking. I have canceled my ChatGPT subscription.