Hacker News: Ampersander

New comment by Ampersander in "UAE Leaves OPEC and OPEC+"

Ampersander — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:33:46 +0000

Then they all pump more every year

New comment by Ampersander in "Ask HN: Have top AI research institutions just given up on the idea of safety?"

Ampersander — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:01:09 +0000

There is danger in people using a token predictor like it is some all-knowing magic computer oracle.

New comment by Ampersander in "Ask HN: Have top AI research institutions just given up on the idea of safety?"

Ampersander — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 15:50:37 +0000

Isn't AI safety mostly a marketing thing? Like, we employ these safety people to make sure our chat bot does not turn into Skynet, implying the chat bot could turn into Skynet i.e. it's powerful and magic and please give us money.

Maybe the text prediction programs are too familiar to people for the Skynet marketing to bite like it used to.

Or maybe it was not just a marketing thing and the AI bros really did believe we were a few GPUs and some training data away from AGI, but now they no longer believe this.

New comment by Ampersander in "YouTube blocks background video playback on Brave and other browsers"

Ampersander — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 09:50:09 +0000

Aren't they going to win in the long run with remote attestation?

New comment by Ampersander in "The Influentists: AI hype without proof"

Ampersander — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 06:56:30 +0000

"Not only were the colours and patterns unusually fine, but the clothes that were made of the stuffs had the peculiar quality of becoming invisible to every person who was not fit for the office he held, or if he was impossibly dull."

New comment by Ampersander in "The Moat of Low Status"

Ampersander — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 08:08:10 +0000

Sufficient status entirely changes how the act of asking dumb questions is perceived by others. A person with a small title is seen as asking dumb questions because they are dumb. A person with a big title asks dumb questions because they are smart. Of course it's not just title but also age, gender, race, appearance, etc.

New comment by Ampersander in "Nvidia's CUDA Monopoly"

Ampersander — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 08:31:22 +0000

It's not 100%. CUDA for example has math functions with special rounding modes, but HIP does not.

New comment by Ampersander in "Ironically, Zoom tells employees to return to office for work"

Ampersander — Sun, 06 Aug 2023 16:55:09 +0000

There needs to be other people at the office for there to be a point in going there.

New comment by Ampersander in "Emacs-like editors written in Common Lisp"

Ampersander — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 12:44:52 +0000

Clojure is the biggest lisp by far if we measure by amount of programmers getting paid to write it.

New comment by Ampersander in "Ask HN: Why aren't devs making desktop apps any more?"

Ampersander — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 19:47:16 +0000

There are many reasons web applications are more attractive. Web applications can't be pirated as the user does not receive the program. Users don't want desktop applications, as it's more convenient to login to a web application with a Google or Facebook account than it is to install a native application. A web application works on any device and most people only have a smartphone.