Hacker News: Archonical

New comment by Archonical in "AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions"

Archonical — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 01:39:09 +0000

> First, from a technical standpoint the required context window would be massive if you're looking at a person's career/life holistically. Probably solvable, but definitely something to be aware of.

Why would it be massive? The application layer typically compacts a profile of information about the users financial situation when offered. I doubt many of us have financial situations that would exceed the context window.

> Third, you would need a training dataset of all those input variables and their outcomes to be able to provide any sort of useful output. The first set of people to share everything wouldn't be able to derive any value from the tool, and I think you'd be hard pressed to convince enough people to do it to get a useful dataset.

Would you 'need' a training dataset of input variables and their outcomes for an LLM? Certainly for traditional ML, but the LLM toolcalling can simulate what an astute user should statistically do in their situation based on information on the internet and reason about the different constraints.

New comment by Archonical in "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation"

Archonical — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:51:17 +0000

I think it's somewhat guaranteed that the music will at least die down a little bit. We saw this with cloud companies being bitten by cloud cost optimization initiatives. I can't imagine we won't see the same with AI, especially as the workforce stops trying to tokenmaxx to save their role.

New comment by Archonical in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

Archonical — Tue, 12 May 2026 05:30:38 +0000

My job is just text autocomplete.

New comment by Archonical in "Joby kicks off NYC electric air taxi demos with historic JFK flight"

Archonical — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:38:53 +0000

Where do you put those 20 pads in the city?

New comment by Archonical in "Joby kicks off NYC electric air taxi demos with historic JFK flight"

Archonical — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 03:33:13 +0000

How many people do you think enter/exit JFK arrivals and departures every hour? Where are you going to land all those air vehicles? Is this a shuttle service with many seats? How do you plan for the air traffic for that many people?

New comment by Archonical in "Joby Kicks Off NYC Electric Air Taxi Demos with Historic JFK Flight"

Archonical — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 03:03:34 +0000

I wonder what % of traffic is to/from JFK. The subway decently connects much of the city to the JFK air train, but it's a fairly inconvenient journey. Toronto's UP express has made travel to YYZ significantly easier, but I doubt it's possible to construct something similar in NYC.

I love aviation, but I also don't see air travel as being a scalable/affordable solution to this problem. Then again, it's only meant to alleviate traffic burden for a certain segment of the population.

New comment by Archonical in "Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training"

Archonical — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:09:03 +0000

It at least used to be true. In order to accept the job offer, you would have to make (or have) a Facebook account.

New comment by Archonical in "Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept"

Archonical — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:09:01 +0000

Seeing what your neighbors are paying for rent is an amazing idea. I know there's quite a disparity in buildings. I imagine landlords will be squeezed from both sides this way - they wouldn't want the website to show how well a given tenant negotiated, so they may negotiate harder.

New comment by Archonical in "OpenAI's fall from grace as investors race to Anthropic"

Archonical — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 04:17:49 +0000

Isn't XAi's valuation paired with X and SpaceX?

New comment by Archonical in "Cursor 3"

Archonical — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 19:03:35 +0000

Isn’t Cursor’s business model mostly subscriptions? They’re the ones paying for inference, not the user directly, right? So wouldn’t they be incentivized to minimize token usage per unit of user value, not maximize raw tokens?

New comment by Archonical in "We hid a free trip to Switzerland in our privacy policy"

Archonical — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:32:25 +0000

This is just an ad.

New comment by Archonical in "What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves"

Archonical — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 23:18:30 +0000

The parent comment is describing supply and demand. If Blizzard attracts a larger supply of workers who will accept lower pay and worse conditions because they intrinsically want the job, Blizzard gains leverage. That is exactly why studios like Blizzard can get away with more than “NicheBoringFinanceCo.”

New comment by Archonical in "Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical Record"

Archonical — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 14:03:26 +0000

I don't read it. Why is it awful?

New comment by Archonical in "Meta planning layoffs as AI costs mount"

Archonical — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:24:29 +0000

Late 2023 levels was after the November 2022 layoffs as well (~11k cut).

New comment by Archonical in "Meta planning layoffs as AI costs mount"

Archonical — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 14:22:54 +0000

> this is what, the third layoff in 5 years?

They have done more targeted layoffs as well like the FAIR layoffs in 2025 and the RL layoffs in January 2026, as well as the 5% performance cut in February 2025.

New comment by Archonical in "E2E encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after 8 May"

Archonical — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:52:36 +0000

It's around the same time they announced their Applied AI org under Boz, which is responsible for data for Avocado/Mango/Watermelon training now. The timing certainly doesn't help.

New comment by Archonical in "How Big Diaper absorbs billions of extra dollars from American parents"

Archonical — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:22:45 +0000

With declining birth rates in the west, wouldn't it also make sense that Big Diaper is increasing prices and expanding into luxury products while unit sales go down? Expanding into products for the elderly, like incontinence, would also make sense, or perhaps expanding products into more countries (I don't know the global reach of say Pampers).

I know it's not the same thing as enshitification, and I don't know if the diaper industry is even vulnerable to enshitification, but it would be such a nice play on words if the diaper industry had enshitification.

New comment by Archonical in "Buckle Up for Bumpier Skies"

Archonical — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 13:58:47 +0000

People do this to meet minimum requirements for mileage tiers, e.g. I know someone who was close to Diamond status on Delta and went to Miami and back without leaving the airport area just for the miles.

New comment by Archonical in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

Archonical — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 04:44:53 +0000

Palantir is a glorified data aggregation/data visualization platform. Hooking up Claude to different data systems, with safeguards turned on in Claude Gov, is different than what the government is asking from them now. Similar to if the government had Claude hooked up to Tableau/some salesforce derivative and then asked it to be autonomous in the kill loop/spy on US citizens.

New comment by Archonical in "The next two years of software engineering"

Archonical — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:14:20 +0000

May I suggest that it may be your attitude about that piece of paper that is holding you back rather than the paper itself?