Hacker News: AvAn12

New comment by AvAn12 in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

AvAn12 — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:56:24 +0000

This is the paradox. For software engineers, the current crop of “AI” tools is magic. A huge accelerator. And then they assume the rest of the world will get the same boost. However this is not the case at all. Claude code is great because it is trained on extremely well documented git histories and stack overflow. And outcomes are binary: the code works or it doesn’t; the PR is accepted or it isn’t. Not much else in the business world is like this at all. No training data with this kind of sequential development information. And no real black and white outcomes as such.

I would love it if we can just take the win on having created an amazing tool set for coders. Can’t this be enough?

New comment by AvAn12 in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

AvAn12 — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 21:58:43 +0000

Fair assessment. Maybe the messaging should focus on “these are great accelerators for software developers” rather than “AI will change everything for everyone everywhere…” It is understandable that non-technical folks are kind of underwhelmed - not due to lack of understanding so much as lack of a tangible need. Not everyone needs an electron microscope or gas chromatograph…

New comment by AvAn12 in "When did Google get so weird?"

AvAn12 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:25:24 +0000

Commercially, this may be what they want to happen. Instead of just getting an answer, they got you to make three more prompts / queries. What do you know? "Engagement" just went up 3X!

New comment by AvAn12 in "What would a serious AI product look like?"

AvAn12 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:23:35 +0000

Would be lovely, but many issues. 1. If LLMs can't reliably produce factual information today, how can they check if any statement is factual? 2. What about writing that is not recounting facts? e.g. fiction or marketing? 3. who decides what is factual? Does the system give a pass to statements like "full self-driving" or "AGI" or anything accompanied by "the likes of which have never been seen before"?

New comment by AvAn12 in "Meta VR Glasses"

AvAn12 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 01:34:43 +0000

Yuck.

New comment by AvAn12 in "What will our economic future look like?"

AvAn12 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:53:00 +0000

Software company pens speculative narratives about impact of not-yet-realized features. This reminds me of the corny old copies of The Futurist magazine that my dad kept around. Fun, hopelessly naive, and not at all aligned with how reality unfolded. Nice that Anthropic can afford a team of economists somehow though.

New comment by AvAn12 in "216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]"

AvAn12 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 15:21:07 +0000

We are on our second Sceptre dumb tv. Cheap, good picture, happy. We handle streaming via Apple TV, though pivoting very slowly to jellyfin.

New comment by AvAn12 in "Stopping the smart TV from being used against you"

AvAn12 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:33:16 +0000

Yep! Our family is on our second one. First was 42” and lasted five years. Current one is 55” and is going on seven years. Both were around $200-250. Picture quality is great for us. Apple TV takes care of streaming. And easy connection to our stereo gives great audio. Cheers!

New comment by AvAn12 in "The Amazon tax"

AvAn12 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:49:07 +0000

Closed amazon account when Bz decided to get into politics. I realize I can buy everything I need “in the real world” and thru manufacture websites directly. I do not miss it.

New comment by AvAn12 in "The Amazon tax"

AvAn12 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:47:19 +0000

Bravo!

New comment by AvAn12 in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

AvAn12 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:50:12 +0000

Open weight != open source

New comment by AvAn12 in "To recruit teachers, school districts are building homes"

AvAn12 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 23:11:23 +0000

Could just, you know, pay more…

New comment by AvAn12 in "The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras"

AvAn12 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:34:48 +0000

1. If someone is running to a cop because someone didn’t pick up after their dog, that is a sad state of affairs.

2. If we are so interested in enforcing laws, what about all of the white collar crime, crypto scams, insider trading, and grifting off of the public sector? Clearly doing more harm to society than some dog poop. Where are the $8bn market cap companies that go around enforcing securities laws?

New comment by AvAn12 in "Wicklow hotel cancels 'secretive' Peter Thiel group conference"

AvAn12 — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 20:31:11 +0000

Hotel wants to avoid undesirable guests. Seems reasonable.

New comment by AvAn12 in "As downtown Seattle offices empty, city facing years of 'zombie' towers"

AvAn12 — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 20:29:45 +0000

Convert some to cheap residential. Solves both problems: affordable housing as well as rebalancing supply and demand for office space.

New comment by AvAn12 in "Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech"

AvAn12 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:31:55 +0000

Why participate? Why not just skip any site that wants a photo of ID? Also, those sites run massive liability risk for the inevitable data breaches that will occur.

New comment by AvAn12 in "The AI industry is pouring millions into US elections"

AvAn12 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:10:49 +0000

There ARE regulations for sure. But they exist to protect the population at large. For example, food safety laws were not created out of government hostility but rather because food was unsafe. Read (or read about) The Jungle by Upton Sinclair if you want to get creeped out about the food industry in the 1930s before regulations

New comment by AvAn12 in "The AI industry is pouring millions into US elections"

AvAn12 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:11:53 +0000

Then those people are on the sidelines like every other citizen. Play the game or be a spectator. Nobody gets to have it both ways.

New comment by AvAn12 in "The AI industry is pouring millions into US elections"

AvAn12 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 16:04:23 +0000

If businesspeople want to get involved in politics, they should have the courage to run for office like anybody else. Lurking on the sidelines and waiving money around is really lame and laughable.

New comment by AvAn12 in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

AvAn12 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:22:30 +0000

At the end of the day, the processor can only do Turing operations: assign values to variables (registers, memory locations, storage), loops, bitwise operations, and conditionals. Whether the source code is python, java, or lisp, it has to compile or interpret down to machine code ultimately. Likewise if the running software is a word processor, DOOM, or an LLM, at the end of the day it will be executed by the processor using the three operations. Lots of other fancy hardware and software may accelerate things but ultimately it is those ops that are the running code. The rest is many wonderful conveniences and abstractions.