Hacker News: CapitalistCartr

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "Agents don't need memory, they need documentation"

CapitalistCartr — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 14:42:11 +0000

Yeah, that's an improvement; if it only involves a few docs, small files, etc. it's not so bad, but what if it's hundreds? The secondary agent could be a librarian the primary agent can call, and a cheaper one, too. It passes the initially relevant stuff and a list of "available but not loaded" stuff to the primary, and if context changes needs, the primary can ask the librarian for it.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "Agents don't need memory, they need documentation"

CapitalistCartr — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 13:31:27 +0000

This is something I've been fooling with a lot lately. Reading his solution, it look to me like his objections apply to his own solution. The sharpest critique he makes of RAG is that agents can't search for what they don't know. A markdown "brain" has the same problem. How does the "agent" know which documents are relevant before it starts? The index files retrieval done by the agent instead of by embeddings doesn't escape the problem. The same goes for staleness (which for me seems like a constant chase). He criticizes memory systems for treating the past as truth, but documents go stale too (a lot). The fix of having the agent update what's outdated, is the same job he's ridiculing the dreamers and background daemons for doing. He says "putting it to the test"; where's the test? He says "only five of the many problems"; if there's so many, show me, don't just say it. He's absolutely right about auditability, but for me at least Claude uses a regular markdown (MD) file I can read just fine. So every memory plugin on the market does not work the same way.

This is a first draft; his github is better than his article. Looking through it, Consult actually works. The agent doesn't pick documents blind. Every scope has a catalog file that describes each document: what it covers, when to open it. These catalogs seem to load in to the start of each session, so the agent gets a little map without reading every file. Code navigation seems the same. Each index document has a short description and a "read_if", and subindexes are opened when their condition matches the job. This looks pretty well laid out, which I would never have guessed from the article.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality"

CapitalistCartr — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 01:59:36 +0000

It's not a matter of "rejected as not real", it's "There's no way to know if this is real or not".

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users"

CapitalistCartr — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:09:09 +0000

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New comment by CapitalistCartr in "Let’s take apart your phone"

CapitalistCartr — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:01:47 +0000

The most intricate machine I've ever held was an inertial guidance system, back when they were hugely complex. My phone isn't even close.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "Should you wash your solar panels?"

CapitalistCartr — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:17:55 +0000

It does no longer pay to be clever with solar panels; they're too cheap. Angle not quite right? Add a couple extra. Summer vs. Winter? Add a couple extra.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "Why Vancouver is always a stand-in for San Francisco in movies and TV shows (2021)"

CapitalistCartr — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 23:13:28 +0000

And Toronto is New York City.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "The great blogging collapse: What happened to 100 successful blogs?"

CapitalistCartr — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:36:15 +0000

If I write a detailed explanation of some industrial electrical detail in some electrician forum, perhaps one or two people will upvote it. If I write some very general, snarky comment in a general forum, I'll get hundreds to thousands of upvotes. Blogs are the same. An excellent niche blog might churn along for many years, but few will ever know it exists, and it won't get on one of these surveys. A clever, popular blog, written to get big quickly, and heavily promoted by the author, will get on all the lists. And most of them won't last five years.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs"

CapitalistCartr — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 22:58:21 +0000

For work, I drive an F-350 diesel with a work-bed full of tools and supplies, and a ladder rack. It's a bit nerve-wracking driving through city side streets, especially with pedestrians. It's 22 feet (6.7m) long. Across the tow mirrors is 8.5 feet (2.6m). It probably weighs 4 tons. Yet people happily choose to drive bigger vehicles as commuter cars!

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "United Wizards of the Coast recognized by NLRB"

CapitalistCartr — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 22:50:47 +0000

Any time you have a chance to unionize¹, do so.

¹ That's union-ize, not un-ionize.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "I hated writing until I learned there’s a science to it (2024)"

CapitalistCartr — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:40:26 +0000

I'm an industrial electrician. I'm also skinny; people often undrestimate me. Once I had two non-electrician coworkers helping me pull some large wire and make up splices in a trough. One beefy guy was struggling with the wire, so I grabbed it, twisted it around into place. The other guy says, surprised, "You're stronger than you look." I just said, "Sure".

Because of the way the strands are laid, wire has a direction and way it "wants" to go. I'd been an electrician twenty years by that point and knew how to work it. Not strength. Not that I said any of that.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "Hindenburg’s Smoking Room"

CapitalistCartr — Sun, 17 May 2026 15:31:38 +0000

When I was a kid, back eons ago, smoking was everywhere. People who didn't smoke had ashtrays for guests. Telling people to not smoke was simply not a thing. When I was about 16, some family friends put a small sign on their front door requesting people not smoke inside their house. I was shocked. I liked the idea, but I'd never seen that before, never even considered it. I recall wondering how many people would be offended enough to stop visiting.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "Casio S100X Japanese Lacquer Edition (JP Page Only)"

CapitalistCartr — Sun, 10 May 2026 16:36:36 +0000

So it's about $630 USD and sold out.

"Limited to 650 units worldwide (production units)."

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag"

CapitalistCartr — Sun, 03 May 2026 23:07:36 +0000

I have a hardhat, high viz vest, lanyard, and $600 toolbelt because I'm an industrial electrician, but they get me into a lot. My face becomes invisible; I become "The Electrician".

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "Show HN: Brutalist Concrete Laptop Stand (2024)"

CapitalistCartr — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:17:30 +0000

The professionals actually use a tool that looks about like a big (BIG) vibrator, along with various other vibrating tools.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

CapitalistCartr — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 20:10:53 +0000

The usual arrangement for an LBO is to saddle the bought company, the vet in this example, with the debt,or spin off a secondary company from the vet with the poorest assets and most to all of the debt. It's all a scummy business.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

CapitalistCartr — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:53:48 +0000

We have red light cameras here in Tampa. I don't know all the details of what it takes to make a right on red and not get a ticket, so I do exaggerated stops to be sure. I know what the law claims but that doesn't matter. The real law is the actual (proprietary) code rumning in the machine. Not what the law says. Not what the contract says. Not what the requirements say. Not what the programmer thinks the code does.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "How to talk to anyone and why you should"

CapitalistCartr — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 01:08:09 +0000

While I don't agree about population either way, in my lifetime it's grown from about 3 billion to over 8 billion. This has been quite a ride. Also, there's a world of a difference between global carrying capacity with responsible aliens managing, and our current management.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "Workers at Redmond SpaceX lab exposed to toxic chemicals"

CapitalistCartr — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 12:39:32 +0000

This is the answer to most of professional life. Unionize! If you don't manage people, join a union. If you think where you work is fine so you don't need a union, that's when you need one, before something like this happens.

New comment by CapitalistCartr in "BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal"

CapitalistCartr — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 22:04:36 +0000

I could make a good case for the United States fitting that description, especially the bits about trade and agression.