Hacker News: District5524

New comment by District5524 in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

District5524 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:40:08 +0000

I don't understand how different this startup is from established, non-John Deere segments, like MTZ? Definitely low tech and around the same price as the startup: https://www.mtzequipment.com/products/tractors

New comment by District5524 in "CCBE has adopted the CCBE technical guide on GenAI [pdf]"

District5524 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:13:26 +0000

The Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) has adopted a technical guide for lawyers on the use of GenAI.

It is addressed to lawyers and bars/law societies (which, in most countries, also regulate lawyers).

It is a clear and deliberate step to educate legal professionals on more technical matters that were previously rarely a focus of their training.

The purpose of the paper is to better acquaint lawyers with their options, including the possibility of using local models and understanding the trade-offs.

CCBE was created by the bars/law societies as a representative body of the profession in Brussels, to whom the EU institutions can turn.

I believe this is an important step in toward better dissemination of the use of AI models. What makes it notable is the level of technical detail that will hopefully help lawyers formulate what they need - comparing the options of on-premises, colocation, IaaS or fully managed/API), and giving indicative hardware budgets (dated September 2025) ranging from ~€2,000 to €20,000 for local inference boxes. It also discusses quantisation (FP16 vs INT8 vs INT4), context-length trade-offs, and tokens-per-second thresholds for interactive use.

Curious to hear your views on whether there is any point in going in this direction. Or if you believe anything important is missing or incorrect.

CCBE has adopted the CCBE technical guide on GenAI [pdf]

District5524 — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 13:13:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ccbe.eu/fileadmin/speciality_distribution/public/documents/IT_LAW/ITL_Guides_recommendations/EN_ITL_20260327_CCBE-technical-guide-on-the-use-of-AI-tools-and-models-by-lawyers.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47792486

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by District5524 in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

District5524 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 08:59:32 +0000

They both work in the same market but they have pretty different careers and understandings. I simply can't believe why on Earth would people choose Altman over Amodei to trust in these kind of pretty important questions. This is not about who is the more savvy investor maximizing shareholder value. I personally don't care whose company grows bigger or goes bust first, OpenAI or Anthropic. The real stakes are different, and Amodei is better suited to be trusted in his decision. Unfortunately, the best choices do not seem to fit well with either the federal political climate or the mainstream business ethics in Silicon Valley. Not that our opinion would matter...

New comment by District5524 in "Sumerian Star Map Recorded the Impact of an Asteroid (2024)"

District5524 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 10:42:27 +0000

In a movie, I'd definitely involve Ötzi as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi). Ötzi was found like 30 km from the impact site. And could have been a contemporary. E.g., he cursed the guy who shot him and whose village is struck by a meteor in the end.

New comment by District5524 in "My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)"

District5524 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:22:02 +0000

I don't understand: if there is a shortage of doctors, why are we trying to solve that by training AI models modelled on influencers that spits out (hopefully improving) advice at 10x the rate of a human doctor? Is it impossible for highly advanced societies like ours to pay more for people to get trained as doctors, nurses or whatever is missing? Or to convince them to choose a profession that deals with other humans instead of UBI?

I don't think people are afraid of doctors using imperfect tools. That is the easier part. But that will not solve the problem of too many patients for a single doctor and what leads to the lack of empathy. This was a problem even before AI. It seems society does not have empathy for these kind of "professional problems". Offering tools instead of humans is an even riskier approach, not for that particular individual, but for how society tends to build trust and empathy. We tend to see everything now as a problem with a technical solution because we only have confidence in solving technical problems.

New comment by District5524 in "Brands upset Buy For Me is featuring their products on Amazon without permission"

District5524 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 09:19:43 +0000

Losing brand control (IP) and lack of control over your sales channels is a big problem for traders who want to comply with dozens of regulations, exclusions and restrictions required by manufacturers, other sellers, trademark owners etc. The article also mentions means tax and customs compliance problems, but this also affects other trade law related issues, like competition law problems (antitrust). It is surprisingly easy to breach these even for tiny sellers. You don't want exposure to these kinds of sales. It is never just selling, it is always also complying with lots of new laws, And rest assured, Amazon bots will not work that out for you. And now, these guys have to scrutinize the email orders as for their source because all the compliance process they have built in their webshops or wherever they advertised, will simply be bypassed by Amazon bots. Terrible idea.

New comment by District5524 in "2025: The Year in LLMs"

District5524 — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 06:34:39 +0000

It's not about invalidating your conclusion, but I'm not so sure about law having a right answer. At a very basic level, like hypothetical conduct used in basic legal training matrerials or MCQs, or in criminal/civil code based situations in well-abstracting Roman law-based jurisdictions, definitely. But the actual work, at least for most lawyers is to build on many layers of such abstractions to support your/client's viwepoint. And that level is already about persuasion of other people, not having the "right" legal argument or applying the most correct case found. And this part is not documented well, approaches changes a lot, even if law remains the same. Think of family law or law of succession - does not change much over centuries but every day, worldwide, millions of people spend huge amounts of money and energy on finding novel ways to turn those same paragraphs to their advantage and put their "loved" ones and relatives in a worse position.

New comment by District5524 in "Tell HN: Happy New Year"

District5524 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 16:19:39 +0000

Happy New Year from Hungary! An exciting new year ahead for all of us!

New comment by District5524 in "Mistral OCR 3"

District5524 — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 05:24:21 +0000

Zucman taxes rich individuals (100m€+), not Mistral. AI Act rules are not that difficult to comply with by GPAI model providers as long as the model doesn't become systemic risk... They have to spend a lot more time on PR and handshaking with French politicians than on AI compliance. They probably don't even have a single FTE for that... So that's just prejudice I believe.

New comment by District5524 in "Italy's longest-serving barista reflects on six decades behind the counter"

District5524 — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:14:02 +0000

Socrates said no such thing, no writing of Socrates has survived. He was just a character is Plato's book, Phaedrus. Please do find the original paragraphs before accusing Socrates of this. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j... Of course, you can read and interpret that same book a thousand different ways, like he was talking about knowledge not being the same as writing things down, or whatever you want. But we don't even pretend to read the things we talk about. We just repeat nice narratives we have supposedly read somewhere else, digested by someone else, somehow.

New comment by District5524 in "DeepSeek-v3.2: Pushing the frontier of open large language models [pdf]"

District5524 — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:01:42 +0000

Digital Spaceport is a really good channel, I second that - the author is not sparing any detail. The cheaper options always use CPU only, or sharding between different cheap GPUs (without SLI/switching) - which is not good for all use cases (he also highlights this). But some his prices are one-off bargains for used stuff. And RAM prices doubled this year, so you won't buy 2x256 GB DDR4 for $336, no matter what: https://digitalspaceport.com/500-deepseek-r1-671b-local-ai-s...

New comment by District5524 in "Omnilingual ASR: Advancing automatic speech recognition for 1600 languages"

District5524 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:12:14 +0000

My new favourite mistake is Malayalam being highly endangered...

New comment by District5524 in "Omnilingual ASR: Advancing automatic speech recognition for 1600 languages"

District5524 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 08:35:16 +0000

Yes, there seems to be lots of mistakes and no easy way to mark it. Highly endangered: Malayalam (=35 million speakers), Hungarian (14 million), Uighur (11 million), or Swedish as endangered... These are quite obvious mistakes even for a layperson.

New comment by District5524 in "Omnilingual ASR: Advancing automatic speech recognition for 1600 languages"

District5524 — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 08:33:42 +0000

I agree that this is a very exciting and really crucial research and I'm glad there is funding for this. But it's very strange that Hungarian is marked as "highly endangered" at https://aidemos.atmeta.com/omnilingualasr/language-globe Highly endangered is supposed to mean "The language is used by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may still understand the language, they typically do not speak it to children or among themselves." Then why is Hungarian marked as such? Obviously not true with 14 million active speakers and being the 20th in terms of the most language resources published on the Internet. Additionally, the feedback mechanism seems also broken ("There was an error submitting your feedback. Please try again.")

New comment by District5524 in "A.I. and Social Media Contribute to 'Brain Rot'"

District5524 — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 18:37:05 +0000

That still seems to be a problem. It was not what "Socrates thought", but what Plato put into Socrates' mouth in Phaedrus, and even this imaginary Socrates is not saying anything like that, just referencing an even earlier Egyptian tale: "There is an old Egyptian tale of Theuth, the inventor of writing, showing his invention to the god Thamus, who told him that he would only spoil men’s memories and take away their understandings..." https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j... But that's just pedantery. The real painpoint is that just because there are lots of useful AI tools, it doesn't mean it's not dangerous at the same time for a surprising number of 8B people currently alive (children, elderly, mentally lazy or just fatigued). At the very least, they will end up being exploited by bandits. And if you let the bandits continue to exploit those who lack certain mental resistance, the bandits will become stronger etc.

New comment by District5524 in "ChatGPT terms disallow its use in providing legal and medical advice to others"

District5524 — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 10:00:15 +0000

Read their paper on GDPval (https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04374). In section 3, it's quite clear that their marketing strategy is now "to cooperate with professionals" and augment them. (Which does not rule out replacing them later, when the regulatory situation is more appropriate, like AGI is already a well-accepted fact, if ever.) But this will take a lot of time and local presence which they do not have.

New comment by District5524 in "Lessons from interviews on deploying AI Agents in production"

District5524 — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 10:40:03 +0000

Not that it's incorrect but there is some data showing variability even with the very same input and all parameters. Especially if we have no control over the model behind the API with engineering optimizations etc. See Berk Atil et al.: Non-Determinism of "Deterministic" LLM Settings, https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.04667v5

New comment by District5524 in "1X Neo – Home Robot - Pre Order"

District5524 — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 12:10:56 +0000

Plenty of opportunity to use forced labourers in a DIFFERENT country while complying with all the immigration laws possible, and also saving the owners from having to meet real poor people. (I hope this will not work well...)

New comment by District5524 in "Who's Submitting AI-Tainted Filings in Court?"

District5524 — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 07:35:49 +0000

That's an important observation. It's not easy to get filing data outside the US Federal courts (PACER), because it's not typical at all that courts publish the filings themselves or information on those who file the pleadings. But you can find statistics of the legal market (mainly law firms), like class size (0-10, 10-50, ... 250+ lawyers per firm) of total number of law firms, number of employees per class size of total law firm employees, or revenue per class size. Large firms only dominate the UK, especially in terms of revenue, US is less so, EU is absolutely ruled by solo and small firms. I did some research back in 2019 on this, updates, the figures probably did not change, see page 59-60: https://ai4lawyers.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Overview-of.... The revenue size statistics was not included in the final publication. You can fish similar data from the SBS dataset of Eurostat https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/main/data/database (But the statistical details are pretty difficult to compare with the US or Canada, using different methodologies, different terminologies.)