Hacker News: DonsDiscountGas

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post"

DonsDiscountGas — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:45:09 +0000

"fixed" is definitely incorrect but there's probably a ceiling on how fast the demand can grow, just because other bottlenecks will take over at some point.

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post"

DonsDiscountGas — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:25:27 +0000

AI/LLMs have been dramatically improving for 7+ years. There's now a lot more funding to support continued improvement. You're correct this is an "assumption", but continued improvement at the same pace (or faster) for the next 3+ years is just extrapolating a trend. Believing we've hit the top today is based on nothing at all. Continued improvement is much more likely.

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?"

DonsDiscountGas — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:20:46 +0000

Concerning but not really surprising. They offer about hundred thousand antibodies, a few hundred frauds is likely the tip of the iceberg.

> “Similar image” searches using Google Lens, Bing Images or DuckDuckGo betray hundreds more that we have yet to document

In my experience these would return any image of an antibody (edit) Western blot, not just the exactly matching background. Would be curious to hear others thoughts.

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Meta Keeps Delaying the Release of Its New AI Model to Developers"

DonsDiscountGas — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:01:20 +0000

Seemed to work when it comes to selling ads. I'm thinking training LLMs is harder than anthropic and openai make it look

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

DonsDiscountGas — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 10:58:19 +0000

> My main motivator has always been to understand how things work

Which things, specifically? I got started programming in order to control scientific instruments and analyze the data I collected. I care about the systems I'm studying. I don't really care much about the software I'm programming. As OP said it's a means to an end.

I think you're right that people on HN are generally more curious but it doesn't have to be curiosity about every single element of software. We don't write assembly code anymore either, half of software is about making software easier and faster to write.

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

DonsDiscountGas — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:11:49 +0000

They also might switch power sources.

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "The Pentagon is running an AI propaganda mill targeting Latin America"

DonsDiscountGas — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:03:06 +0000

If is so good why do they spend so much money on marketing?

Information is not self recommending. There's a lot going on in the world, attention is scarce. Moreso today than ever before, but it's been true for a long time.

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026"

DonsDiscountGas — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 02:06:47 +0000

Demand for electricity is growing massively. Existing coal is required to meet demand.

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026"

DonsDiscountGas — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:30:06 +0000

Nobody, anywhere, is building new coal power plants. Approximately all new power is wind and solar. Which is good. But there is still a lot of installed capacity. And until new solar is cheaper than existing coal (which will be awhile, maybe never) then coal only decreases as plants shut down.

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "In a first, wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026"

DonsDiscountGas — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:26:59 +0000

My understanding is the AI data centers use LNG just because it's the fastest way to spin up a lot of power without using much land/permits. Solar panels would be cheaper but it still requires a lot of land and permits, plus batteries for smoothing.

I don't know why people would be "against" solar and wind. Even if they think global warning is a hoax, at a certain point (which was like 10 years ago) they're the cheapest option. So why not use them?

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Wind and solar generated more power than gas globally in April 2026"

DonsDiscountGas — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:23:20 +0000

You add 100x1day worth of battery capacity. Which is fairly economical even today (though not economical enough to actually shut down coal). Wouldn't work everywhere (winter in New England needs more than 1 day of backup) but works in some places.

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "They’re made out of weights"

DonsDiscountGas — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:15:49 +0000

This whole thing is a ripoff of [they're made of meat](https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...) as stated at the top. It would've taken about ten minutes without LLMs and ten seconds with an LLM. Is ten minutes an acceptable level of effort but ten seconds isn't?

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min"

DonsDiscountGas — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 16:10:43 +0000

Median pay at Meta is $380k. Median. I'm sure it's high variance but I would put up with a lot for that kind of money

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Is Python Becoming Pinyin?"

DonsDiscountGas — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:31:44 +0000

> Why ask AI to write its output in a dynamic language with relatively slow execution (i.e., Python)?

So that it's easy for humans to review it. Same reason as ever. Obviously Python isn't always the correct choice, but the overlap with cases where vibe coding is the correct choice is pretty high.

Also wtf is Pinyin?

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software"

DonsDiscountGas — Sun, 31 May 2026 13:09:31 +0000

Okay but if shipping software that has a bug counts as pissing in soup then a lot of people have been doing this for a long time.

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software"

DonsDiscountGas — Sun, 31 May 2026 12:53:13 +0000

One should assume good faith at first, or when in doubt, but after a certain point it's just denial.

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software"

DonsDiscountGas — Sun, 31 May 2026 12:45:33 +0000

I feel really bad for anybody out there named Claude. Especially if they're a software developer.

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become most valuable AI startup"

DonsDiscountGas — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:56:14 +0000

That aligns with average human values

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union"

DonsDiscountGas — Wed, 27 May 2026 02:15:21 +0000

A fully self driving truck won't need to stop much so I'm not sure this is relevant

New comment by DonsDiscountGas in "Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs"

DonsDiscountGas — Wed, 27 May 2026 02:03:46 +0000

The article assumes 5% monthly growth in token prices continuously. That seems aggressive.