Hacker News: Fordec

New comment by Fordec in "Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model"

Fordec — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:30:19 +0000

Judging by comment history, this new month old account of yours is just for dunking on AI development isn't it?

Software factories don't exist is an easily falsifiable statement https://github.com/topics/software-factory

New comment by Fordec in "Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model"

Fordec — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 22:15:53 +0000

If AI development is like management, harnesses will totally end up orchestrating people like traditional management does. The end state of the Jev type model hype is that a few years from now decision models replace management decision. Disconnected human managers five levels away from the work make suboptimal decisions all the time, the same logic applied to self driving cars can play out here. The model doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to make better informed decisions than your fallible VP.

New comment by Fordec in "Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel"

Fordec — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 01:21:09 +0000

This is great, more access did provide more eyes on these problems.

But, does that all of these being found now call into question, not the open source model logic itself, but the ability of human eyes to find security issues? These vulnerabilities have been sitting here for however long, but how many thousands of humans did not find them before AI?

New comment by Fordec in "Turning GLM-5.3-Flash into a Jev-like decision model"

Fordec — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 00:51:19 +0000

Also, while it's clearly got a lot of training on some use cases, others that probably weren't in the training set have worse good decision rates than a random number generator. If you can rebuild the architecture, you can train it on your use case.

New comment by Fordec in "ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026"

Fordec — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 22:20:04 +0000

Since you know the truth, and on what date was that order put in? Why did it have to be in 2026 and not during the planning process in previous years?

New comment by Fordec in "Ollaya – Ollama for open-source, Jev-style decision models"

Fordec — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:19:49 +0000

I think the idea of a "feature startup" is dead. What used to be a niche subscription business is now an individual Epic level of work. The smallest viable business becomes what two or three years ago was a mid tier enterprise. It is no longer "look at this tool I maintain", but "we take this specific approach using these hundreds of tools merged together to solve a problem in a specific way that nobody is going to compete with. Not because they can't compete if they wanted to, but that the competitions approach diverges in fifty different chosen ways that they are targeting a different market segment essentially."

I adhere to the idea that this is software's "Tower of Babel" moment where everyone just fundamentally ships things in completely diverging architectures, because creating a ground up architecture is no longer something that needs to be avoided for an economically viable business mode that in the past two decades would have otherwise incentivized people into industry standards. In a world where "taste" is the focus, single ingredients in the recipe aren't enough.

New comment by Fordec in "Making Tailscale Faster"

Fordec — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:00:49 +0000

Considering how core Wireguard is to the whole Tailscale value proposition, are they funding the future of that V2 roadmap on the open source side? If the answer is "no", and because the security world isn't going to stay put (particularly with AI math advancements happening lately are accelerating medium term risk), then one has to assume Tailscale is working on it's own in-house "V2" equivalent protocol for post-quantum support to enable that vision? I doubt you're doing nothing.

New comment by Fordec in "US criticises Australia's proposed algorithm opt-out laws as 'censorship'"

Fordec — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 03:51:58 +0000

Australia doesn't have protected speech. We're starting to see the dam break where rules that were left unexplored because it would go against the US driven view of globalization is starting to wane due to the US's loss (self destruction?) of its soft power.

New comment by Fordec in "'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees"

Fordec — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:58:50 +0000

The security of this list is essentially the motivation of the plot of Mission Impossible (1996). Except that's the just list of undercover agents, not he whole agency.

New comment by Fordec in "Writing Rust code that's fast by asking agents to make the code faster"

Fordec — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:16:08 +0000

I ran into this exact issue and had Claude write a test run scheduler to avoid cargo process contention and migrated to nextest within it. I have --release build cycles on my local machine down to about three seconds from what was for the same project 60+ seconds before investing in the changes.

New comment by Fordec in "AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up"

Fordec — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:04:05 +0000

Which only changes the title and your new bottleneck is product engineers struggling to come up with new product ideas worth doing month over month. While also half of their job is still the engineering side of the problem with less customer centric time.

New comment by Fordec in "AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up"

Fordec — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:13:59 +0000

I mean, looking at the release notes for things like say the Linux kernel it is clear that the improvements are there at a massive rate of change. But it's small stuff, it's performance improvements, it's quality of life. If you do things right people will think you've done nothing at all. What did you expect? Businesses to come up with whole new business lines, or is it just that backlogs of work is getting burned down that was going to be gotten to eventually? From what I can tell from the PM forums, the next bottleneck is the Product Org coming up with ideas worth implementing as fast as the developers can deliver them.

New comment by Fordec in "Saving another 100TB of RAM"

Fordec — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 06:28:20 +0000

I expect average human wages for programming to get lower and the overall percentage of the developer to move lower wage countries and this probably means away from the US and US salary expectations. Meat proxies and agentic CRUD will be off-shored to low wage Asian or even African countries with AI handling language barriers. Why wouldn't they be? Why pay six figures for a meat proxy? Product Builders should weather the storm the most, but they'll be the high end skilled PMs/engineers that of the overall industry but probably won't break 10% of total global headcount. In a world where knowing the domain will be the key driver of differentiation, as building averages out and knowing the customer and how to market to them becomes the differentiator, being closer to the target market will fragment competition from four global winners with over 10k employees in a space to 100 niche/regionally tailored winners with maybe 500 employees a piece. Not to mention if you thought GDPR was a pain, wait until AI laws that vary by country to country get added in.

I also expect as AI becomes more cost sensitive once the quality plateaus (there's only so many ways to get an answer to 100% right), the data centers are going to chase where the cheap power is, and this long term is likely to be in high-solar locations. So lower latitudes. Doesn't rule out places like Texas of course, but places like India, Mexico, Brazil, Israel or Saudi Arabia will have home field advantages.

New comment by Fordec in "Saving another 100TB of RAM"

Fordec — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 01:20:42 +0000

The point isn't that "doing math" is safe. Auto-research solves one target variable in one system, doing it at scale where say one developer is SME for the agentically manged 200 microservices down the line, heh I mean you certainly can, but good luck with that token cost of auto-research when that problem space is O(microservice^2). I point at that example yesterday of that optimized database memory with the comments pointing out that the specific problem fit in memory, over optimized and didn't generalize. The problem isn't the work, but the rework. A historian should know that new solutions to problems doesn't lead to "no problems ever again" but only problems with barriers that the new solution doesn't solve.

New comment by Fordec in "Saving another 100TB of RAM"

Fordec — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:17:07 +0000

This sort of thing makes me thing that we're about to enter an era where software development is going to be where most of the jobs fallout will be. You can't one-shot vibe code your way to this. But for proper Software Engineering, those jobs are safe where more and more problems are going to actually need solving by creatively using math because all the problems individuals deliver are just going to be larger. People are just mourning the loss of the low hanging fruit.

New comment by Fordec in "Wax motor"

Fordec — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 02:18:01 +0000

Huh. Do these work in a vacuum? Presumably if sealed right? I imagine there's a few space applications, particularly with solar panels.

New comment by Fordec in "Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint"

Fordec — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:55:43 +0000

A Tree if you will

New comment by Fordec in "How much oil-market buffer is left?"

Fordec — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 04:16:55 +0000

When people have an incentive to build that fast and cut corners (which they will). Under normal circumstances dotting the i's and crossing they t's, it's 5 to 7 years. Remember, the US is temporarily running low on missiles because of how much explosives Trump dropped on Iran. They blew up a petrostate level of petroleum infrastructure to the tune of $58B in damages of specialized engineering, about 15% of the country's total GDP. If recreating that in a quarter was possible, everyone with a drop of oil under their toes would do it.

New comment by Fordec in "How much oil-market buffer is left?"

Fordec — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:14:31 +0000

The main point of news I heard was that the Iran infrastructure the US destroyed, in a time where they are allowed to repair it and not just get bombed again, will take three years to repair. Oil prices don't get "cheap" again this side of 2030. Not to mention that there is a bunch of Russian infrastructure that is still on the chopping block to be destroyed by Ukraine as that war continues. Which has the same time it takes to rebuild issues.

New comment by Fordec in "Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?"

Fordec — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 07:54:41 +0000

And I'm no bear on the tech either. I'm not even in the boat of that the tech should be slowed down yet. But in a world where anyone can produce the effort of 300 people trivially, this eventually takes us places. Electricity and industrialization introduced huge benefits upfront, it introduced new problems that needed addressing at the long tail. Lets not pretend there won't be new problems to tackle here or just "hope" it works out.

AI isn't going to create in of itself "new" problems, it's just going to expose what we already know can cause harm, but was just stopped from being bigger problems because scaling issues was a natural barrier and we took the lazy way out until now.