Hacker News: MichaelDickens

New comment by MichaelDickens in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

MichaelDickens — Sat, 16 May 2026 15:20:30 +0000

From their previous comment:

> I fought for years trying to convince my colleagues to write good commit messages. Now Claude is writing great commit messages but since *I'm no longer looking at code* - I never see them. I don't think Claude uses them either.

(emphasis added)

New comment by MichaelDickens in "Judge bars Kars4Kids from broadcasting 'misleading' ads in California"

MichaelDickens — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:35:55 +0000

It's relevant because the fact that it's religious organization was an important fact in the judge's ruling. From the article:

> If Kars4Kids resumes advertising, [Judge Apkarian] wrote, its ads must contain “an express, audible disclosure of its religious affiliation and the geographic location of its primary beneficiaries and the age of the beneficiaries, specifying whether they aim for children or families, or both.”

New comment by MichaelDickens in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

MichaelDickens — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:01:39 +0000

Logically I understand that cyan is directly between green and blue, but my brain believes it's 100% blue.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

MichaelDickens — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:30:40 +0000

I believe the original idea of the Constitution was that most things would be regulated at the state level.

This is pretty much already the case with marijuana, where it's illegal at the federal level, but in practice if it's legal in your state then it's legal.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable"

MichaelDickens — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:33:48 +0000

What exactly are you implying? It sounds to me like you're saying that if it's impossible to make a product safe, then there shouldn't be any safety requirements. I think a more sensible position is that if it's impossible to make a product safe, then it should be illegal to build.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "Lunar Flyby"

MichaelDickens — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:18:44 +0000

People can have motivations for wanting to cut back Social Security other than "they hate working Americans". I would prefer commenters make more of an effort to understand their opponents' perspective rather than painting them in the worst light possible.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

MichaelDickens — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:41:58 +0000

Maybe people inside the company think Anthropic behaves ethically, which says something scary about either their ethical standards or their general awareness, considering how much documented unethical behavior we've seen from Anthropic leadership.[1]

[1] "Unless Its Governance Changes, Anthropic Is Untrustworthy" https://anthropic.ml/

New comment by MichaelDickens in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

MichaelDickens — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 16:15:53 +0000

Rather than curtailing women's right to vote, my preferred solution would be to increase men's right to not be conscripted.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

MichaelDickens — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:31:52 +0000

I think if that were the rule, all the program managers would just quit and there would be no manned spaceflight anymore.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "Desk for people who work at home with a cat"

MichaelDickens — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:25:05 +0000

I can foresee a design flaw, which is that the cat will ignore all the specially designated areas and sit on your keyboard instead.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "“Your frustration is the product”"

MichaelDickens — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:53:29 +0000

No, but Chrome is not the only browser.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "Death to Scroll Fade"

MichaelDickens — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:25:33 +0000

I'm not a web dev but if the goal is to improve load times, I'd think it would make more sense to load the full article text up front, and lazy load heavier data like images and video? I've seen a lot of websites that do it that way.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale (2025)"

MichaelDickens — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:35:20 +0000

Economics has the Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics: https://jcr-econ.org/

New comment by MichaelDickens in "The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines"

MichaelDickens — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 17:37:32 +0000

Altman has personally claimed that we are close to AGI. Therefore, according to him, OpenAI should invoke the self-sacrifice clause.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "Does that use a lot of energy?"

MichaelDickens — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:30:26 +0000

OP says one query uses 0.3 Wh. Driving an electric car for 10 miles = 3,000 Wh which is roughly 10,000 Wh per hour.

I'm not sure how many queries is equivalent to an hour of Claude code use, but maybe 5 seconds, which means an hour of continuous use = 216 Wh, or ~50x less than an electric car.

OP has a longer article about LLM energy usage: https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ai-footprint-august-202...

New comment by MichaelDickens in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

MichaelDickens — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:40:47 +0000

> It's a piece of software that predicts the most likely token, it is not and can never be conscious.

A brain is a collection of cells that transmit electrical signals and sodium. It is not and can never be conscious.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "MCP server that reduces Claude Code context consumption by 98%"

MichaelDickens — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 03:28:38 +0000

> I think agents should manage their own context too.

My intuition is that this should be almost trivial. If I copy/paste your long coding session into an LLM and ask it which parts can be removed from context without losing much, I'm confident that it will know to remove the debugging bits.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?"

MichaelDickens — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 03:25:49 +0000

In my experience virtually every magazine is like this, not just Quanta. I open an article hoping to learn something about some scientific or mathematical discovery, but instead the article is almost entirely about the discoverer.

For learning about actual discoveries, YouTube is much better (Veritasium, Numberphile, 3Blue1Brown, ...).

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

MichaelDickens — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:41:31 +0000

> Yes it was a pragmatic change, no it was not a change in their values. The commentary here on HN about Anthropic's RSP change was completely off the mark. They "think these changes are the right thing for reducing AI risk, both from Anthropic and from other companies if they make similar changes", as stated in this detailed discussion by Holden Karnofsky, who takes "significant responsibility for this change":

Can you imagine a world where Anthropic says "we are changing our RSP; we think this increases AI risk, but we want to make more money"?

The fact that they claim the new RSP reduces risk gives us approximately zero evidence that the new RSP reduces risk.

New comment by MichaelDickens in "Privilege is bad grammar"

MichaelDickens — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:55:33 +0000

It's both. Saving time is a form of status signaling. Professionalism usually entails spending longer on something than is optimal for effective communication, which is a way of signaling "my time is less valuable than yours". Writing short messages with grammatical errors is a way of signaling "my time is more valuable than your comprehension".