Hacker News: Nifty3929

New comment by Nifty3929 in "DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis"

Nifty3929 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 20:35:50 +0000

How about we hope for Chinese labs to continue pushing forward - and for America and the rest of the world to do so as well.

It needn't be competitive - everybody can succeed more tomorrow than they are today. You win. I win. We win.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs"

Nifty3929 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:50:55 +0000

It's not all roses out there, to be sure. But there are some roses, I think. A lot of roses actually. Can we talk about the roses once in a while?

New comment by Nifty3929 in "Cloudflare Drop"

Nifty3929 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 03:32:25 +0000

The problem is that everything is negative, all the time. Nothing good is allowed to be acknowledged. Everything someone or some company does must not be acknowledged to have any redeeming value- it’s all just negative

Which is sad, because so much amazing stuff is happening on the world right now, and seems to be only accelerating. For everybody.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "Aluminum foil (2021)"

Nifty3929 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 05:04:56 +0000

"Aluminum (Al) is a widespread environmental contaminant " - they lost me right there in the very first sentence.

Already using charged, non-neutral language ("contaminant"), giving away their pre-existing bias and forcing me to disregard the rest of their opinion on the matter. Aluminum is no more "environmental contaminant" than any other extremely common basic element in the Earth's crust, like silicon or iron. Are they also against chlorine?

Clearly they decided to conduct a study to show just how scary aluminum is, and I have no doubt the succeeded.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "Should DayQuil Be Legal?"

Nifty3929 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:33:36 +0000

That's one of the important reasons - I thought - that we have the FDA in the first place. But these days I'm really not so sure. So many promising treatments rejected (or just stalled forever) while pointless placebos and worse get or remain approved.

So - why again does the FDA exist?

New comment by Nifty3929 in "Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions"

Nifty3929 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:58:59 +0000

Yes. It is not true that anything that makes our lives better or work easier is bad. In fact that's the story of all progress - making peoples lives better and work easier.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "Tidal AI Policy"

Nifty3929 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:04:32 +0000

You are correct, but I think having a good policy - and trying earnestly to enforce it - is a good start, even if that enforcement is very imperfect.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

Nifty3929 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:10:05 +0000

I am super excited for the future! Medical advancements are accelerating, fusion power is on the horizon, space travel is exciting again. This is really an amazing moment in human history.

I think we really can conquer cancer, Alzheimer's and maybe even senescence in the next 20-30 years.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "Wikipedia Workers to Seek Union Recognition"

Nifty3929 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:06:15 +0000

Speaking of keeping separate things separate: remember that Unions (a business in it's own right) is different from the Union Workers that it represents.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "New pancreatic cancer drug might open the door to much longer survival times"

Nifty3929 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:53:20 +0000

Because this? "I believe with little certainty"

Actually, I think it's powerful to acknowledge when my beliefs are weak. I still believe it - I think it's true, and I don't have any conflicting beliefs. But still it would not take a lot of evidence to change my mind, and since this is a prediction about the future, I will not be very surprised to find out I was wrong.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "New pancreatic cancer drug might open the door to much longer survival times"

Nifty3929 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:39:40 +0000

It is more than plausible that spending money on AI is spending money on healthcare. I believe with little certainty that AI will help us find new ways to fight disease, improve our health and live longer lives.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "Apple decided not to roll out Siri in EU after denied request for exemption"

Nifty3929 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:27:43 +0000

Yes, exactly! Also forced EU voters to consider how much they value these services, and whether the regulations are worth it not to have them, or to have watered down versions of them. I say this without judgment - I see it as a legitimate area of consideration.

I think the worst is hugely impactful laws for which exceptions are constantly carved out so nobody can truly evaluate whether the law/reg is a good one or not.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

Nifty3929 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:44:45 +0000

You and I are the same person apparently. Let me tell you about malaria! Or the bends! Or tetanus! Please! Wait, where's everybody going?

New comment by Nifty3929 in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

Nifty3929 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:51:59 +0000

It reminds me of how the Panama canal was built, and actually the first major attempt failed and they gave up. What they learned for the second attempt was that digging was not the hard(est) part to solve - it was how to move the dirt! So much dirt!

Great book on this BTW: Path Between the Seas. I couldn't put it down.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "I'm So Tired of Ads"

Nifty3929 — Sun, 31 May 2026 16:41:23 +0000

Would you be willing to pay a small sum per piece of content? Maybe 10c per video or article? Maybe 1c for a short or something? Assume that it’s anonymous and frictionless (big assumptions, but this is just a thought experiment).

New comment by Nifty3929 in "IXI's autofocusing lenses are almost ready to replace multifocal glasses"

Nifty3929 — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:32:52 +0000

These glasses address farsightedness, which doesn't apply while driving. Worst case you just take them off.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "GTA 6 Developers Unionize"

Nifty3929 — Fri, 29 May 2026 23:54:18 +0000

Basically - building video games is (or seems from the outside) fun and cool, and so there are lots of people who want to do it. In effect, people are willing to be paid in fun, rather than in money. Also, games just generate a lot less revenue overall than boring, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen SaaS apps. By a wide mile. When you look at these SaaS companies they're generating maybe $1M/yr in revenue per employee (not just developer). Some blockbuster games can achieve that, but not many.

So basically, high supply of labor and relatively lower demand for it in games than in boring business/SaaS software.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent"

Nifty3929 — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:59:53 +0000

Yes, and yes!

New comment by Nifty3929 in "DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent"

Nifty3929 — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:56:53 +0000

China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China.

China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.

New comment by Nifty3929 in "Google's Antigravity bait and switch"

Nifty3929 — Thu, 21 May 2026 23:28:01 +0000

The original Antigravity editor is/was just a light reskin on VSCode. My normal workflow - even before the 2.0 update - was to run VScode and AG at the same time, on the same local codebase. AG would do the work, which I would then review in VSCode.

Why not just download and run the IDE you want, alongside the agentic dev tool you want?