Hacker News: QuadrupleA

New comment by QuadrupleA in "When did Google get so weird?"

QuadrupleA — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 01:19:40 +0000

Been a reasonably happy DuckDuckGo user for years. It has the SEO slop problems too, and they jumped the AI shark like everybody else, but you can turn the AI off at least and still have your search engine and chatbot be separate tools.

Google let the web descend into SEO slop long ago despite that they could have EASILY spotted and purged low quality over-verbose results and the sites that pooped them out. They make businesses pay to have the top sponsored result, when they're already the top organic result, but the ads are indistinguishable from real results now. They made the web worse for everyone to line their own pockets. Screw them.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "CSS Curiosities of the Past"

QuadrupleA — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:23:55 +0000

IE was such a scourge, a drain on humanity (at least the slice of humanity that made websites). One of Microsoft's great evils - they let the product stagnate for years once they had the market cornered.

Windows has kinda become that now, a low quality user-hostile product forced on people through inertia and monopoly tactics.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI"

QuadrupleA — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:22:08 +0000

Love this quote, seems to apply to all software these days and maybe business generally: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job."

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Compression is prediction"

QuadrupleA — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:13:55 +0000

Ted Chiang made a similar point in his article "ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web" a few years ago:

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-...

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Why Does Everyone Hate AI?"

QuadrupleA — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:52:34 +0000

Point not mentioned: it just doesn't work that well! It lies, it reverts to the mean on every topic, it wastes the reader's time. It's toxically positive, sycophantic. It's such a good mimic that it's insidiously hard to distinguish its bullshit or fake work from real work.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Die analysis of the 8087 math coprocessor's fast bit shifter (2020)"

QuadrupleA — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 02:02:41 +0000

Always amazed how spoiled we are with modern hardware! The 8087 was $500 in today's dollars, and delivered around 50 kFLOPS of performance (0.00005 GFLOPS).

A cheap mobile phone CPU+GPU costs the manufacturer maybe $20, and typically does 50 GFLOPS on the CPU and 500+ on the GPU. So 10 million times the performance for 1/25th the cost.

Humbling too how "worthless" all the incredible ingenuity of the 8087 circuits and die designs now is, although I'm sure many of those innovations live on in modern chips.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "KPMG pulls report on AI usage due to apparent hallucinations"

QuadrupleA — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:26:41 +0000

This hype cycle is unique in that the tech writes its own hype.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

QuadrupleA — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:13:18 +0000

The effort required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude more than to create it.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

QuadrupleA — Tue, 12 May 2026 01:21:43 +0000

Because AI creates unmaintainable messes in any language, and ergonomic ones help humans clean up.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

QuadrupleA — Mon, 11 May 2026 04:36:05 +0000

Not sure how excited I feel about visiting your website and having it auto-download a 8GB model with GPT-3.5 level hallucinations, and then probably crash because I only have 6GB of VRAM. My dad won't be able to use it, or anyone else without a bleeding edge device. On a powerful enough "neural engine" device the battery will be drained quickly, while the heatsink burns a hole in my lap.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

QuadrupleA — Mon, 11 May 2026 04:21:29 +0000

This is just emotional rhetoric. Pretty much any app in the last 20 years has depended on a server somewhere, or a cloud provider. Like an AI provider, they can go down, they can turn off if you don't pay your bill, etc.

And local inference requires fairly beefy hardware, that is FAR from ubiquitous across today's userbases. Local models are also still far dumber than what frontier labs can serve.

Weird that this is getting such a tidal wave of upvotes.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "OpenAI releases GPT-5.5 and GPT-5.5 Pro in the API"

QuadrupleA — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 20:39:21 +0000

Exactly double the cost of GPT 5.4 - $5 per MTok input, $0.50 cached, $30 output.

All the AI players definitely seem to be trying to claw more money out of their users at the moment.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Anonymous request-token comparisons from Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7"

QuadrupleA — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:25:48 +0000

Definitely seems like AI money got tight the last month or two - that the free beer is running out and enshittification has begun.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Opus 4.7 to 4.6 Inflation is ~45%"

QuadrupleA — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:23:38 +0000

One thing I don't see often mentioned - OpenAI API's auto token caching approach results in MASSIVE cost savings on agent stuff. Anthropic's deliberate caching is a pain in comparison. Wish they'd just keep the KV cache hot for 60 seconds or so, so we don't have to pay the input costs over and over again, for every growing conversation turn.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Modern SQLite: Features You Didn't Know It Had"

QuadrupleA — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:10:18 +0000

Love SQLite and most of these features.

On the STRICT mode, I've asked this elsewhere and never gotten an answer: does anyone have a loose-typing example application where SQLite's non-strict, different-type-allowed-for-each-row has been a big benefit? I love the simplicity of SQLite's small number of column types, but the any-type-allowed-anywhere design always seemed a little strange.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "AI Isn't Lightening Workloads. It's Making Them More Intense"

QuadrupleA — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 21:05:36 +0000

One thing I haven't seen mentioned much, in AI coding and other AI-assisted work, is the sheer needless verbosity of models, the walls of text they spew out for us to read through. This alone adds to the workload & fatigue.

There's a thing in writing, "pity the reader" - respect your audience's time, get to the point. In The Elements of Style, "omit needless words."

You can prompt models to be succinct, but the latest ones - GPT 5-series especially - ignore your requests and spew paragraphs upon paragraphs of noise. Maybe it's the incentives of charging per token?

If you want, I can expand on this topic and generate a lengthy comparison chart.

As Platforms Decay, Let's Put Users First (2023)

QuadrupleA — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 03:09:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47560054

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy"

QuadrupleA — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:51:25 +0000

Fun fact: Copilot gives you no way to ignore sensitive files with API keys, passwords, DB credentials, etc.: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/11254#discussi...

So by default you send all this to Microsoft by opening your IDE.

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Some things just take time"

QuadrupleA — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:26:46 +0000

> everybody who is like me, fully onboarded into AI and agentic tools, seemingly has less and less time available because we fall into a trap where we’re immediately filling it with more things

I do wonder if productivity with AI coding has really gone up, or if it just gives the illusion of that, and we take on more projects and burn ourselves out?

New comment by QuadrupleA in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

QuadrupleA — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:18:33 +0000

As a 20+ year Windows user now happily running desktop Linux for about a year - too little, too late. This company has completely lost my trust over the past 5+ years, with all the ads, upsells, silent telemetry, bugs, background process mess, forced updates, poor performance, etc.

It's not only steered me off of Windows, but Azure, Office, and anything else with the Microsoft name on it. I'll do my best to steer family and business customers off likewise.

Trust is earned over years, and whoever the execs are that pushed all these shitty short-term squeezes on their customers, the company now gets to pay the reputational price.