Hacker News: SpicyLemonZest

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports"

SpicyLemonZest — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 03:32:08 +0000

You have to recognize that it's a problem to delegate in the first place. One example I love to trot out is, do you have any toilet seats in your life that kinda slide around bit and don't seem securely attached? It's absolutely trivial to fix this, and it's really annoying when it happens, yet with shocking frequency I encounter people who've just been dealing with the annoyance because they didn't process it as something they could solve.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports"

SpicyLemonZest — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 02:21:15 +0000

> "You have ChatGPT, a 1 billion-user business growing 50-100% a year, what are you doing talking about enterprise and code?" an early backer of OpenAI told FT. "It's a deeply unfocused company."

This is exactly the dynamic I've been worried about.

If you go to OpenAI's site to learn what they're all about, they're pretty clear about it: "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity", "Join us in shaping the future of technology". They think and I agree that ChatGPT is great, but the future of humanity does not depend on precisely how successful this one consumer chatbot is, and so it is not the company's focus. Anyone who understands OpenAI at even a basic level would recognize this, it's neither new nor subtle.

I'm not sure how to avoid the conclusion that OpenAI investors do not understand OpenAI and are just revenue growth junkies.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "Multi-Agentic Software Development Is a Distributed Systems Problem"

SpicyLemonZest — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 01:04:54 +0000

Subagents working on shared state are primarily a context window hack. They're powerful to the extent that they enable solving problems an agent with global state couldn't solve due to context pollution. I'm sure there are caveats, but to first approximation, a main agent that can comprehend the entire code in enough detail to sort out those inconsistencies could have just written the code itself.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "NYC to open municipal grocery store in 2027"

SpicyLemonZest — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:24:21 +0000

It could potentially be a ruse by egg producers. Certainly there's reason for suspicion. But darth_avocado's claim was that grocery stores were in on the ruse and must have extracted huge profits from price gouging consumers. I think that's obviously false. You'll note that in the jury case the plaintiffs were themselves megacorporations, and substantially larger ones than the producers they were suing at that.

I don't blame consumers for deciding they don't care about the underlying market structure and just want cheap eggs. But you can't run a store on that basis, and if the city feels like it has to there'll be problems.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "NYC to open municipal grocery store in 2027"

SpicyLemonZest — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:55:37 +0000

You can't conclude it was a ruse without knowing the elasticity of egg demand!

This is ultimately the kind of thing that worries me about a municipal grocery store. Will voters allow it to respond in rational ways to market conditions, or will they expect the city to go out and extort some egg suppliers when market prices rise above what they consider reasonable?

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "Bouncer: Block "crypto", "rage politics", and more from your X feed using AI"

SpicyLemonZest — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:28:21 +0000

People absorb politics from our social environment. We judge what's good and bad, what's controversial and uncontroversial, based on our models of the political discussions we've heard among peers and what we imagine they'd say. Every Twitter user I know comes to believe that the political dynamics on Twitter are a reasonable approximation of the political dynamics in the US, no matter how much they repeat the mantra that Twitter isn't real life, and this leads them to repeatedly overestimate how much people support crazy niche positions or care about esoteric issues.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "Schools Never Taught Critical Thinking: AI Exposed the Lie"

SpicyLemonZest — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:07:56 +0000

It covers what I think other languages may consider a subset of literacy. The point is to carefully avoid calling anyone stupid, while acknowledging that the ability to deeply think through what other people are communicating is a learned skill which often must be explicitly taught.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true"

SpicyLemonZest — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:33:19 +0000

I agree it's directionally correct, but only in the ways that don't matter to this discussion. If 2026->2029 AI is as much of an improvement as 2023->2026 AI, is anything we learn about how to leverage it in 2026 going to stay relevant?

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "The rational conclusion of doomerism is violence"

SpicyLemonZest — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:03:58 +0000

They are! Yudkowsky sat down with Senator Bernie Sanders last month to explain what's at stake, successfully convinced him that it's a big deal, and Sanders has now proposed a national moratorium on AI data centers (https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-o...) to help slow things down. That's pretty direct, and a lot more useful than random violence by random people.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing"

SpicyLemonZest — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:03:30 +0000

I’ve been car shopping recently, and I’ve found myself deliberately seeking out videos, because I’ve found that it’s very hard to get a sense of what the thing is really going to look like from static photos. Unstaged photos make everything look uglier, staged photos require adjusting for the unknown staging.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building an AI clone to replace him in meetings"

SpicyLemonZest — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:52:20 +0000

Yes. People don’t always frame it as “ooh, if only I could meet Mark Zuckerberg”, but most people IME are at least a little wistful about the kind of company where you’re on friendly terms with your CEO.

Is this a meaningful replacement for that? Probably not, but I’m not prepared to rule it out. Give 1 in 1000 Claudes a Zuckerberg persona and you’d get some chuckles out of it I bet.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "Bouncer: Block "crypto", "rage politics", and more from your X feed using AI"

SpicyLemonZest — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:08:48 +0000

Well, your heavily diluted position is actually a great example. One of the running threads of the current administration has been that they do not think corruption is bad and routinely engage in open bribery. Tim Cook gave the president a gold bar on national TV!

But people who criticize this are almost invariably enraged about it. And so I’ve encountered otherwise informed people with this kind of attitude towards “rage politics” who either don’t know about the issue or assume it must be exaggerated because people are so mad about it.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"

SpicyLemonZest — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:42:14 +0000

Here I think the truth is pretty far to one side. Most engineering teams work at a level of abstraction where revenue attribution is too vague and approximate to produce meaningful numbers. The company shipped 10 major features last quarter and ARR went up $1m across 4 new contracts using all of them; what is the dollar value of Feature #7? Well, each team is going to internally attribute the entire new revenue to themselves, and I don’t know what any other answer could possibly look like.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind"

SpicyLemonZest — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:57:57 +0000

> The obvious objection is that code produced at that speed becomes unmanageable, a liability in itself. That is a reasonable concern, but it largely applies when agents produce code that humans then maintain. Agentic platforms are being iterated upon quickly, and for established patterns and non-business-critical code, which is the majority of what most engineering organizations actually maintain, detailed human familiarity with the codebase matters less than it once did. A messy codebase is still cheaper to send ten agents through than to staff a team around. And even if the agents need ten days to reason through an unfamiliar system, that is still faster and cheaper than most development teams operating today. The liability argument holds in a human-to-human or agent-to-human world. In an agent-to-agent world, it largely dissolves.

I keep seeing this assumption that "unmanageable" caps out at "kinda hard to reason about", and anyone with experience in large codebases can tell you that's not so. There are software components I own today which require me to routinely explain to junior engineers (and indeed to my own instances of Claude) why their PR is unsound and I won't let them merge it no matter how many tests they add.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "Bouncer: Block "crypto", "rage politics", and more from your X feed using AI"

SpicyLemonZest — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:41:16 +0000

I would emphasize misinformed, not uninformed. If Policy X has 30% of people politely supportive, 20% of people politely opposed, and 50% of people incandescently furious about it, you're going to mistakenly think it has majority support.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "Bouncer: Block "crypto", "rage politics", and more from your X feed using AI"

SpicyLemonZest — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:04:47 +0000

I don't think that automated filtering on conditionals like "rage politics" is a good idea. At best, you're going to end up with a confusing feed that contains reactions to the outrage without the actual outrage that's driving them; at worst, you're going to end up systematically misinformed on political topics that people find outrageous.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

SpicyLemonZest — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:50:01 +0000

You’re equating two things that aren’t the same. I’m not still manually writing code, but it’s not at all because Claude can produce better code than me. It’s worse at CRUD apps and a lot worse at domain specific bits. But it’s more parallelizable, so if I drive it well I can focus my skill on the small subset of problems that actually require it and achieve increased throughput.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "US – Iran negotiations end with no deal reached"

SpicyLemonZest — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 06:56:39 +0000

Whoever told you this was lying to you. Trump released a statement on the first night of the war explicitly stating that regime change was the goal. Disarmament is the new goal he fabricated when the first one didn't work.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "US – Iran negotiations end with no deal reached"

SpicyLemonZest — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 06:52:05 +0000

Marco Rubio, who was unanimously confirmed by the Senate with a pretty explicit expectation that he would be the adult in the room for this kind of crisis. But he was too busy watching UFC with the President to attend or even monitor the negotiations.

New comment by SpicyLemonZest in "US – Iran negotiations end with no deal reached"

SpicyLemonZest — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 06:33:01 +0000

With respect, I think it's extremely clear what's actually happening, and the idea that it's confusing is a defense mechanism. The US and Israel launched a series of decapitation strikes, with the explicit and repeatedly stated expectation that this would lead to the overthrow of the Iranian government.

Then it didn't work, so they started a strategic bombing campaign.

Then that campaign proved ineffective at keeping the Strait of Hormuz open, leading to a sustained oil crisis.

So now here we are, with the entire world in a worse position than the status quo, and yet neither the US nor Iran feeling so defeated that they're willing to accept a conclusion worse than the status quo.