Hacker News: Zigurd

New comment by Zigurd in "Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption"

Zigurd — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:45:42 +0000

Many, maybe even most Russians would like to be part of Europe, even if they would complain about the terms that would enable them to join pan European organizations. For now they are just potential Europeans.

New comment by Zigurd in "Most people prefer traditional architecture"

Zigurd — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 20:49:09 +0000

Nostalgia and white guys have a fraught relationship. The good old days weren't even that good for them, killing them off with cigarettes and booze in their replica colonial and Cape Cod homes.

There isn't just "some" racism and segregation, either. Check the text messages sent by cops in the Karen Reid case. What are the odds that the most racist cops in the state worked that case?

New comment by Zigurd in "Most people prefer traditional architecture"

Zigurd — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 19:31:25 +0000

You don't have to return to the 1950s to find racism and segregation in present day America. There's a lot of work yet to do. Get on it or get out of the way.

New comment by Zigurd in "Most people prefer traditional architecture"

Zigurd — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:56:27 +0000

I'm kind of counting on normal being in the minority here.

New comment by Zigurd in "Most people prefer traditional architecture"

Zigurd — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:42:12 +0000

Brutalism isn't cheaper. Not even in the secondary market. Brutalist masterpieces like the Barbican are highly desirable residences.

New comment by Zigurd in "Most people prefer traditional architecture"

Zigurd — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:38:54 +0000

The worst architecture is a combination of cost optimization and aiming for looking traditional-ish. That's a recipe for future blight.

New comment by Zigurd in "Most people prefer traditional architecture"

Zigurd — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:35:29 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by Zigurd in "25 years of mass surveillance is enough"

Zigurd — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:21:05 +0000

You are wildly optimistic about police priorities and effectiveness, with or without flock cameras, when it comes to property crime.

New comment by Zigurd in "Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit"

Zigurd — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 21:30:38 +0000

Isn't this how every agent works these days? Apple and Google are working on tool calling for apps, but that's still going to be backstopped by screen scraping for years very likely.

It's a good bet that everybody's got equivalent CFAA boilerplate in their terms, so I guess all agentic automations are crimes now.

New comment by Zigurd in "An AI deal with China could get Donald Trump his Nobel Prize"

Zigurd — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 16:50:51 +0000

We are all adapting our methods to the times.

New comment by Zigurd in "Bad benchmarks and evals: Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires"

Zigurd — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:21:26 +0000

I don't mean to make you write a dissertation but to say that AI benchmarks can "capture properties that generalize from examining performance against a small set of tasks" is a bald assertion. It's a hypothesis without a theory behind it.

I can profile some code and then tell you where the slow parts are. Unless there's some explanatory power to an AI benchmark, it's a bit like benchmarking pillows visually.

New comment by Zigurd in "AI recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all"

Zigurd — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 21:24:05 +0000

I'm sure they also use the Gemini coding agent to write new Gemini code. But that's far short of self improvement.

New comment by Zigurd in "AI recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all"

Zigurd — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 21:06:40 +0000

I thought by now AIs would not only be rewriting their code, but rewriting CPU microcode to optimize how their code is written and executed. Nowhere close it turns out.

New comment by Zigurd in "David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models"

Zigurd — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:56:41 +0000

LMFTFY: If all the LLM pure plays who are stuck between impossible valuations and the inability to IPO are in agreement that they should colludes to conserve capital, they might not flame out before they figure out how to fix their numbers, and they might not be seen as admitting that more training data plus more GPUs will never lead to AGI.

New comment by Zigurd in "David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models"

Zigurd — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:46:25 +0000

Which AI CEO hasn't been gyrating between scaremongering and selling the shining city on a hill?

New comment by Zigurd in "David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models"

Zigurd — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:42:08 +0000

From a guy who thinks spacs and crypto aren't in need of regulation, unless the regulators are fully captured, either.

New comment by Zigurd in "Sam Altman and Elon Musk Support Dario Amodei's Proposal to Pace AI Development"

Zigurd — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 20:28:27 +0000

It's the 1960s missile gap in the 21st century, and the only people who aren't susceptible are the Russians because they can't afford table stakes. The Chinese have 47 humanoid robot companies and they need fewer than one. They have apartments for half again as many people as can urbanize, and that's a mania we should have mirrored. Our dead malls aren't big enough to convert into data centers so we have to build Brobdingnagian metal sheds so that we're not caught short in the GPU gap. Feh.

New comment by Zigurd in "LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'"

Zigurd — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 12:41:22 +0000

If you use streaming at all, you can't defend against all data collection, but you can minimize it. Don't put your TV on your network. Use a streaming box and keep it powered off unless you're using it. Not just turned off, but unplugged.

A TV that's plugged into power and is on your LAN is way too opaque about what it's doing when, and it has access to too many ways of sensing what you are doing.

New comment by Zigurd in "Sam Altman and Elon Musk Support Dario Amodei's Proposal to Pace AI Development"

Zigurd — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 11:58:55 +0000

You are right it won't work, but a race with China is in the imaginations of politicians taken in by AI CEOs scaremongering. The Chinese are probably willing to stand by and watch the US overbuild AI data centers.

New comment by Zigurd in "Will there be a 7G?"

Zigurd — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:58:02 +0000

Everyone uses the example of stadiums, but the occupancy rate of stadiums makes the economics of the network and backhaul iffy. I would guess only the biggest NFL stadiums get it as a showcase. Maybe parts of Manhattan, too.

Chinese cities, especially at train stations and the surrounding area get really impressive flows of people every day. But even in China I would expect that while they might have a lot more 5G SA when in the US, that the radios are actually mid band and not millimeter wave for most coverage. You still get higher capacity and low latency, but most people probably don't notice the low latency, except maybe Chinese autonomous taxis faking it till they make it.