Hacker News: __alexs

New comment by __alexs in "Interview with Boris Cherny [video]"

__alexs — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:52:02 +0000

Productivity theatre is when activity becomes celebrated over outcomes. It's absolutely everywhere in US tech culture.

New comment by __alexs in "If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level"

__alexs — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:02:13 +0000

This makes no sense at all as soon as you start trying to define where the internal/external line actually is.

New comment by __alexs in "Orion Browser by Kagi"

__alexs — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 11:00:07 +0000

So glad I stopped wasting my subscription fee on these stupid vanity projects.

New comment by __alexs in "Sealed tomb filled with paintings and inscriptions discovered in Egypt"

__alexs — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:57:53 +0000

Is it still a tomb if someone already stole all of the human remains centuries ago?

New comment by __alexs in "Sealed tomb filled with paintings and inscriptions discovered in Egypt"

__alexs — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:56:50 +0000

Christianity has an ancient tradition of relics in which even in the absence of an actual corpse people will just pick up some random bone and be like "this was some old ladies actual hand, it has magic powers now" and then parade it around the city every year.

I just got back from a triple to Naples where there's a church that had a secret skull collecting cult under it for decades, it's a tourist attraction now. Yes it is still full of peoples skulls.

So yes, it seems like there is a statute of limitations on our obedience to the dead.

New comment by __alexs in "$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol"

__alexs — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 07:03:34 +0000

I'm sure some people said the same about ballet.

New comment by __alexs in "Grok 4.5"

__alexs — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:04:07 +0000

Is it somehow LESS nerdy to understand the geopolitics behind the tech we use? I guess we have different definitions of nerd.

New comment by __alexs in "How to Survive 3 Years in North Korea as a Foreigner"

__alexs — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:17:42 +0000

NK is so heavily militarised and culturally isolated that an extraordinary rendition is likely to backfire even more so than they typically do.

New comment by __alexs in "98% Isn't Much"

__alexs — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:16:19 +0000

The same way people generally equate luddism with anything. By entirely misunderstanding what it was to make a point that sounds snappy without all of that boring understanding history stuff.

New comment by __alexs in "In Praise of Observational Evidence"

__alexs — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:35:17 +0000

You are simultaneously arguing for a more complex and nuanced testing approach that demands much higher quantities of data as a result, and also against RCTs, which perhaps rightly you've identified as having suffered from the same kind of cost disease as all other health care in the USA. I can't help but feel like you've identified the wrong root cause here.

New comment by __alexs in "Half-Baked Product"

__alexs — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 14:41:40 +0000

The problem is that people are not listening to each other. Part of this is just working together is hard, but a bigger part is that there is status associated with being "in charge" of things as founder. The desire to feel like you are controlling the outcome and people need to take instruction and direction from you rather than working together to find a path through the forest.

New comment by __alexs in "Ray Tracer in SQL"

__alexs — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:56:21 +0000

Good stress test for your SQL parser I guess.

New comment by __alexs in "Claude Sonnet 5"

__alexs — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:31:15 +0000

100% this. I read these caveats in new models and all I hear is "we made sure this model has no idea about computer security." Such a weird thing to brag about.

New comment by __alexs in "GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks"

__alexs — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 08:22:07 +0000

I find it hard to trust a ranking system that gives Sonnet a higher capability score than Fable.

New comment by __alexs in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

__alexs — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:00:55 +0000

If the EU develops a market leading model to even control in the first place I think that would at least be a neutrally good outcome.

New comment by __alexs in "Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model"

__alexs — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 08:38:18 +0000

Actually it's the opposite. Per mm of silicon it's massively less efficient and making enough chips and powering them is a major bottleneck right now. Worse, scaling to larger models requires more of our absolute best quality silicon manufacturing, where e.g. an H200 mostly just needs more memory.

New comment by __alexs in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

__alexs — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 08:05:07 +0000

Oh sure the EU is terrible at all technology policy but it also seems like this is sort of a don't interrupt your enemy when they are making as mistake situation.

If the US commit to handicapping their AI industry like this it's going to destroy the competitiveness of those companies globally. All of those US spending commitments on data centres etc are going to collapse, or americans will need to pay 2x the token cost of the rest of the world. Both very bad options.

New comment by __alexs in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

__alexs — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 07:51:51 +0000

I don't understand how this doesn't entirely screw the TAM for these companies?

As an EU company I think I now basically have to consider US AI as hostile and avoid it.

New comment by __alexs in "Half-Life 2 in a Browser"

__alexs — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 13:07:46 +0000

There are legal forms of killing. It is only via the application of our legal institutions that criminality is decided. No specific act on its own is criminal, there is no Platonic Crime.

New comment by __alexs in "Half-Life 2 in a Browser"

__alexs — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:04:14 +0000

This doesn't illustrate anything. OJ was innocent until the second trial found him guilty, they just had a different variety of punishments available.