Hacker News: _delirium

Why is everyone's robot folding clothes?

_delirium — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:37:36 +0000

Article URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/robots-folding-clothes

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779644

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by _delirium in "Sonnet 4.6 Elevated Rate of Errors"

_delirium — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 07:38:00 +0000

Hard to square that with how good open-weights models are getting? I'm doing stuff with Qwen3.5-4b that required a frontier hosted model less than a year ago.

New comment by _delirium in "Mayor of Paris removed parking spaces, reduced the number of cars"

_delirium — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 04:10:17 +0000

It's not just an inner city issue. Rural areas in the U.S. are bad too! Parts of the rural south and rural midwest have homicide rates that are completely off the charts for a first-world country (Holmes County, MS; Scioto County, OH; McDowell County, WV).

New comment by _delirium in "Kill Chain"

_delirium — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 03:54:19 +0000

The key part to me:

> Congress wrote to the Secretary of Defense about the extent of AI use in the strikes. The New Yorker asked whether Claude could be trusted to obey orders in combat, whether it might resort to blackmail as a self-preservation strategy, and whether the Pentagon’s chief concern should be that the chatbot had a personality. Almost none of this had any relationship to reality. The targeting for Operation Epic Fury ran on a system called Maven. Nobody was arguing about Maven.

Kill Chain

_delirium — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 01:51:28 +0000

Article URL: https://artificialbureaucracy.substack.com/p/kill-chain

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473625

Points: 21

# Comments: 4

New comment by _delirium in "Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan"

_delirium — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 07:21:10 +0000

Thank you for the link! Now that is the article I wanted on this topic.

New comment by _delirium in "Yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan"

_delirium — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:37:35 +0000

The article didn't answer my main question, which is how the economics work. How does it add up to have high-touch home delivery of $5 yogurt packages?

New comment by _delirium in "Layoffs at Block"

_delirium — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 02:21:43 +0000

Largely in-person gigs in the SF Bay Area, yeah. One reason the rents are up so much.

New comment by _delirium in "IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption"

_delirium — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 04:40:18 +0000

Economy-wide productivity can be measured reasonably well, although there are a few different measures [1]. The big question I guess is whether AI will make a measurable impact there. Historically tech has had less impact than people thought it would, as noted in Robert Solow's classic quip that "You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics". [2]

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/topics/sub-issues/measuring-producti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

The allegations against a San Francisco social climber accused of sex crimes

_delirium — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 04:33:34 +0000

Article URL: https://sfstandard.com/2026/02/12/mickey-gerold-sex-crimes-investigation/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47021087

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

Elon Musk's Sci-Fi Hyperloop Failed

_delirium — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 04:24:48 +0000

Article URL: https://washingtonian.com/2026/02/12/how-elon-musks-sci-fi-hyperloop-failed/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46998911

Points: 9

# Comments: 2

New comment by _delirium in "Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores"

_delirium — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 04:16:56 +0000

> those new self-checkout shopping carts

I'm going to miss those. Two nice things about them compared to a normal self-checkout: 1) you see things ring up as you shop instead of at the end, which is nice in case of errors or unexpected prices, 2) you can shop directly into a reusable bag or backpack instead of repacking everything at the end.

AI and jobs: The decline started before ChatGPT

_delirium — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 05:55:56 +0000

Article URL: https://engineeringprompts.substack.com/p/ai-and-jobs-the-decline-started-before

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46688378

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

Corporate Governance Authoritarianism

_delirium — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 18:43:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.businesslawprofessors.com/2026/01/corporate-governance-authoritarianism/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46660673

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by _delirium in "The truth Elon left out"

_delirium — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 23:50:47 +0000

Both sides here are $100B+ entities! But neither one is acting like it. The plaintiff is shitposting on Twitter, and the respondent is counter-shitposting on their blog (and also Twitter).

New comment by _delirium in "ICE is using facial-recognition technology to quickly arrest people"

_delirium — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 08:21:05 +0000

There are many unresolved gray areas around what exactly the 4th amendment permits in the way of what United States v. Knotts called "dragnet-type law enforcement practices". Knotts suggested they might not be permitted, even if they were made up of permissible individual parts, but didn't elaborate. More recent case law has held, for example, that cell phone companies turning over large quantities of records is a 4th amendment search requiring a warrant, even if they do it voluntarily (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States). Most other types of dragnets haven't been litigated enough to have solid caselaw on their boundaries afaik.

I don't know if it's likely a court will do anything about this particular program, but from what I've read I don't think 4th amendment scholars think this area is at all settled.

New comment by _delirium in "Assorted less(1) tips"

_delirium — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 18:14:01 +0000

> I've got more less tips than the Bible's got Psalms

But there are (at least) 150 Psalms! You're going to need more less tips to match that.

New comment by _delirium in "A guide to local coding models"

_delirium — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 03:52:48 +0000

That's good to know, thanks. In my case nearly 100% of my code ends up public on GitHub, so I assume everyone's code models are training on it anyway. But would be worth considering if I had proprietary codebases.

New comment by _delirium in "A guide to local coding models"

_delirium — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:28:00 +0000

As a third option, I've found I can do a few hours a day on the $20/mo Google plan. I don't think Gemini is quite as good as Claude for my uses, but it's good enough and you get a lot of tokens for your $20. Make sure to enable the Gemini 3 preview in gemini-cli though (not enabled by default).

The Returns to Government R&D: Evidence from U.S. Appropriations Shocks

_delirium — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 21:52:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.dallasfed.org/research/papers/2023/wp2305

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45715495

Points: 12

# Comments: 0