Hacker News: ajb

New comment by ajb in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

ajb — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:10:44 +0000

Do you have any thoughts on Mozilla? It has a two-entity structure, but there are a lot of complaints that it is not sticking to its mission (or, slightly differently, that it's not succeeding at it, due to poor strategic choices).

(Apologies if you already addressed this somewhere. Thanks for doing this)

New comment by ajb in "Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]"

ajb — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 06:25:09 +0000

I don't think we necessarily disagree. I am pessimistic about laws being effective in this case, but that doesn't mean we should not try to find ones that are. I like your idea. Thinking and trials in that direction would be good.

Data using organisations often seem to prefer fig-leaf laws that aren't effective, and lobby against ones that might be effective. "My data use is a good use, therefore I should not be subject to restrictions and oversight". Instead, anyone with a use of data which is valuable to the public should not see themselves as on the same side as the advertisers and surveillance vendors. They should see themselves as on the opposite side.

New comment by ajb in "Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]"

ajb — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:57:41 +0000

That's all very well, but we just plain don't have a legal, economic, or technical system which will allow separation of the good uses from the bad uses. Once data is in someone else's possession, there's f-all way to prevent it being used to do whatever the possessor wants. Even if there is a legal agreement, it's easily abrogated, or overridden by insolvency law, or by a company having a "we can update our terms" clause. Some of this I can imagine how to address - insolvency law could be changed, for example - but in the absence of a fully robust system, promises of "we will only use your data for good" are not credible. Those who actually want to use data for good should be on the side of robust assurance of that, not just plead that they can be trusted and that no accountability is needed.

New comment by ajb in "Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]"

ajb — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:21:35 +0000

Yes, but this is preaching to the choir.

The counter must be as visceral is the claim. They make an emotional pitch:your children are in danger, surveillance is the solution. The counter must show the dangers in visceral, emotionally relevant way. This surveillance is actually a risk to parents and children as well - that by the accusation of an opaque, unaccountable system, you will be labelled a pedophile, and your kids taken away. That when sharing a picture of your own child with your own mother, you will have to worry about what the electronic bureaucracy will label your picture as.

Abstractions like privacy,and categorical claims, aren't going to reverse this. A properly pitched campaign could do. Sure, complain that politicians and the public are dumb. That may make you feel better but it won't change this an iota. Talking to people in the terms they care about might.

New comment by ajb in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

ajb — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:38:50 +0000

Depends how it works in the jurisdiction, but in common law usually this form of restriction is like a contract, but between two pieces of land, or between a piece of land and the public, rather than between two persons. In the former case only the current owner on the benefited property can complain. In the latter case, any member of the public can - but I'm not sure if a member of the public can create such a restriction.

New comment by ajb in "7.8 magnitude earthquake shakes part of southern Philippines. Tsunami possible"

ajb — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 07:03:02 +0000

Training and advice is about the expected disaster, not necessarily the one you are in.

In 9/11, lots of people escaped the south tower using elevators, which is the opposite of what you're told to do. There are people who died because they chose to follow the stair route. But others died because they were trapped in elevators.

New comment by ajb in "Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements"

ajb — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 18:37:58 +0000

I appreciate the sentiment, but this is exactly like the expectation that people can be responsible for intervening when self-driving or driver-assistance goes wrong. Human brains are strongly driven to conserve energy. If nothing seems to be happening - when errors become less and less frequent - the more difficult it becomes to guarantee intervention, and the less practiced the human will be at doing so.

I have written factory tests, in which I injected errors to make sure that the factory workers didn't develop "click next" syndrome and actually noticed errors. That's what you'd have to do. It's hard to get an organisation to stick to that, when they add up the time they're paying for in detecting fake errors.

New comment by ajb in "Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute"

ajb — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 13:28:49 +0000

Not necessarily, just that they don't have as many as they can make use of, and that xAI can't make more valuable use of them than renting them out.

New comment by ajb in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

ajb — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 10:24:43 +0000

This is valid for some use cases, but then it needs to be compared with other solar distillation methods, of which there are already a variety at different levels of energy efficiency, complexity, and land use.

New comment by ajb in "Three of our worst VC stories"

ajb — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:11:09 +0000

It used to be that VCs wanted founders to pursue a singleton strategy, because they wanted the diversification to occur at the level of their portfolio - on the grounds that at the level of an individual startup, diversification would less likely to succeed. The catchphrase was that they wanted "pure play" investments. So it would be interesting to know why it's now a cause of friction. (The "pure play" thing was actually from before YC took off and gave founders a bit more agency; and before the "pivot" was popularised; I get the impression that VCs back then were not too happy for a founder to change direction and confuse their portfolio)

New comment by ajb in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

ajb — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:21:31 +0000

There is a fundamental minimum amount of energy needed to desalinate: you can't take less energy to do it,than you could gain back (from osmotic pressure) if you allowed the desalinated water to expand a cylinder containing the residual brine. This is large. This paper is a thermal method, so it doesn't have an electricity input, but to justify their efficiency claim, they should really compare against what you could do by using the same surface area for solar panels, driving a conventional setup. My (limited) understanding is that conventional reverse osmosis is not far from the theoretical optimum, energy-wise, the main difficulties being operational (the membranes need declogging). And of course RO is more expensive than rain.

This paper is interesting, however, in directly producing crystalline salt, which is lower volume than brine and easier to dispose of, maybe even valuable.

New comment by ajb in "Having your insulin pump die while you're on vacation"

ajb — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:40:08 +0000

I think the GP's point is that accountability/responsibility isn't a substance, it doesn't have to be conserved like energy or momentum. I agree with them.

It would be perfectly valid for the law to be that individuals don't need to unpick the corporate web of relationships, but hold any of those who contributed (above some size threshold) culpable for the whole injury, and leave the corporates to arm wrestle about how culpability is assigned between them.

New comment by ajb in "Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL"

ajb — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:57:06 +0000

Odd - they've had that for years, but only on the command line. Wonder if it's different under the hood? They also have firefox containers which also never quite became a first-class feature (you have to install a plugin).

New comment by ajb in "I hated writing until I learned there’s a science to it (2024)"

ajb — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:19:55 +0000

I don't know if it's specifically UK terminology, but here we don't call bathroom silicone "caulk" - we use that term for decorators caulk, which is much more sticky; so needs to be treated differently to silicone. Definitely true that the little tools are amazing for bathroom silicone, not sure what you do with the other stuff

New comment by ajb in "Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs"

ajb — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:39:11 +0000

SanDisk has designed a flash equivalent to HBM, which has 1.6TB/s of bandwidth. I expect that it will be available initially to server manufacturers only, but once supply ramps up will be built into individual machines. At that point it will be practical to run local inference on much larger models. Of course, maybe the SOTA providers will find some way to use even larger ones, but it seems like the returns to scale aren't as much as they were.

New comment by ajb in "That Methyl Methacrylate Tank"

ajb — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:52:09 +0000

Not a direct answer, but there is a standard code for what actions emergency services should take, and the code[1] for this stuff is 3YE, which means "Use foam or dry agent, substance reacts violently/is explosive, BA [breathing apparatus] use is essential, evacuate vicinity, contain spill." So there must be some reason not to let the stuff out.

[1] This is the hazchem code. I think the US uses a different system. A list is here: https://www.ricardo.com/media/radn55jg/dangerous-goods-emerg...

New comment by ajb in "Use boring languages with LLMs"

ajb — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:57:31 +0000

That's a very interesting page, but the language ranking is wildly different for "average percentage" (python bottom) and "success rate" (python second). Sounds like there is some subtly about this.

New comment by ajb in "The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics"

ajb — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:16:44 +0000

The argument works at the margin as well, though. Suppose companies deliver value X and also extract rent Y, and defend Y on the basis that it would threaten the value of pensions to prevent it - this is rebutted in the same way.

New comment by ajb in "The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics"

ajb — Fri, 22 May 2026 08:27:10 +0000

It's true that the current pension provision depends on this. But if pensions are mainly funded by companies which extract monopoly rent, then it would actually be more efficient and be less distortionary to the competitive market to fund them directly out of taxation - one big, simple rent instead of 100,000 different ones clogging everything up.

New comment by ajb in "News outlets are limiting the Internet Archive’s access to their journalism"

ajb — Fri, 22 May 2026 02:49:47 +0000

In effect, robots.txt should have an "embargo" directive?