Hacker News: alasdair_

New comment by alasdair_ in "Anthropic revenue reportedly jumps to more than $11.5B in second quarter"

alasdair_ — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:28:53 +0000

That honestly seems reasonable. AI is more relevant than oil.

New comment by alasdair_ in "Anthropic revenue reportedly jumps to more than $11.5B in second quarter"

alasdair_ — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:26:53 +0000

The average family will be paying plenty for ai, just not directly in the form of tokens.

New comment by alasdair_ in "Anthropic revenue reportedly jumps to more than $11.5B in second quarter"

alasdair_ — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:21:07 +0000

Every llm-wrapper business needs an llm behind it. There are a sizeable number of firms paying 10mm+ a month to offset the people paying $50/month

New comment by alasdair_ in "Anthropic revenue reportedly jumps to more than $11.5B in second quarter"

alasdair_ — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:14:08 +0000

Enterprises will pay tens of millions a month, millions of individuals will pay $100 a month and there will be a long tail as they offer cheaper pricing and perhaps ad-supported pricing.

The average American family won’t be willing to pay more than a Netflix subscription.

I think in five years, it will only be power users that use a model in its raw form - everyone else will mostly consume using wrapper apps.

New comment by alasdair_ in "Gemini 3.7 Flash"

alasdair_ — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:13:22 +0000

What would a hedge fund want to do on this exactly? It’s too slow for hft and I’m not sure what they would be doing where ms matter but is not hft.

New comment by alasdair_ in "Gemini 3.7 Flash"

alasdair_ — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:10:14 +0000

Oh it’s worse than that. There are places where you CAN set a limit. This seems great until you are at the center of a huge traffic spike because of good pr and so you try to change it to a larger number only to be told you need to wait 24 hours for the setting to change.

Biggest traffic day of the decade and our site was down because of google.

New comment by alasdair_ in "MTG Bench: Testing how well LLMs can play Magic"

alasdair_ — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:07:09 +0000

I wrote a rules engine in rust along with a reinforcement learning with MCTS based system to play decks against each other. It can handle aggro decks well enough but complex combo decks like Amulet Titan are tough to get working without expert demos or reward hacking.

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

alasdair_ — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:25:18 +0000

Does this mean Mamdani can build a datacenter in the middle of central park if he wanted to?

New comment by alasdair_ in "Morningstar values SpaceX at $780B, half its IPO target"

alasdair_ — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:49:42 +0000

If the scales are only checked after the heat death of the universe, does it even matter?

If the market can’t actually detect crooks and charlatans until long after they have stolen investors money, its ability to be “correct” is worthless.

Meta AI Support – full system prompt leaked

alasdair_ — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:17:26 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/michaelcummings12/meta-ai-support-prompt/blob/main/system-prompt.md

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48365565

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by alasdair_ in "SF startup is testing robots in Airbnbs, and trashing them, lawsuit claims"

alasdair_ — Sat, 30 May 2026 01:46:16 +0000

Torment Nexus springs to mind

New comment by alasdair_ in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

alasdair_ — Fri, 29 May 2026 02:47:31 +0000

Next you’ll be telling us the shocking news that one of the parties used EMAIL!

New comment by alasdair_ in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

alasdair_ — Fri, 29 May 2026 02:28:09 +0000

A representative of the corporation, while taking over the store, expressly states that the corporation is taking over the consignment agreement, on camera and with several witnesses.

New comment by alasdair_ in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

alasdair_ — Fri, 29 May 2026 02:21:06 +0000

They can seize assets that belong to the entity. They can’t seize assets that belong to other people just because it happens to be on their premises, in the same way that they can’t seize and sell the cars that happen to be in a bankrupt store’s parking lot.

New comment by alasdair_ in "Mythical Man Month"

alasdair_ — Sat, 09 May 2026 03:27:46 +0000

Notably, his essay “no silver bullet” states that there has never been a new technology or way of thinking or working that has led to a 10X increase in the speed of software development.

That was true for almost seventy years until roughly last year.

AI is the silver bullet - my output is genuinely 10X what it was before claude code existed.

New comment by alasdair_ in "4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor"

alasdair_ — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:31:59 +0000

Or skip the half measures and go straight for the dioxygen diflouride.

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...

New comment by alasdair_ in "4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor"

alasdair_ — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:29:07 +0000

>Well met, fellow Uplinker!!

I'm pretty sure this person worked at Playtronics.

New comment by alasdair_ in "There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning"

alasdair_ — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 04:28:04 +0000

I think your post may have more acronyms than any other post I have ever read on hn. Do you have a guide to which specific things you are talking about with each acronym? Deep Learning and Machine Learning are obvious but some of the others I can’t follow at all - they could be so many different things.

New comment by alasdair_ in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

alasdair_ — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:13:02 +0000

Why 20 years? Just because we know, post hoc, the usa outperformed other places in the last 20 years, in no way means the next 20 years will be the same.

If you want a different point to backtest from, try Japan in the 80s and early 90s

New comment by alasdair_ in "Tinybox – Offline AI device 120B parameters"

alasdair_ — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 02:30:21 +0000

I just don’t believe that this can run inference on a 120 billion parameter model at actually useful speeds.

Obviously any Turing machine can run any size of model, so the “120B” claim doesn’t mean much - what actually matters is speed and I just don’t believe this can be speedy enough on models that my $5000 5090-based pc is too slow for and lacks enough vram for.