<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: alexjplant</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alexjplant</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 18 Jun 2026 04:47:13 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=alexjplant" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> It seems to really be a nice step-up and is getting quite close to the frontier.<p>IMHO it's already surpassed them. I vastly prefer my personal GLM and OpenCode setup to the Claude Code and Opus one that I have to use at work. The former makes way fewer StackOverflow brogrammer-tier mistakes and is considerably better at following instructions. The harness UX is also vastly superior as it doesn't ignore, randomly change, or incorrectly report settings.<p>Maybe it's the harness and I'd have even greater success with OpenCode and Anthropic, but I think it safe to say that Anthropic's moat is evaporating.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:37:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573812</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573812</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48573812</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "RTX 5080 and RTX 3090 Setup: 80 Tok/s on Qwen 3.6 27B Q8"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I drop photo of my water meter and tell it to read the value and serial number. It was far from instant but it was also easily under 3 minutes and result was correct.<p>"Useful" as in "has a use that isn't just for show". It takes me two seconds to read a photo of a water meter. Having an LLM read it for me in 3 minutes isn't useful. Similarly small models are capable of tool use (e.g. web searches) but their synthesis leaves much to be desired. As an example I'd ask some small models to find examples of products with specific characteristics and they'd come back with only one or two because they discounted other possibilities incorrectly by reasoning themselves out of it.<p>> Feels like he was just comparing some benchmarks.<p>On what do you base this assertion?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:56:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48530414</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48530414</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48530414</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The Claude web UI popped a modal up a few days ago advertising their new model to me. It was full of HTML tags that were escaped or otherwise not rendered so that the text was literally<p><pre><code>  <b>Included in your plan limits until Jun 22</b> <br><br>Fable takes 2x the usage of Opus.
  <b> Switch models when a message is flagged</b><k <br> When safety measures flag a message, automatically switch to a different model to keep chatting. When off, your chat will pause instead. <a href="https://support.claude.com/en/articles/153636
  target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" > Learn more</a>
</code></pre>
...and this was presumably generated with the flagship model from the world's most prestigious LLM company.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:48:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48530298</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48530298</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48530298</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "RTX 5080 and RTX 3090 Setup: 80 Tok/s on Qwen 3.6 27B Q8"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've spent the past week trying to scheme a way to get affordable local inference of something useful (Qwen3.6-36B-A3B) for ~$500 and have come to the conclusion that it simply isn't viable. A pair of power-restricted P100s in a workstation gets close but the workstations themselves are expensive and rare as hen's teeth (not to mention loud and large). I think early '27 will be when things open up as the hardware market unclenches and further strides are made in small capable models.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:51:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48519662</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48519662</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48519662</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "APC–2 – A professional record cutter for producing original playback discs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I've heard every lazy comment about hipsters and rich kids who are supposedly their target audience, and the cost of the products, as if the visible ingredients are all that accounting measure. Swiss watches cost orders of magnitude more than TE's amazing inventions, and their only purpose seems to be to remind the wearer how amazing they are when they look at it.<p>Nobody pretends that high-end watches are anything besides objets d'art and even then not every watch is a Rolex synonymous with conspicuous consumption. TE, on the other hand, has legions of fans that buy this stuff without knowing the first thing about music production just because they think it's cool and want to try it out. Nobody who buys a $700 Tissot thinks it tells better time than a $17 Casio.<p>I have no problem with any of this. The world needs more aspiring creatives and it's none of my business how these consumers choose to spend their money. The fact that you find it appropriate to unilaterally shit on people who have nice watches while being in possession of a $2000 groovebox is, however, as the kids say, "a choice."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 02:42:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440791</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440791</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440791</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Ask HN: How do you find deep technical content?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'd love an invite if you have one to spare (no expectation either way). Email is in my profile if you feel so inclined.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:51:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406689</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406689</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406689</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Patching my guitar amp's firmware"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sorry WHAT?! I was under the impression this whole time that this wasn't feasible due to asymmetric key encryption with the private keys baked deep into the hardware. Perhaps I'm misremembering but Cliff (the founder) is very big on protecting trade secrets so I'm rather surprised you were able to. Or do you mean you were able to flash new firmware, not reverse-engineer the existing one?<p>Either way I don't blame you for not writing it up. The same guy just recently accused another industry player of "infringing on [his] idea" with a product because he "filed a preliminary patent". I've been using Fractals since long before they were cool but based on the guy's forum posts I think he's having a hard time navigating the modern internet cultural landscape (the tenuous nature of his legal argument notwithstanding). It's a real shame as he's clearly super talented but I think trolls have gotten to him.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 01:17:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392484</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392484</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48392484</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can only speak for myself but my brain was the Wild West when I was a kid. There was no canon for it to draw on in terms of how or why things were the way they were and this especially applied to creative pursuits like TV shows, movies, music, and video games. I had all sorts of insane ideas about how cool it'd be to implement certain mechanics, characters, etc. in games I played but this was, of course, virtually impossible at the time. Decompilation paves a reliable path to this type of experimentation - see all of the ridiculous SM64 and Goldeneye mods that are available now (with demos on YouTube).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 30 May 2026 01:00:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48331285</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48331285</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48331285</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've heard several LDS adherents talk about these people and I get the impression that they <i>really</i> don't appreciate the practices or the negative media attention that the polygamists bring to their faith. It's rather out of character for each of the people I heard this from to speak ill of anybody at all so I'm pretty sure they feel strongly about it.<p>As an atheist I don't claim loudmouth internet "GoD iSnT ReAl ShEePlE" edgelords so I understand the frustration.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 20:49:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329060</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329060</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48329060</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not incompatible with my satirical post (I wrote "performant," a notorious tech neologism, not performative). Whether subconsciously or not people 100000% use language to communicate and determine others' social tribe membership.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2026 16:06:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48195205</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48195205</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48195205</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Let's double-click on that. It's important to keep top of mind that using disruptive words and patterns in conversation isn't always driven by LLMs — reasoning from first principles tells us that problematic usages like this existed beforehand. One of my load-bearing career learnings is that people used this shape of language as a shibboleth long before game-changing tools like ChatGPT started slopping so much of what people read. It's a performant way of categorizing people into a very specific tech culture in-group based on vibes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 17:22:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48182536</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48182536</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48182536</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I don't think using AI to write code is AI psychosis or bad at all, but if you just prompt the AI and believe what it tell you then you have AI psychosis.<p>Today's frontier models are genuinely useful as rubber ducks or grunt units. They are horrible for actual problem solving. These tools are not capable of actual reasoning. They will happily crap out a broken, untyped, untested Next.js monstrosity with no discernible architecture. They will build esoteric shell scripts to perform operations that could be done idiomatically and simply with tools already in your codebase. They will tell you to walk to the car wash then have the car wash valet your car back to you when confronted with the flaw in their logic. They will validate incorrect beliefs like ketchup being an acceptable hot dog condiment or the notion that "The Red Hot Chili Peppers" make good music. They have no taste, no anima, no drive.<p>Rule #1: Do not anthropomorphize the LLM. It is a million monkeys at a million typewriters piped into a digital sieve. I don't know how or why people place such trust in them while bemoaning other technology in our lives for being so broken ("my algorithm [sic] only shows me X", "the new iPhone update sucks", etc). If everybody followed this rule then the deluge of emoji-ridden hokum pouring into Slack workspaces and GitHub PRs around the world would cease but I'm not holding my breath.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 May 2026 17:46:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48162278</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48162278</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48162278</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I never left anything valuable or personal at my desk when I worked in an office simply because I had a very nonzero number of colleagues who acted like animals. My fizzy waters, coffee, and snacks would be consumed without permission or replenishment. Chairs, monitors, and input peripherals would get swapped without asking. Desks surfaces would be sat on with chairs used as footstools. Corporate effluvia of all types would end up on my "unused desk" because I wasn't in at the exact moment some roving bandit walked by looking for a spot to dump their crates of paper and binders.<p>Some people simply have no regard for others and will mess with or jack your shit. Don't give them the chance.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 19:42:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126484</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126484</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48126484</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "The rise and fall of snake oil"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> the current "It's got electrolytes" craze<p>The modern emphasis on electrolytes is directionally correct but ultimately silly. Most electrolyte satchets and drinks are just overpriced salt water with artificial flavoring and sweeteners. The majority of the Western world actually fails to meet their recommended intake of potassium and magnesium. The former is rare in beverages because of its bitter taste and possible drug interactions. Magnesium is also used somewhat sparingly because certain forms create GI distress. This is very unfortunate since both of these minerals are essential to overall health and of great benefit to the cardiovascular and circulatory systems when taken in recommended amounts.<p>I dump Lite Salt (potassium and sodium chloride in equal amounts), Stevia, and powdered grapefruit into a bottle and shake to make my own electrolyte drink. It's dirt cheap and tastes like flat Fresca.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 04:25:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104182</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104182</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48104182</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've written this before, but C# is a great language held back by its culture. I'd say that 80% of C# shops I've seen used it because they were started in the late 00s by some IT guy with a surplus HP server and a dream whose whole world was Microsoft products. They were staffed by people with little knowledge of OSS products who self-identify as ".NET developers" instead of software engineers. Almost invariably they seem to have some gnarly legacy monolith that everybody is slowly chipping away at while old-timers continue deploying .NET services to IIS running on Azure VMs because it's a small evolution of what they've been doing for the better part of 20 years.<p>In the interest of fairness the San Francisco version of this is also a thing: a giant, untyped ball of Rails spaghetti from the same period running on Heroku that everybody has Stockholm Syndrome'd their way into loving because of Ruby's elegance and beauty. The burden is merely shifted from a large Microsoft to a series of small SaaS companies :-)<p>Exceptions to this rule exist (hence my "80%") and modern .NET is lovely but it seems that the non-Java/Python mindshare is now taken up by the Golangs and Rusts of the world. It's a true shame since I do love C# for basically being a better Java.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 03:47:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48103975</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48103975</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48103975</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Tesla is recalling its cheaper Cybertruck because the wheels might fall off"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>With the weight of the batteries in back it might be fine. The issue with RWD trucks with traditional drivetrains is the lack of traction owing to all of the weight being over the non-drive wheels. Driving my F-150 in the snow or rain was always dicey because of this.<p>That being said I wouldn't touch a Tesla with a barge pole for reasons numerous.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 14:46:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064021</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064021</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064021</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Talking to 35 Strangers at the Gym"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>  instead that they include the name of a person they just met in every sentence because it made that person like them more.<p>I've never read this book but have learned through cultural osmosis that this practice largely originated from it. I always found it rather stilted and ever since discovering where it came from I view it with a degree of suspicion. A contrasting, more generous reading is that the people who read the book and do this are trying to do more of the "win friends" part than "influence people." I'm also notoriously bad with names so I can't really blame somebody for perhaps trying to use mine verbally to commit it to memory :-).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 04 May 2026 16:28:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48010910</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48010910</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48010910</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Dav2d"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Wordpress runs like 70% of the web and you can really feel it from the 1500ms+ TFFB most sites have. PhpBB is not much better.<p>At least phpBB died 15 years ago with most communities migrating to Xenforo. I'm not quite sure how or why WP is still around with so many SSGs and SaaS site builders floating around these days.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 03 May 2026 15:03:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47997640</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47997640</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47997640</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Claude Code refuses requests or charges extra if your commits mention "OpenClaw""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> casting about for viable egress paths if I need to flee Claude Code<p>Check out OpenCode (the OSS product [1]) and OpenCode Go/Zen (the LLMaaS [2]). Use a more expensive model with larger context (like GLM-5.1) for orchestration and cheaper models for coding and iteration on acceptance criteria (writing and passing tests). I also throw a more expensive vision-capable model into the mix like Gemini 3 Flash to iterate on UI tasks using Playwright. With the base usage in Go and pay as you go on cheaper models like MiniMax you can get a lot done for not a lot of coin.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode</a><p>[2] <a href="https://opencode.ai/go" rel="nofollow">https://opencode.ai/go</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:26:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47964860</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47964860</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47964860</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by alexjplant in "Ramp's Sheets AI Exfiltrates Financials"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As the Dead Kennedys opined: "Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death"! [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=FV1YVZV-Wb8" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=FV1YVZV-Wb8</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2026 22:40:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47955668</link><dc:creator>alexjplant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47955668</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47955668</guid></item></channel></rss>