Hacker News: alfalfasprout

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Why We're Banning AI"

alfalfasprout — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:39:19 +0000

Which makes it a very reasonable take. AI as a research and ideation tool is invaluable (provided due diligence is done on sources, etc.)

AI generated writing is (usually) hot garbage.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price"

alfalfasprout — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 19:28:30 +0000

It's trivial to hit that kind of quota if you're trying to execute on major projects. Especially as you start having dozens or hundreds of subagents investigating, prototyping, and working on different things.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Kev: Tiny Jev-like family of decision models built on top of Qwen3.5"

alfalfasprout — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:20:29 +0000

Yeah, and synthetic data is pretty darn good nowadays especially with access to frontier models.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "MiMo v2.6"

alfalfasprout — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:15:55 +0000

The moat for OAI and anthropic seems to be very quickly shrinking. Chinese labs are now using RSI-like approaches and even without resorting to heavy distillation they're catching up in a couple of months vs. what would have been 6-12 months a year prior.

And as these models get better the pace of training is quickly speeding up too.

This doesn't bode particularly well for anthropic/OAI after they go public.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Wall Street Is Growing Skeptical of the Data Center Boom"

alfalfasprout — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:05:32 +0000

assuming demand remains elevated and growing, maybe. But spend on AI is pretty stratospheric right now... companies are already starting to clamp down on spend. This makes you really wonder if there will be sufficient demand at current commodity prices for eg; OSS models to justify all these data centers.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA"

alfalfasprout — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:25:42 +0000

there are many things to blame POTUS for. This isn't one of them... most major fabs were already outside the US to begin with and the US chipmaking industry (well, really Intel) was really struggling even years ago.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Introducing System One Models and Jev"

alfalfasprout — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:59:24 +0000

How is this not a frontier model? It's bleeding edge in its own niche. It's not a frontier LLM; however, applicable to many of the things people use LLMs for.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?"

alfalfasprout — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 19:52:16 +0000

very HN take. Reality is 3.8 flash is good at what it does (being fast + cheap)... but that market is becoming very saturated and google is not competing at all at the frontier where major spend lies.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children"

alfalfasprout — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:55:22 +0000

Yeah but politicians get to claim this is a win. Let's be honest, that's the real reason the prosecution went for a deal this small.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers"

alfalfasprout — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:13:14 +0000

Probably Finnegan's Wake

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Why travellers are obsessed with foreign supermarkets"

alfalfasprout — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 02:59:20 +0000

btw it's colombia not columbia.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "AI won't solve the work-theater problem"

alfalfasprout — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:08:14 +0000

If anything, AI tends to vastly overengineer things (in a bad way) which makes bloat inevitable. But I'm not sure layers of management are to blame. If anything, good management incentivize the right things and focus a team on work that matters. Bad managers only try to empire build and incentivize the wrong things in their engineers.

I've seen orgs that try to flatten too much end up with ICs basically left in the ether without meaningful direction which causes them to 'build to survive'.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index"

alfalfasprout — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:44:51 +0000

Neither of them are "almost there"...

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models"

alfalfasprout — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:52:22 +0000

The weights are open, the training data obviously isn't. But a key thing you can do with open models is fine tune them. So while they may not be SOTA at everything, they can become SOTA at your particular business use case.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale"

alfalfasprout — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:42:38 +0000

There's a massive difference between your kids vibe coding something and an engineer using AI to implement something. If you're unable to discern the difference, that's something to reflect on :)

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

alfalfasprout — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:27:32 +0000

On the flipside, Apple has realized AI models are quickly becoming a commodity. By not blowing hundreds of billions in speculative capex, they get to focus on the bits that likely have higher ROI: the touchpoints with AI and how it's used.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

alfalfasprout — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:26:12 +0000

If anything, it's becoming more true. In the last month you already have Kimi K3 reaching competitive frontier performance (in practice, a bit behind Fable/Sol but close enough). Sure, it's a chinese model but the reality is it puts dramatic pricing pressure on the main players. And these models are now getting good enough to actually help accelerate further AI model research which would suggest the gap might close even more in the near future.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

alfalfasprout — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:20:48 +0000

Sundar Pichai began the downfall of Google by most accounts. It went from an engineer driven culture to one of infighting, politics, and bureaucracy. It's telling when xooglers nowadays complain of maintenance and improvement of products being a career dead end vs. shipping new things. And there being so much empire building.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Zed DeltaDB"

alfalfasprout — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:13:41 +0000

Did you even read the post? The idea is to tie conversations to code. This is a more sophisticated version of something like doltdb, not a git replacement.

New comment by alfalfasprout in "Strata – An app that talks me out of dying outdoors"

alfalfasprout — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 01:51:03 +0000

This is going to kill someone... you can't just make these calls for people. And it's DEFINITELY not a replacement for snowpack tests, etc. at the location you're going to visit.