Hacker News: alpha_squared

New comment by alpha_squared in "California leaders report four to six weeks worth of gasoline and diesel supply"

alpha_squared — Thu, 07 May 2026 17:34:38 +0000

> Bad things happen. You have to be ready.

You're not wrong, but also how "ready" is "ready enough"? What about things the US doesn't generally have access to? Rare earth minerals? Helium? Cobalt? Coffee?

It also costs money to build the infra for storage and more money to maintain. There's always a trade-off. I think governments have done an acceptable job of being ready, but they are predicated on the assumption that the global order that the developed world has largely enjoyed for several decades remains largely intact.

It's a bad assumption in hindsight because some folks chose to go over a cliff over fixing deep-seated problems. You can't really control for chaos.

New comment by alpha_squared in "Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys"

alpha_squared — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:27:08 +0000

You're mixing up the propaganda phrases, that's Russia's stance in Ukraine. Trump's is this is "an excursion", totally different things.

New comment by alpha_squared in "Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions"

alpha_squared — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:28:14 +0000

All the time? This morning when I dreaded getting up so early for work. Last night when I showered. The day before after playing some board games with friends. Normal people do introspect, despite the current fad among a few oddball elites in Silicon Valley [0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/897566/marc-andreessen-is-a-ph...

New comment by alpha_squared in "Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage"

alpha_squared — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:30:33 +0000

Because this is ultimately a beta service. The whole industry is.

New comment by alpha_squared in "Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th"

alpha_squared — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:24:58 +0000

I'm pretty sure this is an attempt by both companies to shape a reasonable finance story for their eventual IPO. They need to make this look a lot better than a pump and dump (raising on wild valuations then offloading onto public investors).

New comment by alpha_squared in "Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found"

alpha_squared — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 18:10:03 +0000

This is addressed elsewhere in the comments, but it appears this is actually a direct comparison to how Anthropic got their Mythos headline results.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47732322

New comment by alpha_squared in "OpenAI backs Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable"

alpha_squared — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 13:47:49 +0000

If we start from the position of the marketing hype and even Sam Altman's statements, these tools will "solve all of physics". To me it's laughable, but that's also what's driven their outsized valuations. Using the output to drive product decisions and development, it's not hard to imagine a scenario where a resulting product isn't fully vetted because of the constant corporate pressure to "move faster" and the unrealistic hype of "solve all of physics". This is similar to Tesla's situation of selling "Full Self-Driving" but it actually isn't in the way most people would understand that term and so they lost in court on how they market their autonomous driving features.

SpaceX Targets More Than $2T Valuation in IPO

alpha_squared — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 15:00:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-02/spacex-is-said-to-target-more-than-2-trillion-valuation-in-ipo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47627429

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by alpha_squared in "Claude Code's source code has been leaked via a map file in their NPM registry"

alpha_squared — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:02:24 +0000

> You're perfectly free to scrape the web yourself and train your own model.

Actually, not anymore as a result of OpenAI and Anthropic's scraping. For example, Reddit came down hard on access to their APIs as a response to ChatGPT's release and the news that LLMs were built atop of scraping the open web. Most of the web today is not as open as before as a result of scraping for LLM data. So, no, no one is perfectly free to scrape the web anymore because open access is dying.

New comment by alpha_squared in "I tried to prove I'm not AI. My aunt wasn't convinced"

alpha_squared — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 15:26:13 +0000

You're talking about the metadata of the files, which can always be edited and someone will inevitably try to make software to do exactly that. Also, Adobe's proposal for handling generated content is exactly this and they're not able to get buy-in from other companies.

New comment by alpha_squared in "Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching"

alpha_squared — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:46:03 +0000

A couple things here:

1. This should have a 2022 tag

2. This is ripe "red pill" fodder and many of the comments here are "red pill" coded.

New comment by alpha_squared in "You are not your job"

alpha_squared — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 19:23:35 +0000

You can be laid off at small companies too. For example, a company may be running out of runway and it's looking increasingly likely the next round of funding will not materialize in time. It needs to control expenses and extend runway an extra 6 months, but everyone's a "top-performer". Who gets laid off? It's likely going to be those adding features (e.g. product folks), not those maintaining the business (accounting, devops). We can get into whether it's a good idea to kick off the death spiral for a company in that way, but my point is that no one is immune to layoffs, not at any scale, except maybe the founders.

New comment by alpha_squared in "You are not your job"

alpha_squared — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:20:03 +0000

Something tells me you haven't been laid off before. I think the overconfidence you're displaying here will be shattered if that were to happen. I hope it doesn't happen to you, but if it does I hope you remember that you are not your job.

New comment by alpha_squared in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

alpha_squared — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:22:48 +0000

I've attempted to take your responses as made in good faith twice now, despite evidence to the contrary in other threads. I understand if this topic is uncomfortable for you, either because it challenges your world view or because it feels personally invalidating. It appears as though you're looking for one very specific statistic or logical vulnerability in what others are sharing to refute the overall claim. However, I can only lead you to water.

New comment by alpha_squared in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

alpha_squared — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:03:16 +0000

You don't see how an organization founded to enforce a cornerstone of white supremacy may have a statistical likelihood of its members being white supremacists?

New comment by alpha_squared in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

alpha_squared — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:47:51 +0000

The American police force originally started as a formalized slave patrol to capture runaway slaves [0]. It's well-documented [1]. We can try to argue whether modern policing carries that tradition, but case [2] after documented case [3] keeps bearing out more of the same. It's been the topic of research [4] and pop culture [5].

[0] https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/36/3/did-american-pol...

[1] https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/

[2] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rodney-King

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd

[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7331505/

[5] https://genius.com/123154

New comment by alpha_squared in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

alpha_squared — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:45:04 +0000

> Or do I want an insightful, well-thought-out response, even if it is LLM-enhanced?

I'd argue that anything insightful or well-though-out doesn't use LLMs at all. We can quibble over whether discussions with an LLM lead to insightful responses, but that still isn't your own personal thought. Just type what's on your mind, it's not that hard and nitpicking over this is just looking for ways to open up unnecessary opportunities for abuse.

New comment by alpha_squared in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

alpha_squared — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:23:18 +0000

> Was this because they were threatened with ~a fine~ being designated a supply chain risk?

Seems like it, yes.

New comment by alpha_squared in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

alpha_squared — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:21:43 +0000

From what I was reading, it appears that their tools were used outside the scope of their contract with DoD via Palantir's work that also used Claude. Anthropic freaked out, DoD freaked out that Anthropic freaked out and threatened to declare them a supply chain risk. That designation would've required any company that contracts with DoD to strip out any Anthropic tooling from their business in order to continue working with DoD. It was effectively designating Anthropic a terrorist organization.

New comment by alpha_squared in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

alpha_squared — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:37:08 +0000

I generally agree with this, but I want to add another thing that I feel is easily overlooked in both the groups you listed and your post: having men who'd make women comfortable having kids.

The alpha-bro intimidation, casual assault/misogyny, disregard for mothers' careers, and lack of community don't exactly scream "great time to have a baby" (I'm not even going to touch the current topic dominating the news). While some of these things are not unique to our time, they compound quite negatively in an era of unaffordability and social immobility. Additionally, everyone acknowledges "it takes a village," but there aren't very many who are trying to be villagers. When's the last time most of us here spent time with our neighbors?

All the approaches to the fertility problem seem to come from men or deeply conservative women who parrot men. That sounds like an echo chamber to me.