Hacker News: andy99

New comment by andy99 in "I'm the mom in that viral Giants clip. Let me tell you about my husband"

andy99 — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 22:33:34 +0000

I’d go as far to say that no good writer uses AI for editing. It’s a tool for people that don’t know how to write, don’t know what good looks like, and are not confident enough to choose raw over soulless.

New comment by andy99 in "Montreal adopts bylaw banning insults against police, municipal employees"

andy99 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 15:29:33 +0000

Canada has a charter of rights and freedoms, but there’s a section that allows governments to override it at will so it’s effectively worthless. And nobody knows that better than Quebec.

New comment by andy99 in "What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals"

andy99 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 01:18:53 +0000

This I believe is part of why forgery is dealt with so harshly, copying a few thousand bucks isn’t a big deal but destroying the integrity of hard currency is.

New comment by andy99 in "I said no and Apple said yes"

andy99 — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 10:42:17 +0000

Agree unfortunately. I hate apple, for the same reasons as everyone else, but I have both a MacBook and iPhone and can’t do much about it. It’s like politics a little, you can only choose the least bad, there is no good.

I have a Linux server, and use cloud Linux machines extensively, but at least the last time I checked, Linux desktop sucks. There are always memory management issues, doing a video call makes my fan sound like a jet taking off, not sleeping, put my laptop in my bag and it gets to hot to touch - that’s just off the top of my head, I’ve tried Linux laptops on multiple occasions and they suck.

New comment by andy99 in "I am often wrong"

andy99 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 10:52:58 +0000

It’s often struck me how many “leaders” basically jump to step 6, and come up with an urgent set of superficial actions without even clarifying what they’re trying to do. There’s probably some value in “bias for action” as you might call it. But it’s been one of the difficult adjustments for me, how little people want to think.

New comment by andy99 in "I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago"

andy99 — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 13:28:33 +0000

I have, LLMs are less fragile, that’s why I like them. The ability to generalize isn’t just about being general purpose, it’s super robust, and so assuming the budget is there (I agree they are inefficient) end up performing better on many classical tasks that have ood inputs. Before LLMs / foundation models we all struggled with generalization and at least in the work I was doing people were independently converging to using bigger more general models for tasks anyway as compute got cheaper. LLMs are just the most popular version of this.

New comment by andy99 in "More than 100k people in Japan are now aged 100 or older"

andy99 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:19:40 +0000

> If it wasn't a problem, the government wouldn't have to do it.

This is certainly very different from my experience with what governments think they have to do.

New comment by andy99 in "Canada welcomes EU proposal to become 'associate member'"

andy99 — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:23:21 +0000

Yeah, I don’t understand why people have a problem with this. I think it should basically always be true between peer nations that there is free movement and trade.

New comment by andy99 in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

andy99 — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:55:07 +0000

I just read the first part and if I understand he thinks we shouldn’t be allowed to train LLMs to act like they are conscious because then people will think they are and give them rights? Seems more an education problem than a problem needing rules about what persona you can fine tune in. People who want to will find ridiculous misinterpretations no matter what you do.

New comment by andy99 in "Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture"

andy99 — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 16:28:03 +0000

Openrouter lets you pick your provider and see their policy re retention and training. You can pick US providers e.g. digitalocean that don’t retain or train on your data. Openrouter is also now owned by stripe, so I don’t see any reason why using them with a trusted provider is riskier than using the big two (especially in light of some of the whole Navier Stokes thing)

If it’s really sensitive then don’t use a cloud provider.

New comment by andy99 in "New $100K H-1B Visa Fee Pushes Tech Jobs Offshore"

andy99 — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 15:04:43 +0000

I’m not super familiar with the options, but isn’t there O-1 for anyone who’s world class commanding a million dollar salary? The impression I have (mostly from online discussion) is that H-1B is basically only for (comparatively) low skill workers to come work for lower salaries. Are there cases where globally competitive people would come on a H-1B?

New comment by andy99 in "Due to concerns about malicious applications, GPT2 will not be released (2019)"

andy99 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 23:42:38 +0000

The public discourse was very different then. Misinformation, bias, etc. Those in power were much more concerned about an LLM saying something unapproved.

New comment by andy99 in "Due to concerns about malicious applications, GPT2 will not be released (2019)"

andy99 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 23:21:52 +0000

See also the 2023 call to “ pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.” https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime...

Signed by Benjio, Musk, Woz, etc

New comment by andy99 in "Data collected by cars and sold to third parties"

andy99 — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 22:07:31 +0000

So I first read this comment and thought is looked like AI and thought I’d give the benefit of the doubt. Then I saw this where there is no doubt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49687774

I thought, I wonder if it’s the same guy? Sure enough.

Stop it.

New comment by andy99 in "We must pace the frontier"

andy99 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 20:26:11 +0000

How much of the “danger” is from better models vs the harness?

Isn’t the current risk due to how AI is configured, like giving it a full set of tools and internet access and a goal to hack stuff?

If we think we need laws or gate keeping, why isn’t it at this level? I already can’t ddos someone or fuzz their server or whatever right, I imagine if I threw equivalent compute at old school hacking I’d just get arrested.

The quality of the “frontier” model doesn’t really matter, they just generate transcripts, they can take no action.

If this was real they’d be calling on people to stop hooking them in to “dangerous” harnesses as opposed to pausing research. But it’s not.

New comment by andy99 in "Anthropic CEO calls for the AI industry to slow down"

andy99 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 17:56:42 +0000

Wouldn’t it most likely mean their progress is slowing and they want to make it appear as a deliberate decision for the good of humanity instead of admitting growth follows a logistic curve in advance of their IPOs?

New comment by andy99 in "Resistance Training Prescription for Muscle Function, Hypertrophy in Health"

andy99 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 13:30:40 +0000

Is there any indication stretching leads to improved health outcomes like resistance training does per the article?

Everything I’ve seen indicates it’s a “nice to have” if one has unlimited time but if you’ve only got an hour a day or whatever for a workout you’re better off spending it all on resistance training.

New comment by andy99 in "Resistance Training Prescription for Muscle Function, Hypertrophy in Health"

andy99 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 11:54:48 +0000

I work out at home with dumbells, the one thing I miss vs a gym is some way to do lat pull downs. I can’t do a chin up and don’t feel like I’ve got a good way to work up to it.

I also don’t work legs super seriously, I have 2x75lb dumbells I use for squats and deadlifts, I could do more if I had heavier weights but that’s not a priority.

New comment by andy99 in "Claude is only available to people over 18 years"

andy99 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:32:45 +0000

  Erlich Bachman: Jian-Yang, what're you doing? This is Palo Alto. People are lunatics about smoking here. We don't enjoy all the freedoms that you have in China.

Anyway, when the talk of age verification first came out, I moved off of Claude and use either local or Chinese frontier models via open router (which probably isn’t safe for long now that they’ve been acquired). I’d almost forgotten why, this is a good reminder.

With HF bought as well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to gate open models by age too. Going to have to sign up for modelscope

New comment by andy99 in "Thelio Mira AI Linux Workstation: 192 GB GPU Memory"

andy99 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:22:47 +0000

When I saw the 192GB I first thought they might have beat Framework to market with a Gorgon Halo machine with unified RAM that Framework has teased. This is just a GPU workstation.