Hacker News: atwrk

New comment by atwrk in "After Losses, Retail Investors Flock to 3x Leverage as 2x Product Are Restricted"

atwrk — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:21:00 +0000

Most people want to live where other people live, for reasons ranging from social connections to access to services and infrastructure. I doubt broadband access access plays even a small role.

New comment by atwrk in "DeepSeek V4 Flash on a Single AMD MI300X"

atwrk — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 05:56:21 +0000

Did you read beyond the headline? It's 1.65 trillion hidden and 1.35 trillion overt - which sums up to 3 trillion.

New comment by atwrk in "DeepSeek V4 Flash on a Single AMD MI300X"

atwrk — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:51:58 +0000

Debt is at $3 trillion right now: https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/ai-debt-hypescalers-capex-cap...

Interest alone, at assumed 5%, amounts to about $150 billions per year. That's probably higher than the combined AI revenue of the top 3 providers.

New comment by atwrk in "DeepSeek V4 Flash on a Single AMD MI300X"

atwrk — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:48:54 +0000

The big question is whether the demand will stay if the subsidized pricing ends. That's what the bubble talk is about. Right now all the players compete for market share and don't care about the losses (hence the debt). But what happens if no one wants to lend them anymore?

New comment by atwrk in "EU Fines Google $1.02B for Favoring Its Own Services"

atwrk — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:48:52 +0000

This is intended to drive you insane on purpose. It is just malicious compliance intended to make users blame the anti-monopoly regulators instead of the monopolists.

This is a corporation with tens of thousands of software developers. If they wanted to do better, they could. As always: If the UI is bad for you, that probably means that particular implementation is good for the corporation.

New comment by atwrk in "OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation"

atwrk — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:51:26 +0000

IMO they hope to make AI a strongly regulated industry, with OpenAI (and Anthropic) becoming military suppliers with their stronger models, and everything Chinese or open-weight gets banned.

The competition from the open models is so strong now that this seems to be the only way to keep both companies afloat, given their dire financials. OpenAI probably hoped that they can achieve market lead and then lower the training costs (and make inference cheap enough to eventually escape the red numbers), but the opposite is happening: The competition comes closer and closer, thus training has to be kept up with full force, thus the bleeding continues.

But if they can position themselves as too important/dangerous to be available for everyone (thus this incident report and the clever mentioning of GLM 5.2), they could get the military supplier treatment and would be protected from the market.

New comment by atwrk in "The state of open source AI"

atwrk — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 08:58:42 +0000

To anyone having read about Mussolini, Italy's economy and political landscape in the 20s onward, his model of corporatism etc, the answer is obviously clear: the US. China also is authoritarian, of course, but the societal structure sharply differs from Italian fascism.

New comment by atwrk in "The state of open source AI"

atwrk — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 08:55:18 +0000

To add to that, to me it seems that the idea is that open weights vastly accelerate dissemination into and practical application in the wider economy, which seems to be the goal. They don't seem to subscribe to the AGI/singularity silliness so prevalent in the West.

Google required to open up to AI, search engine rivals under EU-mandated changes

atwrk — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:12:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/world/google-required-open-up-ai-search-engine-rivals-under-eu-mandated-changes-2026-07-16/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48934054

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

New comment by atwrk in "Grok 4.5"

atwrk — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:03:02 +0000

A bit late now, but thanks for this detailed breakdown!

New comment by atwrk in "Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy"

atwrk — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:00:38 +0000

What makes you think Germany didn't do well with renewables? This almost looks like a hockey stick graph: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/topics/climate-energy/rene...

New comment by atwrk in "Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy"

atwrk — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:31:16 +0000

The no brain solution is to electrify everything and switch legacy infrastructure to renewables, just like China does. Gas usage is down in the EU anyway.

New comment by atwrk in "OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast by 90%, Analyst Says"

atwrk — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:55:25 +0000

You're right of course, but in this case the statement doesn't look that false. The source article [0] states that half of the assets is cash, so "assets" is defined a bit more freely here.

If we assume a 2026 revenue of 23B (Q1 2026 revenue x4) and costs of 70B (2025 costs * (2026 revenue / 2025 revenue)), even those 25B in cash reserves won't mean much. And this napkin math even ignores their debt obligations. So either they raise money in the range of 50-75B this year (actual money, not datacenter vouchers), or ...

[0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/

New comment by atwrk in "Grok 4.5"

atwrk — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:02:57 +0000

The Jack Ma story is that he tried to build a predatory peer to peer lending startup to profit off of working class people getting into high interest debt traps (because they aren't credit worthy for normal credit issued by regulated banks). Which is against the law in China. China is very strict in all things that resemble shadow banking, MLM schemes etc, they even have a .1 % tax on every transaction on the HKSE, to prevent a financialization of the economy like it happened in the West.

New comment by atwrk in "Grok 4.5"

atwrk — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:31:14 +0000

He's quite literally responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot, there's a paper in the Lancet estimating the amount of casualities directly resulting from the sudden cancellation of USAID funds.

Edit: Here it is: https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(25)01186-9/full...

"Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030."

New comment by atwrk in "Grok 4.5"

atwrk — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 08:07:41 +0000

The owner of this LLM is sieg heiling around, openly supports extremists across the EU, actively helped Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Someone pays for his product. What do you think, will this have political consequences or will giving this guy have no effect whatsoever?

New comment by atwrk in "Antares achieves criticality of Mark-0 reactor"

atwrk — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:23:02 +0000

Coal is already shrinking in the China (in absolute terms, not just as share of production) [1], and share of wind + solar is already larger than in the US [2], so I doubt China will ever reach US proportions in CO2 emissions per capita.

An additional data point to support that is that emissions intensity per GDP is clearly falling fast for China [3].

[1] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

[2] https://ember-energy.org/data/electricity-data-explorer/?ent...

[3] Chart 75 from here: https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2025/

New comment by atwrk in "Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)"

atwrk — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 11:18:04 +0000

Well I guess reading the article could ease your confusion. Unsurprisingly it is a bit less generalized than your take.

New comment by atwrk in "South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots"

atwrk — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 08:12:57 +0000

> Looking back, it's easy to say the German govt should have thrown them a billion or two to keep them afloat. However, state intervention was very unpopular at the time in economic circles, and there was much furor over bailouts following the 2008 crisis.

Absolutely, Germany essentially abandoned its position in industrial leadership solely due to neoliberal ideology. Just compare the trajectories of Germany and China in the last 20 years. One country planned and implemented a proper industrial policy, the other hummed and hawed about the infallibility of the market and thus essentially just gave up.

New comment by atwrk in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

atwrk — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 15:56:50 +0000

People around me, outside the programmer bubble, hate OpenAI with a passion. It's the symbol of antidemocratic US corporations cuddling with Trump etc, right there with Tesla. And no one outside my tech bubble has ever heard of Anthropic.

This is distinctly different than the dot com bubble were people actually were euphoric about the future unfolding before their eyes.