<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: avsteele</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=avsteele</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 08:55:46 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=avsteele" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Windows 11's second-chance setup dialogs hurt IT, drain productivity"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is even worse than the article says. You can, though these dialogs, wind up having folder on your hard drive moved around, have your desktop or other folders which you do not intend to be, cloud-synced. Then you get home and all of a sudden two PCs you mean to keep separate have new apps installed, background changed, etc...<p>I HATE this window.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:44:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47922293</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47922293</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47922293</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "How AI destroys institutions"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Obviously ~nobody has read this yet...  But I did have a question based on the opening:<p>"If you wanted to create a tool that would enable the destruction of
institutions that prop up democratic life, you could not do better than artificial intelligence. Authoritarian leaders and technology oligarchs are deploing [sic] AI systems to hollow out public institutions with an astonishing alacrity"<p>So in the first two sentences we have hyperbole and typos?  Hardly seems like high-quality academic output. It reads more like a blog post.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:22:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706930</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706930</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706930</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in ""Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I haven't had much success yet with this. My ratings follow.<p>Reading and interpreting datasheets: A- (this has gotten a LOT better in the last year)<p>Give netlist to LLM and ask it to check for errors: C (hit or miss, but useful because catching ANY errors helps)<p>Give Image to LLM and ask it to check for errors: C (hit or miss)<p>Design of circuit from description: D- (hallucinates parts, suggests parts for wrong purpose. suggests obsolete parts. Cannot make diagrams. Not an F because its textual descriptions have gotten better. When describing what nodes connect to each other now its not always wrong. You will have to re-check EVERYTHING though, so its usefulness is doubtful)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 19 Jan 2026 16:29:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46680858</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46680858</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46680858</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Lots of this is right, but<p>> and PRC's was to peak emissions by 2030s<p>This appears to be wrong. Peak is supposed to be <i>before</i> 2030. They will not hit it.<p><a href="https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/targets/" rel="nofollow">https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/targets/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 23:34:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641008</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641008</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641008</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is not energy output (production, usage), it is that plus an adjustment for the in->out energy efficiency. It would only == production if all energy sources in the mix has the same factor.<p>Because fossil fuels have higher in/out losses this is number is larger than usage. This metric is generally used to track decarbonization.<p>Using the IEA number you can see the hydro+solar+wind production is about 9.5% of the total, not 18%.<p>ChatGPT or you favorite LLM can explain in greater detail, just send it the plot image and ask.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:58:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633438</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633438</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633438</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That metric doesn't answer the same question. It isn't saying 18% of their needs are being met by renewables.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:23:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632115</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632115</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632115</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Photos capture the breathtaking scale of China's wind and solar buildout"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Beautiful pictures. To be clear: China runs on coal and will for the foreseeable future.<p><a href="https://www.iea.org/countries/china" rel="nofollow">https://www.iea.org/countries/china</a><p><a href="https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-country-terawatt-hours-twh?tab=line&country=~CHN&mapSelect=~CHN" rel="nofollow">https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-consumption-by-count...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 12:49:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631682</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631682</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631682</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you want a consequentialist answer:<p>If, for ethical reasons, fewer people were willing to take these jobs, then either salaries would have to rise or the work would be done less effectively.<p>If salaries rise, the business becomes more expensive and harder to scale.
If effectiveness drops, the systems are less capable of extracting/using people’s data.<p>Either way, refusing these jobs imposes real friction on the surveillance model.<p>If you want a deontological answer:<p>You have a responsibility not to participate in unethical behavior, even if someone else would.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2025 12:34:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46325126</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46325126</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46325126</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Article Context-free raw #'s<p>"Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022" Is this a lot or a little? There no context for  national chain<p>> Dad journalism<p>"Bad" Typo, sorry<p>> You should not update on this article<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_inference</a><p>> (…) a national report found that (…)<p>The article's thesis is that these stores are uniquely bad. Whether or not this is correct necessarily depends on a comparison with other stores.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2025 16:25:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46194212</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46194212</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46194212</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article Context-free raw #'s, no comparisons to traditional grocery stores AFAIK. Dad journalism.<p>You should not update on this article unless you have some outside knowledge of the industry.<p>I had AI look into it, it found a national report found that dollar stores had pricing errors at about twice (3.5%) the rate of traditional supermarkets (1.7%) but lower than convenience stores (4.9%).<p><a href="https://cdn.ncwm.com/userfiles/files/Resources/Price%20Verification%20Survey/National%20Price%20Verification%20Report-Final.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.ncwm.com/userfiles/files/Resources/Price%20Verif...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2025 13:02:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191718</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191718</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191718</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "It’s time to free JavaScript (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why is this worth doing? What wrong with the status quo? The author does not give any examples of Oracle threatening people for using the JavaScript (tm) name.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2025 13:00:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46147172</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46147172</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46147172</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Kmart's use of facial recognition to tackle refund fraud unlawful"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Interesting line to draw:<p>- you can record all manner of video in your store...<p>- but you can't process it in this particular way.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 22 Sep 2025 11:53:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332134</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332134</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332134</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Linux phones are more important now than ever"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The authors largest bullet point is on author identification. What are the arguments against this and do people really feel they outweigh the benefits?<p>My view: I would think given how many code supply chain attacks we've see recently this would be be regarded as (at worst) a necessary evil. How much software used by large numbers of people does the open source community think will be done by anons?<p>Sidenote: The author implies SyncThing development was stopped due to author ID but the post linked does not say this and gives a completely different reason (forced updates)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Sep 2025 11:41:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45260886</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45260886</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45260886</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper and why they fall short"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Malpractice slightly hyperbolic.<p>But anybody relying on Gary's posts in order to be be informed on this subject is being being mislead. This isn't an isolated incident either.<p>People need to be made be aware when you read him it is mere punditry, not substantive engagement with the literature.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Jun 2025 22:07:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44279158</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44279158</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44279158</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper and why they fall short"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Papers make specific conclusions based on specific data. The paper I linked specifically rebuts the conclusions of the paper. Gary makes vague statements that could be interpreted as being related.<p>It is scientific malpractice to write a post supposedly rebutting responses to a paper and not directly address the most salient one.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Jun 2025 21:11:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44278868</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44278868</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44278868</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper and why they fall short"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This doesn't rebut anything from the best critique of the Apple paper.<p><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09250" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09250</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Jun 2025 20:58:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44278792</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44278792</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44278792</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "BYD's Five-Minute Charging Puts China in the Lead for EVs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Many people drive places other (further) than work multiple times a year. "75 mile battery" wouldn't even be good enough for a one-way trip of this kind let alone there and back again.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 08 Jun 2025 17:42:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44218380</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44218380</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44218380</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "The Illusion of Thinking: Strengths and limitations of reasoning models [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The authors don't say anything like this that I can see. Their conclusion specifically identifies these as weaknesses of current frontier models.<p>Furthermore we have clearly seen increases in reasoning from previous frontier models to current frontier models.<p>If the authors could /did show that both previous-generation and current-generation frontier models hit a wall at similar complexity that would be something, AFAIK they do not.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 08 Jun 2025 15:01:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217419</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217419</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217419</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "The Illusion of Thinking: Strengths and limitations of reasoning models [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>People are drawing erroneous conclusions from this.<p>My read of this is that the paper demonstrates that <i>given a particular model</i> (and the problems examined with it) that giving more thought tokens does not help on problems above a certain complexity. It does not say anything about the capabilities of future, larger, models to handle more complex tasks. (NB: humans trend similarly)<p>My concern is that people are extrapolating from this to conclusions about LLM's generally, and this is not warranted<p>The only part about this i find even surprising is he abstract's conclusion (1): that 'thinking' can lead to worse outcomes for certain simple problem.  (again though, maybe you can say humans are the same here. You <i>can</i> overthink things)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 08 Jun 2025 14:36:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217256</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217256</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44217256</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by avsteele in "The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is about way more than software. It's all R&D<p>It's effectively 6 years too. You only get to depreciate 10% in 1st year. This might have killed my company if it was around during first years.<p>See my comments on the previous discussion (Nov 2023) here:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145630">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145630</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2025 22:18:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44205579</link><dc:creator>avsteele</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44205579</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44205579</guid></item></channel></rss>