Hacker News: base698

New comment by base698 in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

base698 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 13:42:23 +0000

I asked the OpenAI playground to compare and contrast the themes of Point Break and Fight Club. It did a bang up job and blew my mind. I then realized it basically worked for any of the scripts I had for my dev environment too. Fixing and expanding capabilities I'd wanted to had but never had the time to implement.

New comment by base698 in "US healthcare still stupidly expensive, with pathetic outcomes, study finds"

base698 — Sun, 31 May 2026 23:34:29 +0000

I just moved from a medium sized US city and any specialist provider I contacted for myself or my parents was 5 months or more. It's not good everywhere.

New comment by base698 in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

base698 — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:33:39 +0000

This was the main thing I took from the movie Her. Wild to see it materialize so quickly.

New comment by base698 in "Grok 4.3"

base698 — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:02:07 +0000

Starting to like the lack of memory. Claude remembers I have a grill and will interject in conversations about how maybe this thing would go well with BBQ when it's unrelated or just also about food.

New comment by base698 in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

base698 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 10:52:47 +0000

It's the opening page of the book Technopoly.

New comment by base698 in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

base698 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:15:05 +0000

It's yet another Goodhart's law effect: > Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.

New comment by base698 in "Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all"

base698 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:40:34 +0000

Which grammar tools?

New comment by base698 in "Testing Ads in ChatGPT"

base698 — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:22:00 +0000

BETRAYAL

New comment by base698 in "Man who videotaped himself BASE jumping in Yosemite arrested, says it was AI"

base698 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:55:16 +0000

Would you say the same for 191 people rescued hiking in Yosemite a year?

New comment by base698 in "Man who videotaped himself BASE jumping in Yosemite arrested, says it was AI"

base698 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:48:10 +0000

The legal history is a bit more complex. TLDR: assholes that were BASE jumping in Yosemite in the early 1980s did things like throw burning barrels off the top of El Capitan and take trucks on trails not designed for vehicle traffic.

Comparing the number of BASE jumpers (small thousands) and the number of hikers and climbers (millions) BASE jumpers just can't have the political influence for access.

Random note, Brendan Weinstein who posted here on occasion recently died BASE jumping: https://www.reddit.com/r/SkyDiving/comments/1q6n7v2/brendan_...

New comment by base698 in "Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing"

base698 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:14:57 +0000

> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Gall’s law wins again.

New comment by base698 in "The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem (2022)"

base698 — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 14:56:43 +0000

I started a project this year similar to this with rats. It’s now two axis with tracking and a stereo camera with depth detection. The amount of hours I’ve spent on it is astounding but I’ve learned a lot!

Also, ended up swapping the Pi I started with to a jetson.

New comment by base698 in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"

base698 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 13:36:03 +0000

Until you factor in the legions of devops writing terraform, iam, and cicd scripts.

New comment by base698 in "Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients"

base698 — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 15:11:23 +0000

https://news.yale.edu/2025/02/19/immune-markers-post-vaccina...

They are looking into that.

New comment by base698 in "Claude Sonnet 4.5"

base698 — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 13:23:28 +0000

Perceptual Hash. I have a Python script that does just this I did a million years ago: https://gist.github.com/base698/42d24be9309520fe8ad768844868...

I used it to match frames between different quality video streams. Operates on gray scale.

Toddlerbot: Open-Source Humanoid Robot

base698 — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:04:25 +0000

Article URL: https://toddlerbot.github.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45217372

Points: 133

# Comments: 23

New comment by base698 in "A case study in bad hiring practice and how to fix it"

base698 — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 19:18:59 +0000

Exceptionally, I had both the highest and lowest grade in linear algebra. Probably not what they mean though.

New comment by base698 in "GPT-5"

base698 — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 17:59:06 +0000

Weight of the air deflecting downward. Plain ole Newtonian equal and opposite reaction.

New comment by base698 in "6 weeks of Claude Code"

base698 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 16:36:14 +0000

I’ve used both. Claude more extensively. I’ve had good results with Gemini too, however it seems easier to get stuck in a loop. Happens with Claude too but not quite as frequent.

By loop I mean you tell it no don’t implement this service, look at this file instead and mimic that and instead it does what it did before.

New comment by base698 in "Gemini Embedding: Powering RAG and context engineering"

base698 — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 23:27:17 +0000

Or you find your users search for id strings like k1231o to find ref docs and end up needing key word search and reranking.