Hacker News: bb123

New comment by bb123 in "Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?"

bb123 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:50:24 +0000

I could totally see them running an experiment to test user's stickiness/quality perception with decreased model performance. Facebook was doing exactly this in 2016. They tested the loyalty of Android users by secretly introducing errors that would crash the app to find the threshold at which a person would abandon. That was 10 years ago - imagine what the state of the art in user manipulation is like now.

New comment by bb123 in "America.gov"

bb123 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:20:21 +0000

Not necessarily - there are tons of zero data retention (ZDR) model hosting options, including big players like Amazon.

New comment by bb123 in "Extinct Tasmanian tiger's 'snap' unlike any living mammal's bite"

bb123 — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:25:52 +0000

I've always found there to be something hauntingly beautiful about the Thylacine. The idea of this solitary hunter with a frighteningly powerful maw and an almost sad face lurking at the bottom of the world send shivers down my spine. It's my hope that one day a pocket of them are found alive out there but I know thats a pipe dream.

New comment by bb123 in "Benchmarking Pocket-Scale Inference"

bb123 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:06:44 +0000

I'm not sure about that. I can run Qwen 3.8 27B at acceptable speed on an M1 MacBook Pro from 5 years ago. Thats Opus 4.6 Quality, on 5 year old consumer hardware. I think the trend is the opposite - smaller models that can run on hardware people already have are getting better and better.

New comment by bb123 in "Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal"

bb123 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:05:33 +0000

Mine was a $30 gold scale from Amazon. Probably not accurate but provably consistent which is what I needed. I'd compare each dose and used a calibration weight to verify.

New comment by bb123 in "Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal"

bb123 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 13:03:18 +0000

I did 10% relative reduction in my dose per 2 weeks, until I got down to ~2-3mg and then went cold turkey from there. Very very conservative. The 10% relative part is important - if you dropped by a constant, say 5mg, proportionally you'd be doing bigger drops each time which is where people get into trouble, especially at low doses.

New comment by bb123 in "Doctors are finally learning to manage antidepressant withdrawal"

bb123 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 10:00:28 +0000

There is a real lack of transparency in communicating some of the long term impacts of SSRIs to new patients. When I was prescribed sertraline not one doctor mentioned the massive (and sometimes permanent!!) sexual side effects, the likelihood of weight gain or how brutal it would be to taper off.

Also, I ended up ignoring my doctor's (way too aggressive) tapering schedule and managing my own down-dosing with a pill crusher and a milligram scale. I went about 5x slower than the standard advice and avoided all of the worst side effects.

I don't think it would have changed my decision to start taking it but I would rather have known about all this up front so I could make a more informed choice.

New comment by bb123 in "California's new tire efficiency rules could save drivers $1B a year"

bb123 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:45:08 +0000

I don't think it's just because they are "energy efficient". Teslas are heavy, powerful vehicles. The tires they need are usually rated for extra load (XL), and have a high speed rating (W/Y). If you went for EV tyres they likely contain an acoustic lining too as road noise is more noticeable in one. Unclear if that's really needed though. Either way it sounds like you went for premium tires which is probably the right choice for a ~400hp, 2 ton car.

New comment by bb123 in "Greenland issues "strong warning" as American oil firm illegally drills wells"

bb123 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:34:53 +0000

Thats what I meant by "starting to drill".

New comment by bb123 in "Greenland issues "strong warning" as American oil firm illegally drills wells"

bb123 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:29:14 +0000

So let me get this straight - a foreign company landed their gear on Greenland without authorisation and is starting to drill for oil without permission. And the government's response is a strongly worded letter?

Why would you not just send the local police to shut it down, impound the ship and expel the people running it? Surely thats trespass, vandalism of public property, theft, illegal importation of goods etc.

New comment by bb123 in "Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera"

bb123 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 05:12:43 +0000

If you turn your turn signal on while there’s a car in your blindspot that’s just bad driving. The other driver has no way of knowing if you’ve seen them or you’re about to swing out on them.

New comment by bb123 in "Report on an Unidentified Space Station – J.G. Ballard (1982)"

bb123 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:53:18 +0000

I feel this should have a note that it's fictional in the title. I clicked this expecting to read about some kind of space race development with China or Russia.

New comment by bb123 in "AI will be used to estimate age of asylum seekers from next year"

bb123 — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:07:15 +0000

>the facade is painting over the underlying motivation which is to reject asylum claims.

That feels like an unfair read. Asylum seekers claiming to be younger than they are is a known reality, and it makes total sense that a system would need to guard against that. Are you suggesting we just take every person who shows up at the border at their word?

New comment by bb123 in "Apple accidentally left Claude.md files Apple Support app"

bb123 — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:40:45 +0000

"What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds." — Steve Jobs.

New comment by bb123 in "Joby kicks off NYC electric air taxi demos with historic JFK flight"

bb123 — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 08:27:48 +0000

I'm much less optimistic. Even when factoring in the poor thermal efficiency of gas turbines (~30-40%) compared to electric (>90%), the usable specific energy gap remains immense. Jet-A still delivers roughly 14 times more useful work per kilogram than modern batteries. Removing fuel plumbing and tweaking airframes won't overcome that fundamental physics. Also the issue with the high-altitude efficiency argument is that batteries, unlike liquid fuel, don't lose mass during flight meaning the aircraft to haul its maximum takeoff weight from departure to arrival. It's a double whammy.

New comment by bb123 in "Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock"

bb123 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:24:53 +0000

I don't really have a problem with this - the designs look nice and don't have any of the hallmarks of AI slop. My issue is when the AI generated product is just bad, not merely the fact it was AI generated.

New comment by bb123 in "Moleskine's AI Lord of the Rings collection can only mock"

bb123 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:20:58 +0000

If you're asking me to pay for it, then yes.

New comment by bb123 in "Identify a London Underground Line just by listening to it"

bb123 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:00:37 +0000

Nice! It would be fun to include some of the other sounds on the tube like the door closing chimes or the sounds the doors make when opening and closing.

New comment by bb123 in ""Token anxiety", a slot machine by any other name"

bb123 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 10:41:02 +0000

What's with the lack of capitalisation at the start of sentences? It makes it hard to parse where one sentence ends and the next begins.

New comment by bb123 in "Grokipedia and the coup against reality"

bb123 — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 19:23:13 +0000

That has not been my experience with them at all. I've done nearly quarter of a million miles in various Teslas and never had a serious issue. My service experience with them has also been lightyears ahead of the traditional manufacturers.