Hacker News: bionhoward

New comment by bionhoward in "Now Google says it might use your Gmail and Google Photos data to target ads"

bionhoward — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 22:35:44 +0000

Google privacy policy is an absolute joke so this is hardly surprising. Pretty much everything gets used for model training. It’s hard to find options that respect your privacy without studying 50 support docs pages. Plus they conflate anonymization with privacy, as if ripping off someone’s data becomes OK as long as you … take their name off em

New comment by bionhoward in "Gemini 4 Argon"

bionhoward — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:38:48 +0000

I feel like if Google simplified their privacy/model training policy then their stock would go up.

It feels so complicated and hard to know what we can use vs what hands them our codebases

New comment by bionhoward in "If AI keeps evolving,would you worry about your next generation's survival"

bionhoward — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 16:00:38 +0000

That level of idealism only works if the capitalist system heavily changes so the poor can afford to purchase “replicators” which do not exist today. As it is right now if AI/robots take your job you can easily wind up on the street unable to afford food, shelter, medical care

New comment by bionhoward in "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"

bionhoward — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 23:48:50 +0000

opencode DeepSeek v4.1 Flash isn’t us/eu hosted as of recently, so not sure how this impacts privacy / model training

New comment by bionhoward in "Engineer says Claude Code has made his job "soul-sucking""

bionhoward — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 03:44:58 +0000

Mechatronics is cool

New comment by bionhoward in "The AI Race Just Got Awkward"

bionhoward — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:47:57 +0000

“Distilling” is a funny way to say “learning from”

New comment by bionhoward in "The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore"

bionhoward — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 01:22:35 +0000

the minimum description length principle encourages us to describe living entities at higher levels of abstraction (as motivated rational agents rather than collections of atoms jiggling)

The universe is absolutely hierarchical and neglecting it just because we don’t strictly need hierarchy to define things seems silly

New comment by bionhoward in "Show HN: Building a Markdown editor for Mac, iOS and web"

bionhoward — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 17:46:18 +0000

Looks epic, id like to connect a Dropbox folder

New comment by bionhoward in "OpenAI halts training of latest models as reports mount of AI agents going rogue"

bionhoward — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 17:24:19 +0000

Opus 5.5 does seem competitive with/better than Astra and is more affordable so usage doesn’t run out so fast

New comment by bionhoward in "The Normalization of Inexplicable Failures"

bionhoward — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 17:23:04 +0000

That’s not even an attempt to be charitable to jev. It can make decisions from unstructured data. Nobody uses anything just because it is cheap…

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

bionhoward — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 04:09:18 +0000

whoa

New comment by bionhoward in "Plan mode is dead"

bionhoward — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 02:02:40 +0000

> plan mode has always been a prompt — it has never changed the toolset because doing so would break the prompt cache, and so would be expensive

seems like plan mode could turn off some tools, even if it doesn't change the set offered to the model, the ones that they have which would mutate your codebase could just not work with an error message, and plan mode could change permissions in the security approval prompt for "auto"

anyway, isnt the right way to know if plan mode helps or not, to run an experiment? we're all guessing unless we have data

read only agent mode sounds straightforward and useful to me

New comment by bionhoward in "Why Does the Universe Expand?"

bionhoward — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:57:03 +0000

huh, i never heard of cosmogony, that's cool, thank you

New comment by bionhoward in "Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face"

bionhoward — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 23:27:52 +0000

Brute force is guaranteed to eventually find the most efficient possible solution (in an extremely inefficient manner, assuming you run it long enough)

New comment by bionhoward in "Why Does the Universe Expand?"

bionhoward — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:06:44 +0000

I feel cosmology ought to grapple more with, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” That question and this question are certainly linked. If expansion is a mirror of collapse, how do we get from some initial nothingness to a point where there is something capable of collapsing? Starting with an infinite amount of stuff everywhere feels like cheating.

New comment by bionhoward in "The Painful Truth: The RAM Crisis Is Only Just the Beginning"

bionhoward — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:30:44 +0000

Even with efficiency breakthroughs, it would just afford packing more agents per unit of memory. Scaling compute and data keeps paying off, leading to smarter models, and smarter models have more demand even at higher prices because they can accomplish more work at higher quality. Sovereign AI hasn’t even really taken off yet to anywhere near the level it could. That’s going to dramatically increase the number of massive-scale users of AI agents. So no, IMHO they will “never” have “enough.”

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

bionhoward — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 18:43:18 +0000

Me, Is self-awareness thermodynamically favorable? (2015) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ed9ikW47Key-jYZy0CNZH75q... - “the probabilistic nature of reality is what drives Life and forces the evolution of self-aware consciousness”

New comment by bionhoward in "Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout"

bionhoward — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 04:36:18 +0000

I feel like Nike’s biggest fumble was not advertising the Invincibles more. It seemed they had some evidence the PEBAX foam could reduce injury in base mileage, which is the number one thing many/most runners spend the most time on. So why not make sure everybody knows this? It seems weird. If you have a lot of athletes who need conditioning and don’t want to get injured, why not advertise the crap out of the injury prevention shoes?

New comment by bionhoward in "GPT-6 Astra"

bionhoward — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:12:35 +0000

I think the API runs on Azure

New comment by bionhoward in "Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face"

bionhoward — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:09:00 +0000

I personally think this acquisition is genius anybody who could afford it would be wise to own HuggingFace because they are incredible