Hacker News: bitmasher9

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Casio S100X Japanese Lacquer Edition (JP Page Only)"

bitmasher9 — Sun, 10 May 2026 15:07:21 +0000

I think there is something beautifully functionalist to value things only at what they can do, and not based on any subjective valuation such as narrative or aesthetics.

I’m not that way, but I wouldn’t put someone down who is that way.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 06 May 2026 21:02:47 +0000

I think GoG is a great store and Battle.Net is fine for what it is.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:34:02 +0000

You’re ignoring how much of a role the TF2 hats played in pushing microtransaction skins.

Steam came out in 2003. TF2 hats came out in 2009. It’s lived in the world of micro transactions way longer than it lived in the before times.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 06 May 2026 17:31:20 +0000

I never understood people who argue steam doesn’t have real competition.

The number of fully funded attempts to compete with steam is impressive. Steam has more competition than any other of the major app stores. Steam also had to provide additional value over pre-existing methods of installing games on the PC in a way the Android Play Store or the PlayStation Store did not have to.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "The fun has been optimized out of the Internet"

bitmasher9 — Tue, 05 May 2026 15:11:44 +0000

It’s not like music. The [internet is becoming more commercial and more sloppy over time. It makes sense that people will miss the time they experienced where it was less shitty.

This trend has been happening since at least the 80s.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Y Combinator's Stake in OpenAI (0.6%?)"

bitmasher9 — Tue, 05 May 2026 03:40:11 +0000

OpenAI’s last post-money valuation was less than a trillion. They’ll probably cross that point in the future, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Kimi K2.6 just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a coding challenge"

bitmasher9 — Sun, 03 May 2026 05:03:11 +0000

I don’t fully understand what open weights unlocks that cannot be accomplished via API from a product standpoint.

Open weights is great if you want to do additional training, or if you need on-prem for security.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "How ChatGPT serves ads"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 01:55:34 +0000

If I say “Doing X is a last resort” and then I’m caught doing X, it should raise some eyebrows about my level of desperation.

It’s not that OpenAI is trying to raise revenues that bothers me, it’s how they are doing things that said was desperate just a couple years ago.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss"

bitmasher9 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:37:50 +0000

It has generally reduced the signal-to-noise ratio of writing, but the signal-to-noise ratio has been absolutely terrible for such a long time we’ve all adapted to better signal detection.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic"

bitmasher9 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:32:04 +0000

The real “AI layoffs” are all the people that are PIPed because their colleagues are better at leveraging AI.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

bitmasher9 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 03:57:52 +0000

Efficiency is a long term issue, especially water efficiency.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

bitmasher9 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 03:53:59 +0000

This would make a great plot point in a space opera.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

bitmasher9 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 03:49:13 +0000

Also some locations do not have climates great for agriculture, but may have climates suitable for solar panels.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return"

bitmasher9 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 03:09:13 +0000

I would much rather buy a 2026 computer than a 2019 computer. Two generations of Nvidia GPUs, Apple M series chips, the X3D AMD chips, and pcie5 ssds are all major upgrades.

It’s just that the pace of new stuff is slowing down, and many people are operating under the assumption that this wave will ride on forever.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return"

bitmasher9 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:36:22 +0000

The difference in the cost of compute between 2026 and 2036 won’t be nearly as large as the difference in the cost of compute between 2016 and 2026. Even at 2016 the slowdown in improvements was noticeable.

We might see a one time bump in inference when we move off GPUs onto more limited and efficient dedicated hardware, but the sustained fast pace of improvements are far behind us.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

bitmasher9 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:26:31 +0000

The traditional means of reestablishing equilibrium are becoming more and more infeasible as state defenses and tactics improve. We are rapidly approaching a time when the asymmetric attacks on state protections traditionally used are less effective than the information asymmetry that the state can enforce. Hong Kong is a great example of these defenses leveraged effectively.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

bitmasher9 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 03:49:30 +0000

Using a 5 year old phone is common these days. I still see plenty of home button iPhones in the wild.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

bitmasher9 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 03:44:00 +0000

Or she spent 7% of the purchase price of a new device to defer requiring to upgrade for another 3 years.

$100 is worth it, but you can get a good discount by going to that one mall kiosk instead of the Apple Store.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

bitmasher9 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 03:38:28 +0000

The entire point of the cellphone is that third party apps are required to live a modern life. If I cannot run the apps required to pay for a parking spot or perform a 2FA ritual then there’s really no point in even having a phone. The first party software isn’t compelling enough to justify the pocket space.

New comment by bitmasher9 in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

bitmasher9 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 01:03:36 +0000

He’s already escaped the permanent underclass.