Hacker News: blargey

New comment by blargey in "Hacker compromises A16Z-backed phone farm, calling them the 'antichrist'"

blargey — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 04:31:29 +0000

Having looked at https://doublespeed.ai/ out of morbid curiosity, I have to say a simple screenshot would have sent the message more effectively. Well, that and the tagline "a16z funded this".

New comment by blargey in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

blargey — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:17:29 +0000

> The fact you need to work for wealth is a convention of our constraints

The current constraint is "you need to produce to have things".

If one company's AI takes all the jobs, and thus does all the producing-to-have-things, the constraint transforms into "you need that company's permission to have things".

Hence the top-level question.

New comment by blargey in "Bacteria found in the human intestine capable of improving muscle strength"

blargey — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:30:27 +0000

All fiber-consuming gut bacteria, yes - but that's basically synonymous with "good"/beneficial gut bacteria, so it's good advice even if it doesn't give people the massive gainz they might have been hoping for.

New comment by blargey in "Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model"

blargey — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 19:53:44 +0000

I remember when people were discussing the “performance-improving” hack of formulating their prompts as panicked pleas to save their job and household and puppy from imminent doom…by coding X. I wonder if the backfiring is a more recent phenomenon in models that are better at “following the prompt” (including the logical conclusion of its emotional charge), or it was just bad quantification of “performance” all along.

New comment by blargey in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"

blargey — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:07:10 +0000

> I strongly suspect that vast majority of the "innovation" in recent years has gone straight to supporting the funding model and institution of the software profession, rather than actual software engineering.

Feels like there’s a counter to the frequent citation of Jevon’s Paradox in there somewhere, in the context of LLM impact on the software dev market. Overestimation of external demand for software, or at least any that can be fulfilled by a human-in-the-loop / one-dev-to-many-users model? The end goal of LLMs feels like, in effect, the Last Framework, and the end of (money in) meta-engineering by devs for devs.

New comment by blargey in "Honda is killing its EVs"

blargey — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 23:37:59 +0000

Norway switching from ICEs to EVs objectively reduces global oil consumption+burning by exactly that much.

Norway exporting oil increases oil supply, but doesn't increase consumption. The world's oil consumers are not supply-constrained; the producers are not running at 100% capacity, and they'll happily pick up the slack if Norway just stopped exporting oil for no reason. And there's a large amount of consumption that can't be offset by electrification in the first place (petrochemicals, long distance flight, etc) so there's not even a theoretical future end-state where they require a non-EV-using counterparty to buy their oil to fund their EV usage.

Calling it a "bookkeeping trick" is just verbal sleigh-of-hand.

New comment by blargey in "Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line"

blargey — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 05:01:01 +0000

Because long-term calorie restriction is 100x harder than popping a pill and downing a protein-and-fiber shake, and you can't outrun a burger but you can outlift a calorie deficit, so lumping them all together under "improve diet and exercise somehow" is a nonsensical rhetorical flourish / troll move?

New comment by blargey in "Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers"

blargey — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:34:03 +0000

“i can ask it to give a text description of a linear logical math process that has been described in text countless times”

If you think “the tacit knowledge and conscious/subconscious reasoning mix that caused X to write like X” can be meaningfully captured by some 1-page “style guide” like llmtropes, I’m not sure what to tell you. Such a style description would be informed by a soup of reviewers that most certainly cannot write like X even with their stronger and more nuanced observations than what the LLM picked up.

New comment by blargey in "The Pentagon threatens Anthropic"

blargey — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 19:58:29 +0000

The poll linked in the article shows even trump voters have <30% approval for the pentagon’s actions here, so if the citizenship tells the military how to do things…

New comment by blargey in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

blargey — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 01:22:47 +0000

Anti-crawler tarpits and related concepts have existed for decades already; LLM training data is only the latest and most popular of web-scraping goals.

Claude is happy and able to provide a laundry list of ways to mitigate the impact of tarpits on your crawler, and politeness / respecting robots.txt is only one of them.

New comment by blargey in "Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge"

blargey — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:28:32 +0000

I'm not sure how you could spend 10k/head when ex/ a Claude Team premium plan is $150/mo/head.

New comment by blargey in "British redcoat's lost memoir reveals realities of life as a disabled veteran"

blargey — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 21:48:52 +0000

The thing is, all these “better than a medieval king” tech niceties still don’t cover the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy for all, and “poverty” is the state of suffering those gaps for lack of money.

New comment by blargey in "Slop is everywhere for those with eyes to see"

blargey — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 22:50:42 +0000

"More reach" seems a valid enough goal/desire in and of itself (even if you deride it as a shallow form of communication, shallow attention is what provides the opportunity for deeper connections); this sets the goal-activity of creative pursuits apart from "lounging alone at the beach" (which is itself a flawed representation of retirement, but that's another story).

New comment by blargey in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"

blargey — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 21:49:27 +0000

And the only thing that stopped in Xinjiang is the news coverage and press access.

I find it deeply ironic that for some, the vibes have shifted towards "hey maybe the CCP isn't all that bad" just because...what, the solar buildouts make them look more competent and long-sighted compared to your local upstart authoritarian party? Such is the nature of vibes, I suppose.

New comment by blargey in "My article on why AI is great (or terrible) or how to use it"

blargey — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 03:15:33 +0000

Don't you think "having a concrete idea of what sort of code change / end behavior you're looking for" affects the prompts and LLM output?

New comment by blargey in "Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring"

blargey — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:33:50 +0000

It's also hard to export manufactured goods if they're not price-competitive on their own merits.

New comment by blargey in "Japan joining growing global trend of declining democracy"

blargey — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 07:47:23 +0000

They're talking about how recent trends are a departure from the existing trends that got Japan to where it is now (where you seem to like it).

New comment by blargey in "Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones"

blargey — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 08:54:02 +0000

Lack of care is malice, though. Hanlon's razor only applies if they would aspire to do better but lack the awareness/capability, not if they'd happily accept the tradeoff.

New comment by blargey in "CEOs are hugely expensive. Why not automate them? (2021)"

blargey — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 01:00:04 +0000

> I feel like the people who can't comprehend the difficulties of an AI are people who have never .

That applies to every call to replace jobs with current-gen AI.

But I can't think of a difference between CEOs and other professions that works out in favor of keeping the CEOs over the rest.

New comment by blargey in "Keep the Robots Out of the Gym"

blargey — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 23:46:28 +0000

Lurking between the lines in arguments about AI writing/code/art is that whether or not an activity is "gym" or "job" is often in the eye of the beholder.

People who never "went to the gym" in a field are all too eager to brush off the entire design space as pure Job that can and should be fully delegated to AI posthaste.