Hacker News: bpodgursky

New comment by bpodgursky in "Solar panels that plug into your wall"

bpodgursky — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 02:10:42 +0000

US blue-collar labor is very expensive.

Homeowners are getting the short end, but the solar installers are doing well.

New comment by bpodgursky in "GLM-Legal"

bpodgursky — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 21:45:00 +0000

Both parties in a lot of civil cases would accept next-day LLM adjudication rather than waiting five years for a judge to see it.

New comment by bpodgursky in "Anthropic asks users to stop being mean to Claude"

bpodgursky — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 02:57:40 +0000

Being cruel to your LLM is bad for your own soul. Don't worry about AI consciousness, worry about your own conscience.

New comment by bpodgursky in "Nvidia in talks to acquire US 'open' model startup Reflection AI"

bpodgursky — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 19:52:07 +0000

Reflection AI was founded in 2024. Is it really consolidation when new companies spawn out of nothing and get acquired 2 years later? That's just normal M&A churn.

New comment by bpodgursky in "Taxing Entrepreneurial Wealth: Evidence from Norway, 2021–2025"

bpodgursky — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 03:22:06 +0000

I mean there are some small countries that have absolutely benefitted by giving billionaire expats gentle treatment and keeping taxes low. Dubai, Singapore etc.

Totally fair to claim this cannot scale to a "big" country, but it absolutely works to attract capital.

New comment by bpodgursky in "Anthropic AI model submits false tip on unsolved Philly murder, police say"

bpodgursky — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 02:56:23 +0000

If the police prosecuted every nutjob tip we have to have to turn Nebraska into a giant open-air prison for 30 million slightly neurotic and/or bored people.

New comment by bpodgursky in "Anthropic AI model submits false tip on unsolved Philly murder, police say"

bpodgursky — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 02:05:41 +0000

No matter how much testing you do in sandboxes, you have to test behavior in "real life" before releasing the model to users.

Even if it was normal software you'd have to do this, but actually it's software that figures out that it's running in a sandbox most of the time, so the sandbox behavior may or may not actually represent real life.

It would be far more irresponsible to release the model to users without testing how it interacts with real world websites.

New comment by bpodgursky in "Yandex Takes a Second Data Center Hit in 48 Hours"

bpodgursky — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:44:57 +0000

Taking out GPUs is more important than storage nowdays.

New comment by bpodgursky in "A 5.3M-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone"

bpodgursky — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 04:52:03 +0000

It did the job

New comment by bpodgursky in "Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program"

bpodgursky — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:06:25 +0000

I'm sorry but this is just absurd. Not everyone has the same aptitude for every job. For a company or country to function you have to acknowledge this and put people in jobs suited to their natural talents.

New comment by bpodgursky in "Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program"

bpodgursky — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:27:40 +0000

How is it hand waving? It's literally true a large corporation can fire a customer support agent while sponsoring a software engineer, it is not interchangeable talent

New comment by bpodgursky in "Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI"

bpodgursky — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 19:21:21 +0000

Limited to $10,000/employee/month lol. This is just to cut off a few people doing absurd things with low ROI. Don't read too much into it.

New comment by bpodgursky in "Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is overestimated: study"

bpodgursky — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:13:00 +0000

They never actually stopped fishing it though. It's regulated at a level to prevent 100% collapse, there was never political support to let it truly recover by banning fishing for a decade or two.

New comment by bpodgursky in "The technology to eradicate mosquito-borne disease exists"

bpodgursky — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 15:04:42 +0000

Basically 0, there are only a few species of mosquito that carry disease. Other species fulfill all other ecological roles without spreading horrible diseases.

New comment by bpodgursky in "Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage"

bpodgursky — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:05:43 +0000

OK sure but this is like defense in depth. It's a negligible amount of water, most of it doesn't evaporate, and most of what does rains somewhere it's useful anyway. The actual damage here is microscopic.

New comment by bpodgursky in "Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage"

bpodgursky — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 22:57:07 +0000

Also even in the totally fake scenario where that water completely evaporates, it's just gonna rain on Iowa a bit more.

New comment by bpodgursky in "So You Think You Could Be an Electrician?"

bpodgursky — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 04:04:09 +0000

Well, in principle the economy scales to the labor constraint.

Obviously there are practical limitations to how fast things can rearrange but there's no reason in principle you couldn't have an economy where everyone retrained into blue collar work, and all white collar job needs were handled by the magic internet box.

New comment by bpodgursky in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

bpodgursky — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 02:48:21 +0000

How do you hard-cap S3 and other persistent data storage?

"Sorry, you had a hard cap on AWS spend so we deleted all your S3 data on August 27th". Yeah not going to fly.

New comment by bpodgursky in "I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken"

bpodgursky — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 02:38:46 +0000

I honestly would love to understand — is this your mental model of what motivates the labs to move forward?

New comment by bpodgursky in "Power approval set to delay Oracle's Wisconsin AI datacenter"

bpodgursky — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:03:01 +0000

Feels like Oracle outsourced all their datacenter construction to organizations that were not nimble enough to line up contingency plans for alternative power sources and expected grid connections to happen "like normal".

Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX even Google have been more hands-on and haven't seen these power issues plaguing Oracle, probably because they have an actual internal A-teams on it, not lethargic contractors.