Hacker News: cglan

New comment by cglan in "We Must Pace the Frontier"

cglan — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 14:28:32 +0000

We will not get a coherent AI (or any policy) from this administration, nor will we get coordination with other governments and a lot of that is on the tech right

New comment by cglan in "In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley, with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years"

cglan — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:42:18 +0000

I have no words, but this tribute is beautiful. I can’t imagine losing someone like that after so many years. Heartbreaking

New comment by cglan in "The AirPods Effect"

cglan — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:46:43 +0000

Coming back to the states after traveling abroad is always astonishing. For all our wealth, it genuinely feels worse than somewhere like Brazil in many of our big cities

New comment by cglan in "Midjourney Medical"

cglan — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:24:42 +0000

First of all, this is incredible. Like genuinely insane. Also I bet you can do crazy things with that tranducer. If stuff like this keeps coming out, we have nowhere near enough compute

New comment by cglan in "Midjourney Medical"

cglan — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:23:14 +0000

is it not similar? taking raw data, some vector of data and constructing a visual image

New comment by cglan in "Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable"

cglan — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:55:14 +0000

Well said

New comment by cglan in "Growing tribe of jobless techies is stuck in Silicon Valley's new reality"

cglan — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:39:41 +0000

Every startup under the sun is hiring decent software engineers. If you cannot find a job right now as a software engineer with experience, that's on you

New comment by cglan in "The Quiet Renovation at Bitwarden"

cglan — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:06:12 +0000

I don't think these companies are obligated to run a free tier. Someone has to pay the infra. It's a little shady that they didn't announce any of this though. But bitwarden is open source and you can host it all yourself

New comment by cglan in "The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI"

cglan — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:22:57 +0000

The future (if we keep using money to allocate resources) is something akin to feudalism but worse. If you are born at the bottom you will never rise to the top. It's bleak. Even worse, your labor will not be needed, nor will your intellectual abilities. There will be a few well off people with capital. The data centers will be guarded by automatons and drones. Everyone else will essentially live in a parallel economy that is borderline biblical. Countries like this already exist in the form of countries with excess access to a single natural resource. See the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

New comment by cglan in "LLMs can be exhausting"

cglan — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 23:37:40 +0000

I find LLMs so much more exhausting than manual coding. It’s interesting. I think you quickly bump into how much a single human can feasibly keep track of pretty fast with modern LLMs.

I assume until LLMs are 100% better than humans in all cases, as long as I have to be in the loop there will be a pretty hard upper bound on what I can do and it seems like we’ve roughly hit that limit.

Funny enough, I get this feeling with a lot of modern technology. iPhones, all the modern messaging apps, etc make it much too easy to fragment your attention across a million different things. It’s draining. Much more draining than the old days

New comment by cglan in "When does MCP make sense vs CLI?"

cglan — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:47:16 +0000

They make a big difference. For example if you use the Jira cli, most LLMs aren’t trained on it. A simple MCP wrapper makes a huge difference in usability unless you’re okay having the LLM poke and prod a bunch of different commands

New comment by cglan in "Why isn't LA repaving streets?"

cglan — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:11:52 +0000

I was going to say, how on earth does it take 3 months to build 12 ramps. Seems like there’s a much deeper dysfunction. Ramps should genuinely be able to be stamped out at scale. This is the type of thing China would do in a few hours

New comment by cglan in "Why isn't LA repaving streets?"

cglan — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:08:25 +0000

Sorry, how on earth does it take 3 months to make curb cuts

New comment by cglan in "Gemini 3.1 Pro"

cglan — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:57:50 +0000

Yeah that happens to me too. It’s hard to know where it’s going to break off and follow instructions too well vs use it as a tip. Idk it’s all tiring

New comment by cglan in "Gemini 3.1 Pro"

cglan — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:06:18 +0000

being TOO steerable is another issue though.

Codex is very steerable to a fault, and will gladly "monkey paw" your requests to a fault.

Claude Opus will ignore your instructions and do what it thinks is "right" and just barrel forward.

Both are bad and papering over the actual issue which is these models don't really have the ability to actually selectively choose their behavior per issue (ie ask for followup where needed, ignore users where needed, follow instructions where needed). Behavior is largely global

New comment by cglan in "As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise"

cglan — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 02:04:19 +0000

At this current pace, if "the electorate" doesn't see real benefits to any of this. 2028 is going to be referendum on AI unfortunately.

Whether you like it or not, AI right now is mostly

- high electricity prices - crazy computer part prices - phasing out of a lot of formerly high paying jobs

and the benefits are mostly - slop and chatgpt

Unless OpenAI and co produce the machine god, which genuinely is possible. If most people's interactions with AI are the negative externalities they'll quickly be wondering if ChatGPT is worth this cost.

New comment by cglan in "Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief"

cglan — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 16:06:39 +0000

I think for the first time I’ve been considering moving off iOS because of liquid glass. The bugs on apple products have hit a breaking point for me. Mac is still unequivocally the best laptop around imho, but it’s less clear cut for phones. My iPhone 15 pro is borderline unusable. Every day is a new issue. I’m very much over it.

You used to be able to count on the basics working smoothly, but stuff like the camera and messaging are frequently broken for me

New comment by cglan in "Copper thieves are wreaking havoc across America"

cglan — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 23:23:33 +0000

^^ yes

New comment by cglan in "Copper thieves are wreaking havoc across America"

cglan — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 23:22:00 +0000

I think immigration currently is fucked up and there needs to be clean, legal avenues for immigrating. I don’t think immigration policy is too soft. It’s much too hard if anything.

But immigration policy =/= immigration enforcement. I think ICE needs to exist and needs to enforce the laws. Do I think maskless thugs dragging people from their homes is good? No. Screw that. They need to be dressed in uniform and follow laws. But we DO need enforcement and if you’re illegal I think you’ve got to go while simultaneously we need to offer a straightforward avenue beyond the lefts idea of simply abdicating any sort of enforcement

New comment by cglan in "Copper thieves are wreaking havoc across America"

cglan — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 23:17:23 +0000

I live in a very very good area of Brooklyn and still regularly run into needles, human shit, and open fentanyl use.

LA is similar unless you never leave your little neighborhood.

DC was similar when I lived there about 4 years ago.

SF is cleaning up, but I’ve regularly walked on streets where it’s just bodies and needles

I was shocked by the Vietnamese area of Seattle. It felt like a zombie land.

I mean, if we’re talking city core yeah this it the average experience. I say this as someone who loves cities, American cities leave a lot to be desired and a lot of that comes from simply refusing to enforce basic laws that the rest of the world (including much more left countries) don’t hesitate to do.