Hacker News: christina97

New comment by christina97 in "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%"

christina97 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:00:41 +0000

They’re trying to compete with open weight models here. It’s a very different customer segment.

New comment by christina97 in "Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+"

christina97 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:11:57 +0000

Do people feel Stripe APIs are really that good? I’ve always found them unintuitive, tons of options, weird edge cases, breaking occasionally, etc.

I’m sure payments are convoluted, but I’d still imagine they could be meaningfully easier for the bulk 80% of use case?

New comment by christina97 in "Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk"

christina97 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:06:29 +0000

GLP-1s seem like a night and day difference in intervention adherence though. For various obvious and non-obvious reasons, it’s very hard to produce an intervention that people will adhere to to make the test group lose weight.

New comment by christina97 in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"

christina97 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:52:28 +0000

Is it not common knowledge that this is the entire purpose of loyalty programs? As far as I know, if you don’t give them your details and just swipe a card, they are not doing facial recognition and PCI stops them from linking your purchases too heavily.

I’m not really surprised by anything here but the fact that McDonalds disclosed all their predictions?

The bigger question here is whether it is good for large corporations to be run with such brutal profit motives, running on extremely precise data to uncover how to best make a bigger profit. It doesn’t appear good to me, but it is how the entire US economy operates. The lift from the per-customer loyalty timeseries and per-customer upsells is probably modest compared to the rest of the data driven work to understand how to sell more “product”.

New comment by christina97 in "Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows"

christina97 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:39:42 +0000

The GP is claiming Meta is an awful company for what they have done and how they continue to treat their employees. That’s a perfectly ok opinion to hold, and many seem to agree.

Have DeepSeek, Moonshot, or the other Chinese AI companies done such things that attract moral outrage?

New comment by christina97 in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

christina97 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 23:41:31 +0000

There’s some kind of tradeoff between speed, cost, and quality for every application. I would be perfectly happy with a model 6 months old that was 50x faster for many uses. Right now I use either Opus (for smart stuff) or Flash without thinking (for fast stuff). I would take an even dumber model for more speed (lower latency in particular).

New comment by christina97 in "Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork"

christina97 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:00:59 +0000

Copyright is an automatic protection (meaning you don’t need to register it, like registered trademarks), for certain types of creative works. Contracts are one way to dish out these rights (eg. for a fee).

If you have a work that is not copyrightable, and you give it to people lawfully, then you cannot protect it via copyright.

New comment by christina97 in "Franken.domains: Stitched-Together Domains, Because Every .com Is Taken"

christina97 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:45:37 +0000

This wouldn’t really reduce the scarcity though. Right now everyone wants a “.com”, because it’s the convention. If you could buy the TLD “widget” for the same price as “widget.com”, then you would just move up one level in the domain hierarchy and have the same scarcity? If anything, the fact that there are several legitimate TLD options reduces the scarcity a tiny bit?

As an aside (I’m also annoyed by domain squatters etc), it is a fascinating market study how domains are artificially scarce the way they are when everyone can easily and cheaply buy them. I am not sure there is any reasonable solution to it.

New comment by christina97 in "Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models"

christina97 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:42:48 +0000

I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.

New comment by christina97 in "Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth"

christina97 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 00:58:04 +0000

It depends entirely on the time-to-failure distribution though whether used cards are a good deal or not. Often this kind of hardware has a bathtub shaped hazard rate, actually getting burned in cards may mean you get the weeded out solid specimens, and forgo the lemons.

New comment by christina97 in "Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth"

christina97 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:52:29 +0000

Why would they be shot? Unlike the consumer cards that are basically factory overclocked to look good on benchmarks, the datacenter GPUs are designed to run at full tilt 24/7 and survive for years.

New comment by christina97 in "Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth"

christina97 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:24:01 +0000

GPGPU programming has become significantly easier now and the payoff is bigger (better hardware), due to the immense investment in this due to ML/AI.

New comment by christina97 in "Hologram Works. Sponsor What Comes Next"

christina97 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:30:14 +0000

My framework/stack choice on the other hand is now much more dictated by the quantity and depth of existing literature on the internet about that stack.

New comment by christina97 in "Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers"

christina97 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:13:38 +0000

Because the people in charge of site picking also shop for low regulation environments.

New comment by christina97 in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"

christina97 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:01:38 +0000

It’s quite the opposite. Passkeys are phenomenal for a lot of consumers. Based on this thread, it’s the engineers who understand authentication in the first place and have their own system (eg password manager) that are confused.

Consider a user in the Apple ecosystem: you are already conditioned to just do Touch ID or Face ID when asked. I was on Amazon the other day, it prompted randomly for “want to set up a passkey to sign in easier”? I set it up and now I can easily sign in to Amazon on my mac or iphone with zero friction.

For the normal consumer this is not a replacement for “dig out my password manager and copy-paste/autofill my password”, it’s a replacement for “oh it’s prompting for my password again” -> proceed to type your shared password for all sites.

New comment by christina97 in "That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing"

christina97 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:46:56 +0000

I’m not sure if you are just repeating what I said or trying to add something? I was indeed implying that the ethical and moral issues lie in implementation, but my point was that I don’t see an ethical/moral issue with in abstract wanting convenience. There’s nothing wrong with wanting food delivered to your door or an LLM to do the boring tasks for you. The issues of slavery lie elsewhere.

New comment by christina97 in "That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing"

christina97 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:53:29 +0000

I didn’t really get this point in the essay. What’s wrong with wanting servants as long as it’s done ethically etc and is not indentured servitude?

The whole gig/services economy is just building this up piece-by-piece: you can now pick the set of household needs you want taken care of for varying levels of money; and practically everyone participates in one form or another. This is exactly a disaggregated 21st century version of servants: paying for convenience. Of course with many issues in implementation, but I don’t see the ethical/moral issue with wanting this kind of thing?

New comment by christina97 in "A Beautiful Theory Falls to Ugly Data"

christina97 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:10:16 +0000

It seems stupid to model books as a durable good. Reading this summer’s bestseller next summer sounds at its face like you should gain the same utility. But that is clearly not the case for the population buying books after a bit of thinking.

Also books without copyright are obviously cheaper beyond pricing than those with copyright. There is a rights holder there somewhere making a cut.

New comment by christina97 in "Australian energy retailers must provide three hours of free daytime electricity"

christina97 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 17:33:25 +0000

One issue with grid scale batteries is that the solar is predominantly generated in the suburbs, but the grid wasn’t built for a huge “generator” in the suburbs. It requires retrofitting the grid for this huge excess. It would be better to instead store it in the suburbs in household batteries (which they are also building out like crazy).

New comment by christina97 in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

christina97 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:18:23 +0000

Yes and just to add, the infra itself is pretty cheap. The cost comes from the labor and regulatory complexity. Budapest for instance has dirt cheap fibre just about everywhere.