Hacker News: cjbgkagh

New comment by cjbgkagh in "Tracking down a 25% Regression on LLVM RISC-V"

cjbgkagh — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:56:34 +0000

And how would John Travolta at roughly 5K lifetime hours compare to the best of the comercial pilots at 1K hours per year? Also John Travolta has a commercial licence and has been paid to fly.

This argument seems absurd to me.

I get that in software quite often time is wasted by poor management that otherwise would not be wasted if working unpaid. Well managed research orgs can work at elite levels but they are few and far between.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "Tracking down a 25% Regression on LLVM RISC-V"

cjbgkagh — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:45:18 +0000

I did read it and I agree with the sentiment, but disagree that professionals have no chance to reach the level of amateurs.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "Tracking down a 25% Regression on LLVM RISC-V"

cjbgkagh — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:22:46 +0000

I'm focusing on the following premise;

> if you require money to do something, you usually have no chance of being as good as the folks that do it for the pleasure

Not only do I think professional have a chance to be as good as amateurs, but the elite professionals are on average better than the elite amateurs.

I do think that we would be better off if more elite amateurs became elite professionals.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "Tracking down a 25% Regression on LLVM RISC-V"

cjbgkagh — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:50:58 +0000

I would suggest that’s an availability bias, those who do it for free are more likely to blog about it.

There is a common distinction between professional and amateur with the former getting paid for their work. In general there is an understanding that someone getting paid can focus and do it full time and are expected to be better than someone who does it as a hobby.

Perhaps coding is an unusual space where the best coders are often misfits who have a hard time holding down a job.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "I ran Gemma 4 as a local model in Codex CLI"

cjbgkagh — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:12:00 +0000

I've been playing with this for the last few days. The model is fast, pretty smart, and I am hitting the same tool use issues. This blog post is unusually pertinent. The model speed isn't an issue on my dual 4090s, the productivity is mainly limited by the intelligence (while high it's still not high enough for some tasks) and getting stuck in loops.

What I would like is for it to be able detect when these things happen and to "Phone a Friend" to a smarter model to ask for advice.

I'm definitely moving into agent orchestration territory where I'll have an number of agents constantly running and working on things as I am not the bottleneck. I'll have a mix of on-prem and AI providers.

My role now is less coder and more designer / manager / architect as agents readily go off in tangents and mess that they're not smart enough to get out of.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "Taking on CUDA with ROCm: 'One Step After Another'"

cjbgkagh — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 05:26:52 +0000

It seems like general improvements in ram efficiency, such as that used in Gemma 4, means it’s back to memory bandwidth as the bottleneck and less about total available memory size. I’m also curious to see how much more agent autonomy will reduce less need for low latency and shift the focus to more throughput. Meaning it’s easier to spread the model out over multiple smaller GPUs and use pipeline parallelism to keep them busy. This would also mean using ram for market discrimination becomes less effective.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons"

cjbgkagh — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:42:57 +0000

Not Russia in general but their leadership succession

New comment by cjbgkagh in "What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)"

cjbgkagh — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:45:44 +0000

I think it was more the violent people were hung, or ostracized to die in the wilderness. Animals likely have similar genetic pressures as some animals have evolved ways to determine who’s the strongest with contests instead of the more deadly violence that they care capable of.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "Exploiting the most prominent AI agent benchmarks"

cjbgkagh — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:30:26 +0000

Whose intent? POSWID Is about structural incentives not personal intent, and these can be, and likely are, an emergent behavior. It’s about reframing away from intents, treating the system as a structure and removing the whole structure for replacement. As opposed to localized reforms which are exposed to the same prior emergent behaviors leading to constant backsliding.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons"

cjbgkagh — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 11:57:19 +0000

Hense the credible belief. The Russians did manage to step down from violence so it is possible.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons"

cjbgkagh — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:20:32 +0000

Or concretely, would the Israeli wars end sooner if Netanyahu was pardoned of all crimes? Would Kim Jong Un consider giving up his position if he could be pardoned, or at least credibly believe that he could live a life in luxurious exile? I don’t know the answer to either of those questions, but I do think letting some people get away with crimes with witness immunity can make it much more difficult for criminals to organize as the optimum move is to defect before anyone else does. Which is why I think elite blackmail focuses on unforgivable deeds.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "The effects of caffeine consumption do not decay with a ~5 hour half-life"

cjbgkagh — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:56:16 +0000

There are some fairly common genes that can drastically effect the strength and duration of caffeine so your experience may vary. For me the effect is very strong and one cup lasts all day, even as a habitual consumer.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "Peptides: where to begin?"

cjbgkagh — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:12:26 +0000

Things go wrong all the time, it's a balance of risks / rewards given the information we have. For me the cost of doing nothing is that I succumb to ME/CFS and end up homeless in addition to still having ME/CFS which might as well be a death sentence.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "Iran demands Bitcoin fees for ships passing Hormuz during ceasefire"

cjbgkagh — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:57:13 +0000

AFAIK they only let two ships pass before closing it again due to Israeli strikes on Lebanon, so in effect the strait is still closed and likely to remain so.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "Iran demands Bitcoin fees for ships passing Hormuz during ceasefire"

cjbgkagh — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:54:15 +0000

Paid in bitcoins denominated in USD so the price is stable, just a small carry risk while holding.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

cjbgkagh — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 06:48:06 +0000

This is not peace terms it’s a ceasefire, and most likely it’s not even that. It appears little has changed except Iran can now charge a toll.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

cjbgkagh — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:51:55 +0000

We will have to agree to disagree on Israel’s long term viability without the support of the US. Perhaps if Iran was defeated but so far that has not happened.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

cjbgkagh — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:37:47 +0000

And the IEDs were in the ground not flying overhead. Asymmetric war has completely changed the math.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

cjbgkagh — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:08:25 +0000

I warned you specifically that this Iran war was coming and would not end up in Israel’s favor. As I stated “the Iran war is already unpopular and it hasn’t even started yet.” I understand that it is not yet over.

Iran and its proxies can slow squeeze Israel like Israel was squeezing Gaza. I see this war as a breakout attempt to fracture Iran into a failed state so that Israel would be the uncontested regional hegemony. Israel is losing popular support, which precedes losing political support and military support. You had some fantasy that Israel would dump America and find some other client state to support it.

New comment by cjbgkagh in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

cjbgkagh — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:52:59 +0000

I think it’s less about the money and more about a formal declaration who won the conflict. The loser sues for peace / pays reparations.