Hacker News: codelord

New comment by codelord in "Veo 3 and Imagen 4, and a new tool for filmmaking called Flow"

codelord — Wed, 21 May 2025 04:46:11 +0000

Even if the content was 100% AI generated (which is the furthest thing from reality today) human engagement with the content is a powerful signal that can be used by AI to learn. It would be like RLHF with free human annotation at scale.

New comment by codelord in "Google is winning on every AI front"

codelord — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 06:51:03 +0000

As an Ex-OpenAI employee I agree with this. Most of the top ML talent at OpenAI already have left to either do their own thing or join other startups. A few are still there but I doubt if they'll be around in a year. The main successful product from OpenAI is the ChatGPT app, but there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots. The whole time that I was at OpenAI until now GOOG has been the only individual stock that I've been holding. Despite the threat to their search business I think they'll bounce back because they have a lot of cards to play. OpenAI is an annoyance for Google, because they are willing to burn money to get users. Google can't as easily burn money, since they already have billions of users, but also they are a public company and have to answer to investors. But I doubt if OpenAI investors would sign up to give more money to be burned in a year. Google just needs to ease off on the red tape and make their innovations available to users as fast as they can. (And don't let me get started with Sam Altman.)

New comment by codelord in "How a $2k 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured"

codelord — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 04:29:47 +0000

American and multi-national companies often build such factories in low-income countries. It's not that no one in the US knows how to build factories. It's purely a cost/regulation question.

New comment by codelord in "How a $2k 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured"

codelord — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 02:56:28 +0000

So basically you can find qualified workers everywhere. There's a valid question about the cost. But to say the problem is lacking "skilled workers" is laughable as most of these skills are machine dependent and can only be learned on the job after the factory is built.

New comment by codelord in "How a $2k 'Made in the USA' Phone Is Manufactured"

codelord — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 02:19:30 +0000

"manufacturing expertise exists primarily in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other countries" lol. What's this skill that Cambodians have that Americans can't learn or can't be automated by robots? Can they juggle 4 wrenches in the air simultaneously?

New comment by codelord in "Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button"

codelord — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 06:53:50 +0000

Fade in/out animation.

New comment by codelord in "Piracy"

codelord — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 07:37:47 +0000

Having worked in the game industry in the past it's amusing to see people talk about the greed of game developers. You have no idea! You have no idea what an effort it takes to ship a game. An album is the work of one or a few individuals for a relatively short period of time with very little cost. Because of that you can have services like Spotify that allow pretty much access to all the music ever created for a 10$ fee. The math just doesn't work with video games. Video games take an army of developers and years of work to make. Game development is one of the hardest and worst paying professions in tech. Most people in the industry are there not for the money but because of their passion for the profession. Most games fail to pay for their production costs despite all the effort that goes into them. Companies who have had a few mega successes have to make enough money out of their popular titles to be able to pay for all the other titles that fail to pay for themselves. Please don't complain about video game prices!

New comment by codelord in "How to think in writing"

codelord — Sat, 06 Jul 2024 22:44:09 +0000

"If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it."

Apparently, even writing it down didn't help the author with this flawed deduction.

New comment by codelord in "Show HN: I created an After Effects alternative"

codelord — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 22:17:10 +0000

I wish people stopped equating AI with Adobe's content policy.

New comment by codelord in "Show HN: I created an After Effects alternative"

codelord — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 22:03:16 +0000

I thought this is using AI so I was gonna dismiss it. But then saw the No AI sign and immediately signed up. Seriously though why is "No AI" a "feature" worth mentioning on top?

New comment by codelord in "Biden signs TikTok bill into law, starting clock for ByteDance to divest"

codelord — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 04:38:46 +0000

If you are on TikTok and you don't think CCP has all your personal data TikTok has collected from you, I have a bridge to sell you.

New comment by codelord in "How to Start Google"

codelord — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 23:58:01 +0000

How to start Google? You can't. That holds for 99.999999% of the people. The rest 0.000001% aren't wasting their time reading Paul Graham's essays.

New comment by codelord in "Among the A.I. doomsayers"

codelord — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 01:05:59 +0000

We live in a world where proven maniacs (e.g. Putin) have access to an arsenal of nuclear weapons that can essentially make the earth uninhabitable for all humans. That's a very real possibility (with no ifs and buts and maybes) that exists now and we have learned to live with it. Yet somehow the hypothetical scenario of a human exterminator super-intelligent AI is getting all the coverage.

New comment by codelord in "Game Development Post-Unity"

codelord — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 04:29:22 +0000

30% for distribution is fine, 5% for more than half the cost of development is not?

Fortnite is also a top selling mobile game developed with UE5. You can make great mobile games with UE5 now. Mobile hardware right now is comparable to last gen consoles.

New comment by codelord in "Game Development Post-Unity"

codelord — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 03:45:38 +0000

IMO Unreal Engine is the best deal available and fits >90% of use cases for game developers. Unless you are building something for the web or low powered mobile VR I wouldn't even consider anything else. For PC and console games UE5 provides incredible amount of tools and flexibility. It's also great for building 2D/3D mobile games. People who say complexity of Unreal has stopped them from using it have gotten it wrong. UE5 provides you with a lot of tools, you don't have to use them all. But if you are thinking of building something more complex than a hello world example, you'd realize that the additional tools that UE5 provides you greatly save your time.

If you are a total beginner you can use Blueprints to write the game logic and use the existing out-of-the box tools. If you are a more experienced programmer you can use C++ to build custom components/plugins to get more customization.

I remember a time that game engines were these precious secret tools that you had to pay millions of dollars to get a license for. Now you can get the full source of UE5 on Github for free. And you pay something like 5% after 1 million dollars of revenue. This is just a no-brainer folks. IMO 5% is totally deserved and justified. In fact it's a bargain and you save money by paying Epic 5% compared to anything else out there. Use UE5 unless you have a really really really good reason not to.

New comment by codelord in "Money is pouring into AI. Skeptics say it’s a ‘grift shift’"

codelord — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 07:11:27 +0000

IMO AI is more underrated than overhyped. The scale of value that AI can bring maybe larger than what internet brought. But, product design and engineering havn't caught up with the science yet. I think we are too narrowly looking at AI. LLMs are cool, but investors should look beyond that. ChatGPT wrappers aren't the next big thing. The fact that LLMs and image generation models work as good as they do now, should give investors a signal that the science of AI is approaching a tipping point where it's finally good enough to be incorporated into products. I see potential in 10 years time for a new FAANG, 5 trillion dollar companies with heavy reliance on AI that bring automation to various aspects of our lives.

New comment by codelord in "Comcast, CenturyLink fail to derail Utah community-owned gigabit fiber network"

codelord — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 18:38:58 +0000

As a Comcast customer who's paying 5x what I was paying in Europe for half the bandwidth I want this to succeed. However let's not celebrate a win before actually delivering the service to the customers. There's more to building a business than seed funding it. The pessimistic in me would say if there was a viable path to providing high-speed internet with low cost in the US surely companies with a lot on the line like Netflix, Google, Amazon, etc. would make that happen. If you think it's all Comcast profit margins you can always go and buy Comcast stocks to get your share of that profit. They are doing well but not spectacularly well.

New comment by codelord in "Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer"

codelord — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 07:49:16 +0000

As someone who did a PhD and published and read many papers (in ML) I believe vast majority of papers in ML are misleading. If in fact every paper that claims a better performance over state of the art was true we would have solved AI by now. You see all sorts of problems when you dig deeper into the technical details of peer reviewed publications (even in top tier conferences) including misleading baselines, statistical insignificance of improvements, overfitting to test data, and in some cases just flat-out fabrication of results.

I hope this is not as bad in medicine and health related research. But just thinking that some paper can be used against you in court to claim billions of dollars in damages makes me uneasy. Peer reviewed paper != science. Peer review is a crude filter on research that can both accept bad work and reject good work. There must be a higher bar for something that can be used in the court of law. Some sort of scientific consensus must be needed at least.

It's easy to dismiss this because screw J&J. But I think we are all paying for these lawsuits through our insurances and taxes and higher drug prices.

Not saying these lawsuits don't have merits, but I think there must be a higher bar for what is presented as evidence.

New comment by codelord in "Meta releases Intermediate Graphics Library"

codelord — Sat, 08 Jul 2023 07:46:45 +0000

Good to know I was under the impression that to draw 2 triangles I need to copy paste the whole code twice. I have been a graphics programmer for over 25 years. I'm not even commenting on the API. The toy example certainly can be reduced in code length even given the current API.

New comment by codelord in "Meta releases Intermediate Graphics Library"

codelord — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 19:34:00 +0000

385 lines for a triangle: https://github.com/facebook/igl/blob/main/samples/desktop/Ti... When you are trying to sell a wrapper you want your hello world example as small as possible not as comprehensive as possible.