Hacker News: cootsnuck

New comment by cootsnuck in "Midjourney Medical"

cootsnuck — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 06:11:50 +0000

"Dangerous" is a loaded term. But yes, even "soundwaves" can cause harm, same way use of pharmacological medical interventions can cause harm. Dosage, application methods, side effects, etc. all exist for medical use of ultrasound too. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8954895

New comment by cootsnuck in "Siri AI"

cootsnuck — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:23:48 +0000

Yup, precisely. Turns out getting AI to be reliable at doing useful things is harder than we've all been led to believe by the dominant narratives.

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/new-paper-towards-a-science-of-a...

New comment by cootsnuck in "They’re made out of weights"

cootsnuck — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:35:50 +0000

> Lets redefine work into discovering the world again. Let people do old handcraft jobs, let them do more sports, let them read more, let them write and make more. Let them enjoy nature.

Why leave something so important up to what AI does or doesn't do?

New comment by cootsnuck in "They’re made out of weights"

cootsnuck — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:16:28 +0000

> I certainly don’t think individual cells have any subjective experience or sense of agency.

There's definitely research and scholarship that would beg to disagree with you there. At least in terms of completely writing off the notion of "agency" when it comes to cells.

Dr. Michael Levin's lab is doing some pretty cool work. https://drmichaellevin.org/

New comment by cootsnuck in "They’re made out of weights"

cootsnuck — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:10:22 +0000

> something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator

That says nothing about emulating a human brain.

New comment by cootsnuck in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

cootsnuck — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:15:32 +0000

I'm hearing different from PhDs. The bottleneck with much research isn't "trying out ideas" so much as it's all the bureaucratic minutiae, grants, mentoring PhD candidates, collaboration with other researchers, etc.

I've heard LLMs can be helpful in limited targeted ways. But not as some kind of "game changing" accelerant.

New comment by cootsnuck in "Various LLM Smells"

cootsnuck — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:27:44 +0000

I call it "I'm not like other girls" writing.

New comment by cootsnuck in "Claude Opus 4.8"

cootsnuck — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:10:49 +0000

> 4.8 is also 2x more expensive for a "modest" performance bump. How refreshing.

Where are you seeing it's 2x more expensive? https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing

New comment by cootsnuck in "Claude Opus 4.8"

cootsnuck — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:07:52 +0000

I'd be kind of shocked if a model that came out six months ago is the same size and cost to run as one that just came out today.

New comment by cootsnuck in "Claude Opus 4.8"

cootsnuck — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:05:58 +0000

Well, it seems like collectively we are all struggling to perceive model progress, given that it seems like every reply to you is reporting different experiences with which of the models has subjectively performed best for them.

New comment by cootsnuck in "I analysed 20 years of my chats"

cootsnuck — Thu, 28 May 2026 16:21:41 +0000

I have my original gmail address from 20 years ago still and even old youtube videos my friends and I uploaded from ~18 years ago.

The cringe is rough but at some point the cringe becomes so bad it loops back around to me just feeling nostalgic and grateful that there's proof I was able to do things, create, be silly, whatever without worrying about appearances so much.

Also, I figure if I ever become a megalomaniac then old youtube videos of my teenage self doing parkour should go pretty far in humbling me (although, honestly, I think 13 year old me was way cooler than I am now, so I guess it could backfire).

New comment by cootsnuck in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

cootsnuck — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:25:00 +0000

Also it was but a few months ago that their CFO said, in a court filing, that Anthropic's revenue across the entire lifetime of the company "exceeds $5 billion". Pretty strange.

https://www.reuters.com/commentary/breakingviews/anthropic-g...

New comment by cootsnuck in "Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country"

cootsnuck — Wed, 27 May 2026 15:07:27 +0000

Yea, I wonder the same. Something I've been wanting to read up on is how the land ownership works with these data center deals.

Because developers promising massive projects to scoop up a bunch of land, do little to nothing with it, sit on it for awhile, and then eventually just sell it for a profit...that's not a new thing at all and isn't unique to the tech industry.

I wouldn't be surprised if a not-so-insignificant part of all of this winds up being just banking land that you got zoning, entitlements, and maybe some utility infra stuff setup for.

That may also explain some of the kind of puzzling cloak and dagger behavior with so many of these data center initiatives in local communities. If you truly think you're about to build something that is going to "imminently transform the way we do everything" and become some kind of $X trillion dollar industry, I'd imagine you'd be showing up with better "gifts" to ensure quick frictionless approval. But if they're more so viewing project proposals as speculative investments for control of land that is hopefully desirable to a bunch of tech firms (whether that's now or years from now), then keeping costs low and details vague early on makes more sense.

New comment by cootsnuck in "Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country"

cootsnuck — Wed, 27 May 2026 05:38:54 +0000

Yea, my bad. "majority getting scrapped” was sloppy wording.

More accurate to say would be that a big chunk of the AI data center pipeline looks delayed/speculative. 16GW is slated for 2026, but only 5GW is actually under construction. https://www.sightlineclimate.com/research/data-center-outloo...

I do think it's a bit ridiculous though to not consider someone a tech insider who was a director for a decade at one of the biggest tech companies in history...

New comment by cootsnuck in "Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country"

cootsnuck — Wed, 27 May 2026 04:06:54 +0000

I'd argue we don't need to build a 9 GW data center anywhere. But that's just me.

New comment by cootsnuck in "Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country"

cootsnuck — Wed, 27 May 2026 04:03:41 +0000

> The data centers the industry wants are all going to get built.

If that was the case then why are the majority of data center projects getting scrapped?

https://gizmodo.com/data-center-project-cancellations-quadru...

Why are insiders saying they only expect about 10% of data center projects to ever be completed?

Why is 2026 already shaping up to have less than half of planned data centers break ground on construction?

Local community opposition is a big driver but so is permitting and infra procurement.

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/energy-power-supply/why-...

All of this is inconvenient to big tech's "inevitability" narratives.

New comment by cootsnuck in "Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country"

cootsnuck — Wed, 27 May 2026 03:51:04 +0000

Heat. 9 GW puts off a staggering amount of heat. In an already arid environment. What's the worst that can happen?

https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...

New comment by cootsnuck in "Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country"

cootsnuck — Wed, 27 May 2026 03:49:14 +0000

It seems fairly likely that a comically gargantuan data center like Stratos would endanger the surrounding ecosystem, at a minimum.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2026/05/07/utahs-dat...

But I also think there's very little chance that they even get 1 GW up and running anytime soon, and less than 3 GW before the whole thing gets scrapped (just like plenty of the other hyperscale data center projects that keep getting shouted about).

New comment by cootsnuck in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

cootsnuck — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:56:05 +0000

No, they do not have empathy or motivations. Arguably, if you think of them as having such then maybe it could help you coax out better outputs occasionally (wildly dependent on the task at hand). But that's only because of the LLM always wanting to "complete the story" -- "the story" being the prompt (which includes any "unseen" parts in the context window like a system prompt set by the application you're likely calling the LLM through).

It'd be more accurate to say that using language that tends to evoke empathetic motivated responses is more likely to get them. I'd argue that's only going to be relevant in scenarios where you want outputs that read as more... "empathetic and motivated".

The important point though is that none of the above equals "better" outputs, just different.

New comment by cootsnuck in "The Companies Cutting Headcount for AI Will Lose to the Ones Who Didn't"

cootsnuck — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:39:56 +0000

But the firms in the headlines doing layoffs after layoffs aren't growing crops, selling groceries, or driving busses... They're knowledge work roles in companies selling intangible products and services. It's large corporations doing this much more than SMBs.