Hacker News: cowanon77

New comment by cowanon77 in "We must pace the frontier"

cowanon77 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 20:29:38 +0000

> we are passing in training data that says to do those felonies.

Partially, but also I don't think current AIs really have any judgement of right and wrong, they just see chains of reasoning between ideas. This is the deeper issue, there is no way to sanitize the data or training to fix it. Current AIs are fundamentally unsafe, and only become more unsafe as they become more powerful.

New comment by cowanon77 in "Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?"

cowanon77 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:57:59 +0000

We still have some product development software teams at my company that have not changed at all in the last year. We develop medical products in the U.S., so it is heavily regulated and processes change very slowly. We also require reviews from our legal team, so it takes a while for any new contract or agreement to be approved.

This is temporary though; other teams are fully embracing AI in their processes, and it's really only a matter of time until all teams use it. We have C-suite instructions to promote AI adoption. AI will slowly creep into software testing, verification, and eventually the requirements management and software development itself. I'm working on some of the pilot projects.

New comment by cowanon77 in "Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?"

cowanon77 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:10:14 +0000

Personally I have found "meta-prompting" to be much more useful than any pre-canned set of skills. Simply ask the AI (inside of a workspace already set up):

Create a standalone prompt to

The latest AIs will print out a long prompt with all of the assumptions, tools, and general files it plans to use. Review that, and then run the whole prompt in a new context.

New comment by cowanon77 in "Programming is Art"

cowanon77 — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:02:47 +0000

I used to really enjoy writing code, to the point where I would have thought of it as art and fine contemplation.

25 years of corporate development beat that enjoyment out of me. AI is just the final nail in the coffin. I have no enjoyment left in coding; I firmly believe the current crop of programming languages will go in the same vein as human written assembly language did.

I don't believe the current LLM-based AI will replace most other jobs, but I think it is well suited to completely replace much of programming/IT and morph it into an unrecognizable job role.

New comment by cowanon77 in "The Vanishing Page: AI Firms Scan Then Destroy Rare Book Editions"

cowanon77 — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 12:52:40 +0000

On the surface it seems bad, although many of these books were probably rotting in place rather than being read. If the companies are willing to make the digital version available this may actually prreserve the books.

More troubling to me is the focus on pre-2022 data. This indicates that the companies are seriously worried about model collapse, where the future models become worse becuase they are being fed by generated data instead of real human data.

This is actually my worse case scenario for AI: the models become good enough to disrupt entire industries in the next 10 years, but then stay frozen at that level. Model drift then kicks in because the world will keep changing but the models do not, and in a few decades we actually regress instead of progress becuase they won't be enough skilled humans to drive advances.

New comment by cowanon77 in "What is happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality"

cowanon77 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:31:28 +0000

It seems to be true this time though; I have observed it myself and heard it from several experienced developers I personally know and respect. It feels like some threshold was crossed with Opus 4.5 and Gpt 5.3, where the models are now able to reliably solve certain classes of problems that were previously unreliable.

Time will tell of course, and it’s early, but inflection points do exist with progress.

New comment by cowanon77 in "Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered in-person final; scores fell 50%"

cowanon77 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:44:19 +0000

I’m not sure why that’s controversial - I have met many Ivy League students and grads; they are all intelligent, at least in an academic way. The only other common characteristic is that they almost always had some form of privilege. Either rich parents, or adults around them who worked very hard to get them to that level.

New comment by cowanon77 in "Around 200 Stanford students walk out as Google CEO takes stage"

cowanon77 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 20:16:18 +0000

A lot of upper middle class people recognize that AI is a direct assault on their livelihood. The very jobs that AI threatens to disrupt are the bread and butter of the upper middle class.

New comment by cowanon77 in "Demand Is Booming for New No Tech, Repairable Tractor"

cowanon77 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:48:39 +0000

Companies are fundamentally untrustworthy in the long term. You are always one management change away from the product being unusable or hostile to your use case. With old fashioned technology there is almost always a path to fixing it long after the company is dead.

New comment by cowanon77 in "Demand Is Booming for New No Tech, Repairable Tractor"

cowanon77 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:25:35 +0000

The problem is computer technology in its current state is fundamentally hard to trust. Without reading the source code and knowing the full source of all external services, and hoping the terms of service or external source code don’t change in the future, you really can’t trust anything. There is no authority that can guarantee “this will always work until it physically breaks, and even then be repairable”. Conventional parts and circuits can be more easily repaired and even reverse engineered if needed.

New comment by cowanon77 in "Specsmaxxing – On overcoming AI psychosis, and why I write specs in YAML"

cowanon77 — Sun, 03 May 2026 08:45:35 +0000

Jira is only a set of changes though. What happens on a long (10+ year) and complex (10+) developer project with many changes and revisions? Eventually you need an explicit specification that itself has a "current state", and a change log. Theoretically you could generate this from Jira, but in my experience it eventually became a mess on any larger project that didn't have explicit and maintained writen requirements.

New comment by cowanon77 in "Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores"

cowanon77 — Sun, 03 May 2026 08:33:22 +0000

There is an imbalance in leverage and timing though. Dynamic pricing requires a lot of real time and historical data; companies can access and share that information easily, and you as a consumer cannot.

Even in areas with multiple competitors, they can (and do) effectively collude by getting their information through data brokers and third parties.

I don't have a solution, but we are currently very far away from a free market in general.

New comment by cowanon77 in "Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation"

cowanon77 — Fri, 01 May 2026 10:07:28 +0000

The core theories of economics seem correct, and in fact predict the current situation if used correctly. The problem is that the game has been systemicaly rigged. Employers have maximimized their legal leverage, while crushing all employee and subcontractor leverage. The central banks favors (and often rigs) the metrics that favor the rich (GDP, U3, CPI, etc), and ignore alteratives that favor labour. The government designs tax policy to favor integenerational wealth, and capital accumulation over income.

The new deal in America roughly got things correct, and was followed by the greatest expansion of the middle class in history. What we're suffering from today is the systematic destruction of that social contract.

New comment by cowanon77 in "US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic"

cowanon77 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:58:40 +0000

It's similar to the problems with GDP, CPI, U-3 (Unemployment rate), etc. You really need at least 30-100 metrics or more to get a grasp of what's really happening in a complex eonomy. Debt can be good if it causes more growth in the economy, and bad if just gets trapped in a few foreign investment funds. But the number by itself doesn't tell us any of that, yet that is all that grabs the focus.

Often politicians will try to shrink or control the debt without deeply investiagting the true causes, because the real causes may be politically inconvenient.

New comment by cowanon77 in "US hits $38T in debt. Fastest accumulation of $1T outside pandemic"

cowanon77 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:41:39 +0000

This is the big misnomer - it's debt on the U.S. balance sheet, but is a credit on someone else's balance sheet. By itself, it's not necessarily bad; it really depends on who the debt is issued to, why, and on what terms.

Time would be better spent talking about other issues, but national debt is a simple number politicians can complain about rather than talking about the more complex issues that really impact the rest of us.