Hacker News: cowpig

New comment by cowpig in "Claude Science"

cowpig — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 20:01:32 +0000

I've always found that what science is really lacking is closed, proprietary ecosystems trying to build for-profit moats around research.

Thank our lords at Anthropic for stepping into this void

New comment by cowpig in "A way to exclude sensitive files issue still open for OpenAI Codex"

cowpig — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:30:11 +0000

I don't think we should ask the agent runtime to police itself.

I contributed to a tool for this problem that is lower-friction than traditional sandboxing:

greywall.io

But you should use something to contain an agent runtime. The idea that people run things like codex on their machines with regular user permissions is baffling to me.

New comment by cowpig in "Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place"

cowpig — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:23:37 +0000

I don't see why those two positions are mutually exclusive?

New comment by cowpig in "Steam Machine launches today"

cowpig — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 21:43:30 +0000

Can I serve my media library off of my NAS with the PS5? I am legit asking because I just got on the list hoping to use this thing as my home entertainment system

New comment by cowpig in "Migrate from OpenClaw"

cowpig — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:28:19 +0000

openclaw is for larping

New comment by cowpig in "The U.S. Is Terrorizing Cuba to Make Rich Men Richer"

cowpig — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:33:00 +0000

I visited Cuba and found that Castro's popularity is fairly universal there. I have never been to Miami and don't know any Cuban immigrants, though.

New comment by cowpig in "Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit"

cowpig — Sat, 30 May 2026 03:13:49 +0000

I think you are underestimating the amount of compute the US frontier labs have access to.

New comment by cowpig in "The Last Technical Interview"

cowpig — Sat, 30 May 2026 02:48:40 +0000

A lot in here about Google, which hilariously has done a bunch of studies that concluded it's hiring process is awful (is sure is!) and the takeaway is that candidate evaluation is impossible, not that Google in particular does it badly.

New comment by cowpig in "Social Animus"

cowpig — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:25:22 +0000

> Right now my only source of income is the $15k/year I got by being one of the top 300 GitHub users globally. That puts me in the 99.9997th percentile of open source developers (based off GitHub's 100 million monthly active user count). What it means is that I'm uniquely able to convert your money into the largest amount of value for society. I want to start by using the money to buy myself a home in San Francisco, in a neighborhood where I can feel safe, so that I can have a bed, set up a real office, entertain guests, and take photographs. I want to travel around the world and experience the cosmopolitan lifestyle my project is named after, using only private aviation, so that I won't be molested or risk being detained each time I fly. I want to hire an elite team that can help me accomplish my social and technical goals, such as adding native support for my file format to every operating system.

The bit about "using only private aviation" and "hir[ing] an elite team" sound satirical at first, but then the next sentence sounds earnest, so I can't tell?

I looked up this person on wikipedia, so the "I want to live a cosmopolitan life and fly private" seems like something someone who was involved with occupy wall street would say sardonically, but I am not sure?

Regardless, this person's technical work seems incredible and I really hope we can find a way to support people who work independently and aren't obsessed with capturing the value they create in the US.

New comment by cowpig in "Germany Law to Force Algorithm Boost for State-Approved News"

cowpig — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:16:25 +0000

I don't know how I feel about this, conceptually.

It's clear that social media are natural monopolies, and are being politically leveraged by the people who run them. So the status quo is definitely far from free speech. It's more of a "command economy of ideas" than a "marketplace".

But is this a reasonable solution? I feel like rules around algorithmic neutrality and penalties for misinformation might be better?

New comment by cowpig in "SpaceX launches Starship v3 rocket"

cowpig — Sat, 23 May 2026 20:30:07 +0000

I expect more from HN than seeing this kind of propaganda:

Vague story without references featuring the takedown of an uninteresting political caricatures

New comment by cowpig in "Microsoft is 1.84 Peters, Google is 0.66. What's the Peter unit?"

cowpig — Wed, 20 May 2026 02:56:22 +0000

oh great more memes about that data security catastrophe

New comment by cowpig in "Security researcher says Microsoft built a Bitlocker backdoor, releases exploit"

cowpig — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:05:01 +0000

people with values different from yours, presumably

New comment by cowpig in "Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools"

cowpig — Sun, 17 May 2026 13:52:26 +0000

We should be involving our community members more in the exchange of ideas, and digital sources of information quite a bit less.

New comment by cowpig in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

cowpig — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:02:30 +0000

Their business model revolves around people to choose to pay them for products, which aligns them with customer interests on a fundamental level. They have to work within those constraints when they engage in lock-in chicanery

Most of the other big tech companies make their revenue from other companies paying them to leverage the influence they have over their users. So they are not constrained in the same way.

I believe that most Googlers are pretty aligned with the principles of the HN crowd, but Google the machine is not.

New comment by cowpig in "U.S. Senators Vote to Ban Themselves from Trading on Prediction Markets"

cowpig — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:04:17 +0000

better is always good

when something you think is bad gets better but not better enough, say "more please"

New comment by cowpig in "Surveillance Pricing: Exploiting Information Asymmetries"

cowpig — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 19:08:53 +0000

Can you explain why they are mutually exclusive?

New comment by cowpig in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

cowpig — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:33:37 +0000

A couple of my favourites to add to your list:

- Patrick's Parabox

- Blue Prince

New comment by cowpig in "Monero Community Crowdfunding System"

cowpig — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 02:23:45 +0000

pro: if the world devolves into an authoritarean hellscape, people will still have a form of undetectable currency until they find a way to get rid of this

con: this improves the chances if the world to devolving into an authoritarean hellscape

New comment by cowpig in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety"

cowpig — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:53:56 +0000

> I think it’s likely (at least in the short term) that we all pay the burden of increased fraud: higher credit card fees, higher insurance premiums, a less accurate court system, more dangerous roads, lower wages, and so on.

I think the author is brushing against some larger system issues that are already in motion, and that the way AI is being rolled out are exacerbating, as opposed to a root cause of.

There's a felony fraudster running the executive branch of the US, and it takes a lot of political resources to get someone elected president.