Hacker News: dclowd9901

New comment by dclowd9901 in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

dclowd9901 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:14:40 +0000

I feel like the big takeaway here isn't what's covered or not covered, but the percentages.

We have 3 companies claiming something like a $35T market for their services. The world's entire GDP is something like $126T. So 10% of the productive work that is done on this planet, that AI can actually perform makes up fully 1/4 of the entire world's economic output? best guesses for output solely of tech companies is something like $12T. Where are they getting these figures?

New comment by dclowd9901 in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

dclowd9901 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:09:59 +0000

This would imply then that AI output is equally wortheless.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

dclowd9901 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:07:35 +0000

What work do you do?

New comment by dclowd9901 in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

dclowd9901 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 19:01:56 +0000

How much can you buy memory for?

New comment by dclowd9901 in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

dclowd9901 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 18:56:57 +0000

This is a gleaming silver lining view. Blindingly so. The largest customers of the trades class are the white collar class. The largest customers of service industries are the white collar class. It _will_ be "the rich get poorer and the poor get poorer". This is a hollowing out and redistributing up of wealth, plain and simple.

It's the reason AI company leaders are so adamant about framing it as a post-singularity utopia with UBI. They have no answer other than "you're all going to be jobless, better figure that out." Worse yet, they see it merely as a policy problem, rather than a problem they're responsible for. It _is_ a policy problem, no doubt, but the angry mobs won't be coming for policy.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

dclowd9901 — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 18:55:05 +0000

"They'd pay you nothing if they could."

I'll say this: I'm teaching myself every skill I can think of. I'm already pretty decent at finish carpentry, structural carpentry, electrical, mechanical work, HVAC, auto repair, auto body, welding and a few other less lucrative things.

I was thinking briefly I might want to go to law school, but who knows how much longer that's going to be a thing.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead"

dclowd9901 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 04:17:47 +0000

Can you show me how diverted nasa funding cured AIDS, directly?

New comment by dclowd9901 in "US criticises Australia's proposed algorithm opt-out laws as 'censorship'"

dclowd9901 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 04:14:11 +0000

Can you elaborate how this might be different than laws in Germany that disallow certain speech around white supremacy? Or laws that disallow violent rhetoric?

New comment by dclowd9901 in "NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead"

dclowd9901 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:37:15 +0000

It's hard to imagine, since the moonlandings, if America kept its pace in space exploration, how far ahead of everyone else it would be, but also how far along everyone else would be. America was the catalyst for the impossible in that era, and then we decided to abandon it for... basically nothing. Enriching corporations, I guess?

People took issue with the cost of space exploration in context of "the good the money could do here on Earth", but then when we shifted resources that way, the money did absolutely no good here on Earth.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "GPU World"

dclowd9901 — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:52:54 +0000

I don't think you've said anything different than the person you're responding to. The difference primarily seems to be whether you think AI is transformative vs simply being another tool (which is really just a matter of perspective).

If you're not an expert software engineer, it's transformative. If you are, it's just another tool.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "Hacking IKEA Furniture"

dclowd9901 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:13:45 +0000

Anymore I almost don't buy any IKEA stuff without intending some modification. I do woodworking as a hobby so it's nice to be able to skip all the rote stuff like building a large flat wooden surface or a square box or table legs. I can just focus on building a highly focused and functional piece of furniture for my space.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion"

dclowd9901 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 22:24:06 +0000

Clearly some folks here have never worked at Amazon before. It's genuinely terrifying to see what most of the internet runs on.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:59:25 +0000

Yet, with 37% of people being only a $400 surprise cost away from financial destitution, you might be completely wrong.

https://www.investopedia.com/here-s-how-many-americans-can-t...

New comment by dclowd9901 in "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:54:08 +0000

Still, it lowers the resolution of the results if you have to throw out a significant portion of the interviews.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:51:18 +0000

> Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes

Would that everyone employed this level of skepticism before commenting on figures.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:21:16 +0000

Ah, guess I was conflating the two (they are quite similar after all). From their documentation (the link you posted):

> For untrusted repos, use a basic text editor instead.

Is that really our options here? How shitty.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left"

dclowd9901 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:16:15 +0000

This draws to mind the dialog that opens when you open a new project in Cursor (and VSCode too, I think), where the IDE asks the user if they trust the project they're opening. Is Cursor under the impression that this is sufficient security apparatus?

New comment by dclowd9901 in "Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor"

dclowd9901 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:59:17 +0000

I'm always confused by these phrases:

> The new API cuts word error rate by 3.5 to 4x on the same audio: from 9.02% to 2.12% on clean speech

Shouldn't they have said "cuts error rate by 78%" or something?

New comment by dclowd9901 in "A possible future for Damn Interesting"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:31:46 +0000

Oh yeah, I think I alone have shared this article with a few dozen people.

New comment by dclowd9901 in "A possible future for Damn Interesting"

dclowd9901 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 21:27:52 +0000

Just more focused places to find it, I think. I loved the historical seafaring stories that DI would post, but then I realized that there were subject matter podcasts that dug into these stories even more. So I think it was just specialization taking over.