Hacker News: dcow

New comment by dcow in "AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions"

dcow — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 07:33:13 +0000

The trick is not to let it hit your checking account. Live without it and your lifestyle will adjust.

New comment by dcow in "Kenji/Serious Eats – 30-Min Pressure Cooker Pho Ga"

dcow — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 07:27:33 +0000

Is this the one where he adds espresso and chocolate? So good!

New comment by dcow in "GCC steering committee announces AI policy"

dcow — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 16:29:05 +0000

Yes this. I was trying to highlight that wasting someone's tokens still makes AI companies money so if your goal is to spite some individual using AI to open a PR and doing things out of spite is ethical to you then go ahead. If your goal is to resist the proliferation of AI then you're probably shooting yourself in the foot.

New comment by dcow in "GCC steering committee announces AI policy"

dcow — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 02:37:02 +0000

If you subscribe to the ethical framework where a) you don’t support companies that associate with e.g. Russian vendors or b) eat at Chik-fil-a then “no”?

Otherwise, “yes”?

New comment by dcow in "I think you might be fooling yourself with AI"

dcow — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:27:40 +0000

> The primary reason is that we have observed a significant increase in developers choosing not to participate in the study because they do not wish to work without AI.

Why do you think this is? Who wants to spend an afternoon gluing API calls together when the robot can do it in 5 minutes?

New comment by dcow in "I Think You Might Be Fooling Yourself with AI"

dcow — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:26:03 +0000

It’s not a consideration. I am more productive with AI. Period. Maybe that’s not the reality for you, but it is for me. I don’t need a study to prove it.

New comment by dcow in "I Think You Might Be Fooling Yourself with AI"

dcow — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:56:41 +0000

The entire thing is an AI skeptic saying “I’m skeptical I found some outdated anecdata that supports my point”. Feynman’s quote is meant for the author of this post, not people using AI to execute better day to day. It’s not reasonable to point at a chatgpt subscription and say “look the entire industry isn’t sustainable”. We all know those are subsidized just like uber was. And there are plenty of people paying API rates for tokens and getting along just fine. Further, if there was a single point in history where an environmental concern killed an entire industry please point me to it. What happens in reality is that humans compromise and innovate under new sets of constraints.

New comment by dcow in "I Think You Might Be Fooling Yourself with AI"

dcow — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:44:23 +0000

AI costs aren’t going to stay this high. They will go down. Nobody is going to turn off AI, but they will care about making sure that we are reasonably efficient when using it. Compute that can happen locally will. Communities that responsibly want to build data centers are. Climate implications will be addressed by policy. People said the same about the internet 30 years ago… It’s not about raw productivity. It’s about perceived effort. If a job feels easier with AI assistance we’ll demand it. If AI checking a human’s work is more reliable than a human checking AI’s work (it is) that’s what we’ll deploy.

New comment by dcow in ".self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting"

dcow — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:50:27 +0000

Midwest.

New comment by dcow in "OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation"

dcow — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 05:54:05 +0000

So did it pass the exam, or not?

New comment by dcow in "TS-2026-009: Insecure argument handling in Tailscale SSH permitted root access"

dcow — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:53:34 +0000

Why does the page only show up to 008? Did TS remove the notice?

Edit: my bad, it's between 008 and 007 ?=

New comment by dcow in "Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS"

dcow — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 05:52:16 +0000

Yes, it was a step in the right direction at the time. But there are plenty of well-documented warts with the approach which Fuchsia aimed to solve via capabilities (and which the Linux community general solved via crun).

New comment by dcow in "Grok CLI uploaded the whole home directory to GCS"

dcow — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:31:13 +0000

Why should it be? We have containers and capabilities…

New comment by dcow in "Grok uploaded my user directory to xAI's servers"

dcow — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:29:57 +0000

Even though it’s completely normal to us and in widespread use, GP is a reminder that conceptually it’s a broken model. Security should be capability-based not user-based. And to anyone who didn’t grow up on a desktop this model makes complete sense since it’s what your phone uses.

New comment by dcow in "Why Vanilla JavaScript"

dcow — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 06:01:47 +0000

So React is like C++?

New comment by dcow in "Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles"

dcow — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 05:47:22 +0000

My only thought is that "good" genai authors/articles will easily get through the filter while "generic" ones will fail. So the outcome won't be all genai articles getting flagged (unless people self-report), just the low quality ones. I'm guessing that's okay and I'm one of those people who discounts genai writing the second I read one of the tells, so the flag would save me time.

Ultimately though this is the same debate as "should we allow genai code in codebases". High quality code lands naturally while slop is slop. Not much value in banning AI outright--the desire is predominantly to ban the slop.

Maybe the tag should be [slop] rather than [genai]...

New comment by dcow in ".self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting"

dcow — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 23:20:24 +0000

It’s not a problem to fail students. But when the online wing of the school has a 35% graduation rate, doesn’t hold lectures, and has a swarm of disgruntled reviews from people who feel like the school is in the business of taking Pell grants and maxing their student loans then stonewalling them when they hit mid 3rd year (right after you’re in for a pound) and start asking questions about where all the money went and why they were sitting at a B all semester then magically ended up with a 59 after the final, it’s a little sus.

New comment by dcow in ".self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting"

dcow — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 01:49:02 +0000

I always thought these TLDs were a flight risk to be used in any serious capacity. What if the random state decides you/your business are in violation of [whatever] and kick you off?

New comment by dcow in ".self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting"

dcow — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 01:45:32 +0000

It’s getting so bad. My wife is in a remote school where they fail students occasionally to squeeze a little extra $$ out of them.

New comment by dcow in ".self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting"

dcow — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 01:39:19 +0000

You just described my teacher, and I’m fairly certain we didn’t go to the same middle school.