Hacker News: dmortin

New comment by dmortin in "ChatGPT Desktop (Codex Desktop) for Linux"

dmortin — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:08:36 +0000

Isn't it expensive, though? If you let it perform gui or web tasks for you using vision, I'd think it consumes lots of tokens.

New comment by dmortin in "Cloudflare's new AI traffic options for customers"

dmortin — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 10:07:51 +0000

Do you actually get any signifcant AI traffic today?

New comment by dmortin in "China's open-weights AI strategy is winning"

dmortin — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:18:02 +0000

Nothing, but the article is about American AI, so using Chinese models by American companies can be risky. And it's risky for the Chinese to use American models.

So every country or block needs to run their own models to avoid opening a security hole for other countries.

New comment by dmortin in "China’s open-weights AI strategy is winning"

dmortin — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:11:23 +0000

Are open weights models secure? E.g. if a Chinese model is run by an American provider then can it still do bad things, like inserting backdoors into generated code or accessing external URLs (if browsing is enabled) to send info to them?

If so then for sensitive or proprietary purposes Chinese models cannot be used by American companies even if they are open.

New comment by dmortin in "Knowledge Should Not Be Gated"

dmortin — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 13:28:36 +0000

There should be at least some correlation. When building the model they give more weight to some pages (e.g. Wikipedia) which have bigger trust (pagerank?). And when they provide links in answers, those matches are listed first which have better pagerank for the query.

So if it sources something in Wikipedia, it is more likely to provide Wikipedia as a trusted source for it.

The problem is when an answer is hallucinated, false, it may provide a source for it which contains the invalid info.

New comment by dmortin in "Knowledge Should Not Be Gated"

dmortin — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 13:01:12 +0000

Secifically in Google AI Overview I always see links to sites where the information is sourced from.

Or at least some of the sites, if the same info is sourced from 100 pages then it only shows 2 or 3, maybe the ones with the biggest PageRanks.

New comment by dmortin in "Automating myself out of development"

dmortin — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:05:54 +0000

Is his code maintainable, though? Or is it just a pile of code which happens to work? What if he wants to change something? Does he generate again the whole thing from scratch? Or does he tell Claude to make the changes and doesn't even know when something breaks when a new thing is added? (Assuming the software is complex, having multiple non trivial features.)

New comment by dmortin in "Google's AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back"

dmortin — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:20:04 +0000

That's exactly what PageRank is about, invented by Google.

New comment by dmortin in "Google's AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back"

dmortin — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:18:00 +0000

The strength of the sources are not a question of quantity. A hundred obscure blog post have not the same strength as one wikipedia link, because the latter is more trustworthy. There could be some indication beside the info showing the strength of the sources (how many major trustworthy sources support it, etc.).

New comment by dmortin in "Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back"

dmortin — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:04:51 +0000

There should be some warning if some "fact" is only supported by one or very few obscure sources.

The strength of the sources should be clearly indicated in the answers to help users gauge how trustworthy the info is.

New comment by dmortin in "Erich von Däniken has died"

dmortin — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 07:27:38 +0000

Was it inability or simply calculation? He made a livelihood out of making up stories about ancient aliens. He was financially motivated to keep telling his stories.

New comment by dmortin in "Resurrect the Old Web"

dmortin — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 13:36:22 +0000

What bothers me is that even some tech forums use Facebook groups and stuff, hiding the information in non-searchable silos.

Why can't at least tech people use only traditional forums which are easily searchable, readable without login, etc?

New comment by dmortin in "No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search"

dmortin — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 16:31:47 +0000

> Content can’t be free if you want it to be of any quality.

There are lots smaller local websites which can produce useful local content because of ad support. Those may not have enough subscribers to continue behind a paywall.

New comment by dmortin in "No clicks, no content: The unsustainable future of AI search"

dmortin — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 16:27:31 +0000

> Luckily, there's tons of information on the web provided not by commercial entities but by volunteers

The question is: is there content which is useful, but not provided by volunteers? We see more and more content behind paywalls, and it is a loss for many people who can't pay, because they won't be able to access the same content for free supported by ads.

So the result is poor people are going to lose access to certain contents, while well to do people will still have access.

New comment by dmortin in "My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)"

dmortin — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 15:37:50 +0000

" it will be interesting to see what the business model for Anthropic will be if I can run a solid code generation model on my local machine "

Most people won't bother with buying powerful hardware for this, they will keep using SAAS solutions, so Anthropic can be in trouble if cheaper SAAS solutions come out.

New comment by dmortin in "Hungary's oldest library fighting to save 100k books from a beetle infestation"

dmortin — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 19:20:15 +0000

> but unless you're deeply, deeply into repetitive religious tracts of 600 years ago, most of the collection is more of a curiosity than a valuable resource to modern scholars.

It's an abbey, so they are probably into religious tracts and it has cultural and sentimental value to them. E.g. if it has a Bible from the 13th century then it's worth preserving even if it's just the usual stuff.

New comment by dmortin in "A Reddit bot drove me insane"

dmortin — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 12:56:04 +0000

Unless that typo was inserted intentionally to make it look like it was written by a fallible human.

New comment by dmortin in "Emacs Solo: A Surprise System Crafters Live Demo"

dmortin — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 07:53:57 +0000

Keybindings are the least interesting part of emacs. I modify the default keybindings heavily, because I find them uncomfortable.

Emacs's strength is being a portable programming platform which once you learned it allows you to very quickly create mini applications which help with everyday tasks.

Programming a VS Code extension is pretty cumbersome compared to creating a quick Emacs extension.

New comment by dmortin in "Comments on Shared Unix Hosting vs. the Cloud"

dmortin — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 14:08:40 +0000

> I just want write some scripts and SSH to a Unix box I don't want to maintain kernels, web servers, or SSL certificates.

That's my use case too. I don't want to maintain a VPS, just have some server available. Something fast and cheap which is maintained by someone else.

New comment by dmortin in "I pulled data on 1378 restaurants from Google Maps to rank them in order"

dmortin — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 07:22:13 +0000

> I don't trust Google reviews anymore, Maps or otherwise.

What do you use as alternative?