Hacker News: dw_arthur

New comment by dw_arthur in "America's Expanding Domestic Surveillance"

dw_arthur — Sat, 02 May 2026 17:38:48 +0000

A surveillance state was always inevitable once wireless networking, GPS, and cameras were ubiquitous. If you say this isn't true, show me anywhere in the world with these technologies that is not headed down this path.

New comment by dw_arthur in "Notes from the SF peptide scene"

dw_arthur — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:56:26 +0000

Injecting unregulated chemicals into your body is something you may regret in the future. If you inject a Chinese peptide to improve your sleep quality score and three years later you're diagnosed with cancer the inscrutable nature of causality in the body may drive you mad.

New comment by dw_arthur in "AI could be the end of the digital wave, not the next big thing"

dw_arthur — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:04:08 +0000

We have been since we bound consumption to the internet. All of this was inevitable after that.

New comment by dw_arthur in "MacBook M5 Pro and Qwen3.5 = Local AI Security System"

dw_arthur — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:21:17 +0000

LLMs are powerful systems that eventually may be a requirement for being able to economically participate in a large portion of the economy. For this and other reasons it's important that people are able to control their own LLM.

Look at how much Google has changed over the years in the pursuit of profit. What will ChatGPT and Claude look like when they are pushed further down the profit maximization path?

New comment by dw_arthur in "I'm OK being left behind, thanks"

dw_arthur — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:32:36 +0000

Even two or three years ago I had ideas for projects but I could see the models were not ergonomic for my uses. I decided to wait for better models and sure enough the agentic models showed up which are much easier to use.

Next thing I'm waiting on is building a new server for a powerful locally hosted LLM in 5 years. No need to go through the headaches and cost of doing it now with models that may not be powerful enough.

New comment by dw_arthur in "$96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor"

dw_arthur — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 15:46:12 +0000

Throwing an aside here that anyone interested in 1940s war technology must check out the old BBC documentary The Secret War (1977) which goes into depth on solving the engineering challenges of the war.

New comment by dw_arthur in "India's top court angry after junior judge cites fake AI-generated orders"

dw_arthur — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:22:37 +0000

As someone who has done QA on white collar work it's tiring looking for little errors in work reports. Most people are not cut out for it.

New comment by dw_arthur in "Technical Excellence Is Not Enough"

dw_arthur — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:18:23 +0000

It was okay writing in the context of marketing. A normal person never wrote like that.

New comment by dw_arthur in "The Slow Death of the Power User"

dw_arthur — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:41:42 +0000

Low information density is a big AI tell. Also sheer length is another AI tell. The LLM pukes out a bunch of text and the "author" either doesn't have the skills or energy to edit it.

New comment by dw_arthur in "AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says"

dw_arthur — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 05:36:08 +0000

It should show in decreased revenue for the company you didn't buy the product from. It also should show up at your company either as increased profit margin, increased investment, increase in total employee wages, or increased dividend payout.

If this is happening on a widespread basis in the economy we should see evidence of it sometime this year and that's what investors are anticipating with SaaS stocks.

New comment by dw_arthur in "Writing code is cheap now"

dw_arthur — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 20:28:41 +0000

It's funny that so many people are using AI and still hasn't really shown up in productivity numbers or product quality yet. I'm going to be really confused if this is still the case at the end of the year. A whole year of access to these latest agentic models has to produce visible economic changes or something is wrong.

New comment by dw_arthur in "Global Intelligence Crisis"

dw_arthur — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:36:38 +0000

Citrini charges like $1000/year for a subscription. It's ridiculous he is using AI generated charts.

New comment by dw_arthur in "Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents"

dw_arthur — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 20:07:03 +0000

As a long time computer hobbyist who grew up in MSDOS and now resides in Linux I'm starting to wonder if I am not more connected to computing than a lot of people employed in the field.

New comment by dw_arthur in "What is happening to writing? Cognitive debt, Claude Code, the space around AI"

dw_arthur — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 02:39:55 +0000

I assume if someone used an LLM to write for them that they must not be comfortabley familiar with their subject. Writing about something you know well tends to come easy and usually is enjoyable. Why would you use an LLM for that and how could you be okay with its output?

New comment by dw_arthur in "Why I'm Worried About Job Loss and Thoughts on Comparative Advantage"

dw_arthur — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:39:15 +0000

The Jevon's paradox example of plummeting costs to create videos doesn't make sense to me. If people are already watching 7 hours of videos a day how much more time do they have to consume video? There are only 24 hours in a day. Earth is only so large and can only handle so much pollution. There are limits we need to talk about here. I guess Elon hand waves it away by saying we'll go into space but that remains to be seen.

New comment by dw_arthur in "Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle"

dw_arthur — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 21:36:09 +0000

Everyone should have their own private evals for models. If I ask a question and a model flat out gets it wrong sometimes I will put it in my test questions bank.

New comment by dw_arthur in "How to effectively write quality code with AI"

dw_arthur — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 14:08:04 +0000

Is the progress of LLMs moving up abstraction layers inevitable as they gather more data from each layer? First, we fed LLMs raw text and code and now they are gathering our interactions with the LLM regarding generated code. It seems like you could then use the interactions to make a LLM that is good at prompting and fixing another LLMs generated code. Then its on to the next abstraction layer.

New comment by dw_arthur in "AI Usage Policy"

dw_arthur — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 16:08:35 +0000

I think a social norm of disclosing AI use at all times would be great. People and companies should also be held 100% accountable for anything created using AI.

New comment by dw_arthur in "The next two years of software engineering"

dw_arthur — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:06:32 +0000

I think the GPT3 or 4 minute mile moment for robotics will be when we see a robotic hand with the dexterity of a 6 year old. Once that happens it will quickly be over.

New comment by dw_arthur in "ICE is using facial-recognition technology to quickly arrest people"

dw_arthur — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:07:43 +0000

We've been building a turn key police state for the past 25 years.