Hacker News: em500

New comment by em500 in "The labor share of income in the US is at its lowest post-war level"

em500 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:49:07 +0000

Pertinent data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPPOP65UPTOZSUSA

New comment by em500 in "GLM 5.2 vs. Opus"

em500 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 08:27:53 +0000

We've had the great small Qwen 3.6 early April that many could actually run on their laptop. Then similar from Google a few weeks later (Gemma4, better in prose, worse in code). Then the super cheap large Deepseek V4 a few weeks later. Then antirez DS4 build that made that actually runnable on MacBooks and Mac Studios. And now the "near-frontier / near-Opus" GLM 5.2.

For people who follow open LLMs, none of these were quiet and all were the most interesting open model release for a few days/weeks. In one or two months, it will be some other model again. Now I do appreciate the real rapid improvements in open models. But there's also a ton of hype and fast-fashion around all of this.

New comment by em500 in "Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school"

em500 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 06:06:10 +0000

Just to be accurate, median annual salary is over $62k accross the US for kindergarten and elementary school teachers, with California nearing 100k.

[1] https://www.onetonline.org/link/localwages/25-2021.00?st=CA

New comment by em500 in "US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks"

em500 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:34:34 +0000

Noteworthy that Z.ai, maker of the just released near-frontier GLM 5.2, has already been on the Entity List since Jan 2025[1]. Being on the Entity List does not mean all trade is forbidden. Broadly speaking it means American companies and individuals are not allowed sell them goods and services, but they are still allowed to buy from them and pay them.

AFAIK the Chinese AI companies barely depend on US goods and services, except for nVidia GPUs which were export restricted anyway, so it doesn't seem to be very consequential (see Z.ai). For the RAM maker CXMT it could be a lot more problematic though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z.ai

New comment by em500 in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

em500 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:38:43 +0000

Hourly wage for all private sector workers is up +32% since Dec 2019 ($37.54 vs $28.38)[1]. For non-management workers +35% ($32.31 in May 2026 vs $23.85 in Dec 2019)[2].

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AHETPI

New comment by em500 in "AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study"

em500 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 06:51:55 +0000

> The biggest trap is the hallucinated citation. It will easily insert an absolutely authentic sounding quotation from another case that perfectly proves the point you are trying to make, then it'll make up an authentic name for it, e.g. United States v. Shenzhou Electronics Inc or whatever.

Naive question from an outsider: aren't there searchable databases of cases (with complete text) so that citations could be checked automatically, either by the same or an independent agent?

New comment by em500 in "Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars [video]"

em500 — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:54:33 +0000

So this is specifically about Toyota's hybrid engines (which is very different from e.g. Honda's engine, not to mention plug-in hybrids or "mild hybrids"). The explanation of the mechanics starts around the 36 minute mark.

I always found most explanations of Toyota's Power Split Device too abstract, until I found this page where you can play with the sliders to see how the power is actually split between the ICE and the MG1/MG2 electric generators: https://eahart.com/prius/psd/

New comment by em500 in "Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouter"

em500 — Sun, 17 May 2026 15:26:10 +0000

They learnt from ooenai that naming yourself open-xyz doesn't actually require opening anything.

New comment by em500 in "AI uses less water than the public thinks"

em500 — Fri, 01 May 2026 19:28:45 +0000

> The cities' water usage is to keep people alive with basically mandatory things, like hygiene, and drinking

Almost half of city water usage is for residential landscape irrigation, mostly spraying lawns, which is not exactly mandatory or a basic necessity. Landscape irrigation uses about 3.5 million acre-feet / year, which is 1 to 2 order of magnitude higher than the estimated AI data center usage.

New comment by em500 in "Spain to expand internet blocks to tennis, golf, movies broadcasting times"

em500 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 18:08:45 +0000

I sure hope connected health device makers include some generous tolerance for network outages.

New comment by em500 in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

em500 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:10:43 +0000

> Why do you think an employer would waste resources like that?

The parent post specifically mentioned large organizations, where the "employer" is not some person who hires and pays employees from their own funds. Hiring and personel management is done by middle managers with their own interests and incentives, which can differ substantially from those of the owners or capital providers.

New comment by em500 in "Gold overtakes U.S. Treasuries as the largest foreign reserve asset"

em500 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:33:00 +0000

> The price of a loaf of bread in gold now is still similar to what it was in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago.

That seems pretty unlikely, when the price of a loaf of bread in gold now is less than half of what it was only 3 years ago.

New comment by em500 in "Run Linux containers on Android, no root required"

em500 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:04:28 +0000

Yes, under How It Works:

> libqemu-system-aarch64.so (QEMU TCG, no KVM)

TCG means software emulation

New comment by em500 in "Mark Zuckerberg creating new Applied AI engineering company, reorganises teams"

em500 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 22:00:12 +0000

You mean his terrible financial decisions of founding a company in 2004 that IPO at 104B within eight years, and now 14 years on is valued at 1.6T? Are we looking different track records?

New comment by em500 in "How to run Qwen 3.5 locally"

em500 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:31:06 +0000

This also works

persona: emotionless vulcan

New comment by em500 in "A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content"

em500 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 11:32:40 +0000

> I'm worried that this will lead to a Prop 65 [0] situation, where eventually everything gets flagged as having used AI in some form.

This is very predictably what's going to happen, and it will be just as useless as Prop 65 or the EU cookie laws or any other mandatory disclaimers.

New comment by em500 in "A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times"

em500 — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 11:19:32 +0000

Most of these studies get published based on elaborate constructions of essentially t-tests for differences in means between groups. Showing the opposite means showing no statistical difference, which is almost impossible to get published, for very human reasons.

New comment by em500 in "The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe"

em500 — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:09:53 +0000

Non-tech people tend to think similarly about developers, breaking things that worked fine until yesterday / last week / last month, for no user-visible benefit.

New comment by em500 in "Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)"

em500 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 04:58:54 +0000

Here's John Cochrane take on Fed vs Narrow Banks: https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2019/03/fed-vs-narrow-ban...

TLDR: Cochrane thinks the Fed wants keep a lid on narrow banking because it believes it can cross-subsidizing lending to households and businesses from retail deposits.

New comment by em500 in "Calling All Hackers: How money works (2024)"

em500 — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 04:06:57 +0000

Rather than leaving some oblique references to "many good books", why not provide the actual references?