Hacker News: ericd

New comment by ericd in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

ericd — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:20:40 +0000

I appreciate you taking the time to look it up so the rest of us don’t have to.

New comment by ericd in "Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI"

ericd — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:54:59 +0000

My list would be to go grab GLM5.2, Deepseek v4 Flash and Pro, and the various sizes of Qwen 3.5/3.6 dense and MoE, along with at least one of the multi modal qwens (I think it’s called VL). In a pinch, you can quantize them yourself to whatever size you need.

New comment by ericd in "Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs"

ericd — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 15:47:49 +0000

The per token costs plummet with more concurrents. A box that can do 100 tps at request depth 1 might be able to do 3000 tps at request depth 64. Less per thread, but massively more per GPU/joule/etc. That’s the economy of scale of running in a DC rather than locally that they were referring to.

New comment by ericd in "The state of open source AI"

ericd — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:38:00 +0000

Well, there are generally strategic government uses.

New comment by ericd in "The state of open source AI"

ericd — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:10:07 +0000

Ah good counter, hadn’t seen that. Proven?

New comment by ericd in "The state of open source AI"

ericd — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:09:26 +0000

Did they give those secrets to US private industry?

New comment by ericd in "The state of open source AI"

ericd — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:07:59 +0000

I wasn’t talking about spying on Chinese firms, I was talking about firms worldwide. And I said nothing about conscience.

New comment by ericd in "The state of open source AI"

ericd — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 22:07:04 +0000

Right, talking about behavior in living memory.

New comment by ericd in "The state of open source AI"

ericd — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:28:03 +0000

One big difference is that the US doesn't have much public record of using state espionage resources to steal industrial secrets to give domestic industry a leg up in the market, whereas CCP very much does.

And while I use and love the open weight models, it seems likely to be pretty hard to prove conclusively that they have no reinforcement-learning-trained proclivity towards curling specific URLs if the topic happens to be some very specific thing that the government is interested in, when used to drive agents.

So it depends who you are. If you're a company, you might have something to fear. If you're a private citizen, maybe not so much.

New comment by ericd in "Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence"

ericd — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:17:31 +0000

Yeah, I'm literally getting 529 API Overloaded responses on Claude Code right now.

New comment by ericd in "The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News"

ericd — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:22:06 +0000

The large industry largely emits to help us build and maintain our too-large homes, and fill our large houses with junk. So it would help reduce those, too.

New comment by ericd in "The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News"

ericd — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:14:16 +0000

That’s tragic, I love Fontainebleau. But it’s industrial civilization as a whole, not American AC. Cement is a larger contributor, for example.

New comment by ericd in "A graph that should be front-page news"

ericd — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:12:29 +0000

Their daily shower used more energy than generating the article, it doesn’t invalidate the article.

New comment by ericd in "Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid"

ericd — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 21:39:17 +0000

Agh sorry, but yeah, great example of the problem of the variance in access.

New comment by ericd in "Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid"

ericd — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:09:58 +0000

Yeah, good point, especially at the higher levels. Our public high school offered differential equations as the level after calc only because they randomly had a really exceptionally capable math teacher who was a teacher as a passion project after he'd made his money elsewhere, but most schools don't have access to that sort of capability. Remote learning could offer that sort of headroom in every subject. I guess local colleges sometimes offer that ability.

Maybe some charters do, I'm definitely not an expert.

New comment by ericd in "Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid"

ericd — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:39:38 +0000

Dang, ah well. Thanks for answering, anyway.

New comment by ericd in "Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid"

ericd — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:39:06 +0000

Ah yeah, another good method. We had some project-based labs, and those were definitely some of the most impactful classes for me. But those still tended to be somewhat "synthetic" projects, and we'd never really used even basic professional tools like SQL. I definitely would've had more motivation to spend more time learning about databases, for example, query planner, how to build, etc.

New comment by ericd in "Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid"

ericd — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:41:04 +0000

> Do you see no value in young energetic people being educated while their brains are still maximally plastic, and society get maximal value out of the education?

Eh, I’ve often thought that going to college would’ve been much better after a few years of building software in the workforce. I didn’t understand the “why” of going into a lot of the subjects I studied, they didn’t have much real experience to attach to in my brain, and retention was worse.

I think Waterloo’s mix of school and working is a pretty solid way to tackle this.

New comment by ericd in "Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid"

ericd — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 12:31:13 +0000

Sounds great, if you don’t mind sharing, what school was it? We have a couple of young kids that that seems like maybe a good fit for.

New comment by ericd in "Capitalism Gone Wrong"

ericd — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:31:09 +0000

I think more penalties involving "you aren't allowed to operate until this is fixed" rather than fines would help.

Also, this is a pretty good take on a lot of related topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTmpwVCC2So