Hacker News: ericd

New comment by ericd in "ChatGPT Pro 500"

ericd — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 02:40:08 +0000

I mean, it's a good deal for the boss, but I also wouldn't want to waste two years of my life doing something I could do in a couple months or weeks, would you? That's not a good use of my life, regardless of whether someone's willing to pay me.

New comment by ericd in "When oil prices spike, where does the money go?"

ericd — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 02:17:59 +0000

Yes, but I think with bafflingly huge numbers, it's a useful reference point. ~the value of all the stuff and services made in Australia for the year!

New comment by ericd in "Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries"

ericd — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 01:47:45 +0000

California rate payers are being forced to essentially pay for fire insurance for CA residents who live in tinderbox areas, by way of PG&E rates, and burying lines that serve widely dispersed populations. That's the big difference. The vast majority of US residents have much lower utility rates.

New comment by ericd in "AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom"

ericd — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:11:10 +0000

Well of course. Wars tend to destroy wealth quite efficiently.

New comment by ericd in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

ericd — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:44:39 +0000

Yeah, fair. We’ll see!

New comment by ericd in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

ericd — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:44:25 +0000

I don’t think they’re getting enough press on this to justify this level of investment. But I could definitely be wrong.

New comment by ericd in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

ericd — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 04:56:43 +0000

That's usually in hindsight? And I said it wasn't obviously insane to them, not that it would pencil out in the end.

Can also just be an asymmetric bet - relatively small outlay with low chance of working, but massive upside if it does, such that it's still positive expected value.

But mostly, I think all these armchair quarterbacks should not have very strong opinions about something that they almost certainly don't know much about compared to the people who build these. The person I responded to cited a random blog that ran some numbers, and includes such gems as "In space, a broken fan or a fried motherboard is a crisis." Just... lol

New comment by ericd in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

ericd — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 04:38:03 +0000

The threat of prison if you don't turn over SSH keys probably still works.

https://xkcd.com/538/

New comment by ericd in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

ericd — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 04:24:36 +0000

I guess we'll see if their idea warrants your ludicrous comparison soon. Google is putting out a lot of real resources to test theirs out, so presumably it wasn't obviously insane to them when they ran the numbers.

New comment by ericd in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

ericd — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 03:14:16 +0000

The real point is power limitations, putting stuff in space in the right orbit lets you turn solar power into reliable base load.

New comment by ericd in "Federal judge orders Texas to air condition all prisons by the end of 2029"

ericd — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 17:18:41 +0000

And here I was thinking that prisons should be about keeping people who can't operate in society without damaging society away from society. I mean, even better would be to find a way to help them operate in society, but apparently we're not even all at the baseline.

New comment by ericd in "Virtio-nvgpu: Near-native Nvidia GPU access inside a KVM guest"

ericd — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:39:17 +0000

Excited to try this, I've wanted for so long to have a properly performant gaming VM without having to do all the VFIO nonsense, thanks very much.

New comment by ericd in "Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware"

ericd — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 09:18:35 +0000

Well, the guy is a professor in AI. So I'd not look for 100% human-written prose from him.

But I'd also not dismiss what Tim has to say. For much longer than this stuff has been super hyped, he's reliably been one of the best sources of info on some of this stuff, especially about GPUs and how to run things locally.

New comment by ericd in "Show HN: Ax-check.com – Can agents use your product?"

ericd — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 01:03:07 +0000

> No ones shown there's any real ROI in a more virulent intermediary that has even less reason to view ads.

Good riddance?

Very happy to have my agent totally ignore the ads trying to hijack my attention.

New comment by ericd in "US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report"

ericd — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 18:33:01 +0000

It seems that a pretty clear first step is that thinking traces are required, along with sourcing all evidence, so that things can be easily double checked. Anthropic/OpenAI have business reasons for not sharing those, but it also probably means they can't be trusted with any vital decision making.

New comment by ericd in "Astra for Law"

ericd — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 13:19:06 +0000

That’s awesome! I especially like RECAP as a method for freeing things from PACER.

Seems like you all are already doing a lot of what I’ve been aiming for with mine. Are there useful ways to contribute, or have you all gotten it to a pretty good place technically, and it’s mostly a matter of spreading it at this point?

New comment by ericd in "Astra for Law"

ericd — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 01:15:31 +0000

OK, I just bundled it into a torrent, available here: https://law.agentlookups.ai/downloads/

If you decide to give it a download, let me know if you have any issues with it/suggestions for improvement.

New comment by ericd in "Astra for Law"

ericd — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:16:59 +0000

Yeah, going to the courts and municipal code seems like it's going to be a heavy lift. Many of them seem to hang off of municode, though, so maybe it's not a huge number of unique crawlers.

New comment by ericd in "Astra for Law"

ericd — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:15:34 +0000

Cool, thanks for the pointer!

New comment by ericd in "Astra for Law"

ericd — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:11:02 +0000

Right now it's just a bunch of crawlers for the individual states. If there's interest, I could periodically stand up snapshot torrents or something. That something you'd be interested in?

Alternatively, if someone else knows an all-in-one option that exists, I wouldn't mind retiring those crawlers...