Hacker News: figassis

New comment by figassis in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

figassis — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:47:31 +0000

It's a strange thing that as humans, we sleepwalk into every crisis, never agreeing on anything, and then when we're there, we also never agree on the causes. When we ge too the point where we can no longer "engineer" or "science" anything we will spend the next decade arguing that the issue was not really AI, or that if it was, it was inevitable and no one (or everyone) was to blame. Rinse, repeat. Yet we're here, today, looking at the bleak future, and taking yet another step forward.

Do we assume society just self regulates. I think it does, but the cost of letting it self regulate is really really high, with lots of suffering. Is it that we find this acceptable when there is a chance we won't be the first to feel the pain?

New comment by figassis in "GoPro warned it may not survive"

figassis — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:09:44 +0000

RN the market is not you. The amount of investment being pushed to AI dwarfs what you collectively spend. So the market now is driven by the IPO dream where you'll hold the bag, jobless.

New comment by figassis in "Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out"

figassis — Sun, 24 May 2026 13:03:31 +0000

> the goal seems to be to create as many things as fast as possible, throw them into the world and see which ones gain traction, whether or not they serve a real need

The goal was never to solve a real problem, like we evangelized for decades. That was how it was explained when resources (mainly time, but also money) were scarce and we could not just throw things at walls. Now we can, and you won't see anyone talk about "make something people need".

Things will be low quality until something sticks, and then money will be poured into it. It's not a bad strategy, but my takeaway from this is: there are multiple plausible explanations for the same thing. People have an incentive to not give you the correct one if it helps you compete with them. But they will give you a sensible one. AI won't protect you from this, experience and real knowledge will.

New comment by figassis in "OpenAI launches ChatGPT for personal finance, will let you connect bank accounts"

figassis — Sat, 16 May 2026 14:55:08 +0000

Everyone will wake up in 2028 and realize Anthropic is the new Google. Not OpenAI.

New comment by figassis in "I work on self-improving AI despite the risks"

figassis — Thu, 14 May 2026 08:15:33 +0000

So because I think it will help us, others might do it first, don’t worry, open algos. Isn’t this everyone’s reason to do something controversial? Also looks like the OpenAI route no?

New comment by figassis in "Meta's embrace of A.I. is making its employees miserable"

figassis — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:12:00 +0000

And it’s too soon to have these norms. Employers today are willing to part with them at the hint of the slimmest efficiency gains, you’ll waste time. So I think the correct response today is wait for it to settle. Norms will form on their own.

New comment by figassis in "AI slop is killing online communities"

figassis — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:07:37 +0000

It seems this is getting downvoted, no promotion. Understood, thanks for the reminder.

New comment by figassis in "AI slop is killing online communities"

figassis — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:56:14 +0000

I may have a solution for you and could use some beta testers. Please reach out to me if you don't mind. Info on my profile.

New comment by figassis in "Claude for Creative Work"

figassis — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 06:25:44 +0000

It threatens because we aren’t just talking about selling your art. Artists get hired at companies to produce all kinds of work that will now be replaced by AI.

New comment by figassis in "OpenAI CEO's Identity Verification Company Announced Fake Bruno Mars Partnership"

figassis — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:58:16 +0000

I shared this here before, I think we're trying to over engineer identity. How about decentralized verification?

https://humanidentity.io, https://protocol.humanidentity.io

Disclaimer: I am the author, feedback appreciated

New comment by figassis in "Show HN: Tolaria – Open-source macOS app to manage Markdown knowledge bases"

figassis — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:12:16 +0000

Thank you for this. Honestly, please earn something. You should at least make it optional to buy/donate. I wanted to, couldn't.

New comment by figassis in "Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary"

figassis — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:37:27 +0000

Over editing is one of the biggest tells of junior engineers. Often, a very big task is reduced to a 1 line change if you spend the time to understand the core problem.

I feel like this was one of the most valuable skills an engineer could learn, as it protects the integrity of the system by making minimum viable changes. If you need to refactor something, it should be clear that that is the task.

But we're all tokenmaxing now.

New comment by figassis in "Scoring Show HN submissions for AI design patterns"

figassis — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:15:36 +0000

I think HN is the crowd that values MVPs. And LLMs are the best tool to quickly materialize an idea. So I think we should judge these submissions on merit and not on our collective rejection of reality. If they succeed I’m sure (or hope) their user facing app won’t remain vibe coded.

New comment by figassis in "Moltbook, Gas Town and the Death of the Programmer Priest-Class"

figassis — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:52:05 +0000

What is true and ironic here is SWEs never thought they’d need to unionize.

New comment by figassis in "Shift-Left Code Quality: Inside DebtDrone CLI 2.0.0 and a Dual-Mode Architecture"

figassis — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:33:40 +0000

Maybe I’m need coffee, but I don’t understand what DebtDrone actually does.

New comment by figassis in "Finance ministers and top bankers raise serious concerns about Mythos model"

figassis — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:29:05 +0000

The interesting thing is this: no matter who they hire (because certainly they’ve already been hiring the best), will make a bank Mythos proof. It likely won’t even make it regular attacker proof.

The reason banks aren’t being hacked daily is a mix of physical and digital access controls, and processes, as well as the real threat of the FBI knocking on your door. It is not because the systems are hard to hack.

But now, they panic because some company told them their systems were not 100% secure? And how will they solve this? My making it 99.99% secure with a $10B yearly Mythos subscription?

I would just settle for not leaking any more s3 buckets. Start there.

New comment by figassis in "Stitch – Google's AI design tool"

figassis — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:24:55 +0000

I see this pattern for a long time. Large companies always release the same products at the same cadence, hours or minutes apart. Are they having the same ideas? Spying on each other? Are these products just the natural next step from the previous so as long as you’re not stopping, 10 companies would release the same products?

New comment by figassis in "The local LLM ecosystem doesn’t need Ollama"

figassis — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:43:02 +0000

This is correct, and I avoided it for this reason, did not have the bandwidth to get into any cpp rabbit hole so just used whatever seemed to abstract it away.

New comment by figassis in "US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed"

figassis — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 03:58:53 +0000

Thank you, this is very early stages. Still trying to validate the idea. But yes, the reason there is a sovereign verifier tier is because I am sure governments will want their own rules, and the protocol is meant to be decentralized. So one govt can legislate that they are the exclusive verifier for their country, while another takes a more hand off or hybrid approach.

New comment by figassis in "US national level OS-level age verification bill proposed"

figassis — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 02:56:32 +0000

If this is the case, this can be gamed. People can use stolen documents. Nothing says a person can’t own multiple computers so what happens if someone uses your id in 20 laptops? Will the companies just claim “but the machine said they where old enough?” The law may not have teeth, but will violate privacy.

Something like https://protocol.humanidentity.io (disclaimer: I built it, sorry for the plug) or any other privacy preserving service might work better. A platform can then require that a person verifies age in a privacy preserving way before viewing adult content.