Hacker News: flyinglizard

New comment by flyinglizard in "How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?"

flyinglizard — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 20:26:46 +0000

Zitron is providing a service: he's running the train for those who want to believe, or sincerely believe, AI is a bubble. His interviews are apocalyptical one sided rants that confuse what is with what Zitron thinks should be. I'm not sure he's wrong, by the way. As LLM performance is becoming more and more commoditized I fail to see how spend catches up to expectations to keep running this market as it does, but that's beside the point.

One annoying side effect is that YouTube's algorithms will always try to force feed you more of the things you last searched, to amplify your biases and send you down the doomscroll rabbit hole. So if you search for Zitron, next time you visit you'll be flooded senselessly with naysayers, contrarians and skeptics from all courses of life.

New comment by flyinglizard in "The Harness Is the Thing"

flyinglizard — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 08:36:22 +0000

FWIW I run a clinical analysis backend and directly compared Luna with DSv4 Flash 0731 - DS was a bit ahead, and cheaper even considering it used 40% more tokens.

The exposure to Deepseek made me question the valuation house of cards built on SOTA providers. There are more companies producing competitive and useful models than there are companies producing jet engines for airliners, and not for the lack of trying. China has been trying to make these engines for decades and so far failed (their flagship C919 airliner is using CFM, American/French), but it has produced at least three competitive model companies within 3 years even though they're handicapped by their hardware.

It's simply not that hard, and diminishing returns will, in fact, diminish.

New comment by flyinglizard in "Anthropic appears to be A/B testing reduced effort levels in Claude Code"

flyinglizard — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 08:02:10 +0000

I pay $200 a month at home for roughly the same amount of tokens I pay $3k for (or possibly more) at work. I doubt they are both profitable and sustainable.

New comment by flyinglizard in "Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots"

flyinglizard — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:43:42 +0000

I'm really sorry you have these strong feelings, however, the first two links don't even mention Israel, and the third quotes the closest thing Israel has to a Nazi party, of which I assure you there are plenty in many countries.

New comment by flyinglizard in "Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200B 2028 revenue forecast"

flyinglizard — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 23:01:37 +0000

It takes a big leap of faith for real companies with a real P&L to hand out token budgets in the thousands far and wide across their teams. The ROI is very easy difficult to demonstrate.

I've been thinking about it a lot and I think there's going to be commoditization of tokens. No local models - the hardware to run at scale is too complicated for companies that are reluctant to even run a local file server - and not wholesale run to Chinese suppliers (due to IP considerations mainly).

I think the winners in the coding/office work space will be intermediaries who can sell reasonable quality tokens at cost plus. It's the same reason "real" companies don't hand out their employees fully decked Macbook Pros or don't provide $500k TC packages as a norm: they are fine with "good enough" and "good ROI". And that's not going to happen with Claude API pricing where it is.

Another field is API pricing for things that are not coding, like automated systems doing analysis of things. I think there it's a real race to the bottom, including - or even mostly - direct sourcing from China (just like business do with their real goods today).

New comment by flyinglizard in "Israeli PR wants to answer your ChatGPT questions"

flyinglizard — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 01:13:23 +0000

Are you sure that’s how it went down, Khaled?

New comment by flyinglizard in "Israeli PR wants to answer your ChatGPT questions"

flyinglizard — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:07:53 +0000

Ben Gvir is the minister responsible for domestic security (primarily police, firefighters etc), with no effect (beyond his position in the coalition) on the warfare policy in Lebanon or Gaza. He's not even responsible for Shin Bet (that's the Prime Minster). So while he can spew that rhetoric for his voter base, he can not take any action affecting how the war is conducted. Therefore whatever he said may be used to attest on the man and possibly his voters, but that's not the voice of the Government of Israel nor is it representative of the Israeli public.

New comment by flyinglizard in "Israeli PR wants to answer your ChatGPT questions"

flyinglizard — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:19:47 +0000

Gaza attacked Israel on October 7th, 2023. Lebanon joined Gaza’s offense on October 8th, 2023.

New comment by flyinglizard in "Israeli PR wants to answer your ChatGPT questions"

flyinglizard — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 23:18:41 +0000

It is bad faith to use Ben Gvir as a representative for Israel, let alone Israelis. He received less than 5% of the votes for parliament and only got to his ministerial position due to the extortive nature of the Israeli political system. This is a guy who was incarcerated and barred from holding any kind of position for a very long time.

You could use many other moderate Israeli politicians, but you chose to bring the one who 95% of the Israeli electorate will not vote for.

New comment by flyinglizard in "Israeli PR wants to answer your ChatGPT questions"

flyinglizard — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 21:24:18 +0000

Ah yes, Israel has really thrown all of its economical and technological might behind this campaign to the tune of $100k. It was either this or another nuclear sub.

New comment by flyinglizard in "The AI Situation in Software Development"

flyinglizard — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:51:54 +0000

There’s no company that has “no sensitive stuff”, from HR to financials to customer data to board presentations to engineering IP and they all, without exception , entrust their data to cloud services for at least a decade now. Even governments do that, although they sometimes use special regions.

So I don’t think AI will be much different.

New comment by flyinglizard in "Anthropic Risk August 2026 [pdf]"

flyinglizard — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 20:51:36 +0000

Meanwhile I can't really tell the difference between Fable and Opus for my tasks. I kinda think Fable does a better UX work so I keep using it for that because I couldn't be bothered to A/B them, but otherwise it's all the same and the model and effort are just feel good knobs I twist to still remain a load-bearing element. At least that's my honest take.

New comment by flyinglizard in "DARPA heavy lift challenge ends with winner at a 3.84:1 payload to weight ratio"

flyinglizard — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 07:34:05 +0000

This is the honest take.

New comment by flyinglizard in "Nvidia's Risky Business"

flyinglizard — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:41:32 +0000

To me they come across as overzealous peddlers and hacks on some market pumping mission.

New comment by flyinglizard in "Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength"

flyinglizard — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:33:44 +0000

I routinely use the RSSI indications in my UniFi WiFi (thoroughly recommended) to find various kids devices around the house. You go by AP first (each section has its own), then each room tends to give its own RSSI, give or take.

New comment by flyinglizard in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

flyinglizard — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 22:07:12 +0000

Look at it the other way: compared to the cost of training a model, the cost of making a custom ASIC is trivial.

New comment by flyinglizard in "AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job"

flyinglizard — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:46:06 +0000

Products, yes, because the barrier to making a product had fallen off a cliff (both in developing the software and the marketing/sales fluff around it). But are those products converting to business results? Are those quality products someone will pay for?

In other words, is anyone using these products or is that becoming like the spammy App Stores with tons of low effort stuff?

New comment by flyinglizard in "Kimi-K3 Releases on HuggingFace 7/27"

flyinglizard — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:13:34 +0000

Or even the basis of the cost of hardware. There are lease deals, capacity traded for equity, various programs by Nvidia, there's absolutely massive depreciation, etc.

New comment by flyinglizard in "UK AISI / Caisi Preliminary Assessment of Kimi K3's Cyber Capabilities"

flyinglizard — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 12:08:21 +0000

I'm curious about the process. How such a thing (or any kind of model lobotomy) is done?

New comment by flyinglizard in "IRGC claims it destroyed Amazon's Bahrain data center"

flyinglizard — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:34:06 +0000

The Israelis are the only ones that can, and want, to strike back. Besides no one weeps for missiles falling on Israeli cities, so that doesn’t serve the Iranians at all. Lots of much softer targets for Iranian missiles which can’t do anything to Iran.