Hacker News: foolswisdom

The Resistance Liberal Lawyers Helping Trump Take over the Media

foolswisdom — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:46:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-resistance-liberal-lawyers-helping

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49038270

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by foolswisdom in "Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters"

foolswisdom — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:12:40 +0000

While the misuse of the term monopoly is annoying, that's quite the misleading comment. You're allowed to disagree with what policy is a good idea, but laws like the linked do exist, and they were seen as pro-competitive in their time.

Today you can consider that "just business", and therefore "part of competing", but the were laws with the intention of allowing/disallowing types of tactics. E.g., you can't compete by leveraging your volume (see attached link), so you have to focus on making your service good.

The assumption made by a these people is that if there are so majy companies getting that big, there must be general disrespect of these laws. And correlating with the undisputed fact that antitrust enforcement did change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson%E2%80%93Patman_Act?wp...

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

foolswisdom — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:18:45 +0000

It sounds like you're focusing on the problems of running local models, or running models yourself, but I don't think that many people seriously expect near term improvement on that, it's definitely more just hopeful thinking there. That's not what I meant to address, and I also am in more of a "wait and see" mode.

But at this point we do expect that open weights _hosted_ options become feasible for the tasks they're using the frontier models for. And because of the lack of "legal monopoly" (intellectual property of whatever kind), they're way cheaper, not mention more flexible.

The launch of the tinker platform from Thinking Machines is an example of the "more flexibility" part that people want (and they chose to make their model open weights, maybe because this is the angle they want to push).

At this point I think it's realistic enough that the ball is in OpenAI / Anthropic's court to figure out how to respond to this threat to their business model.

That said, I think it's concerning that there are apparently only a couple of providers of hosted open weights inference, due to the complexities of doing so (per Dax from OpenCode's tweets).

Competent Bureaucracy – Rebuilding State Capacity [pdf]

foolswisdom — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:09:32 +0000

Article URL: https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d2746030c5b0599338fceef5ed4c.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950378

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by foolswisdom in "Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)"

foolswisdom — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:08:48 +0000

While preserving problems is undoubtedly a natural incentive, I think Hanlon's razor applies here. Just today I was reading Competent Bureaucracy - Rebuilding State Capacity (<https://cdn.sanity.io/files/d8lrla4f/staging/cf7eedaf5d21d27...>) on the topic of agency structure promoting success (the author has done a nice amount of work in the past - e.g. https://www.statecapacitance.pub into this history of this topic).

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

foolswisdom — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:14:12 +0000

> Take a task, any medium-sized task, decently scoped that you'd trust to give to Sonnet to finish without a hitch. Now give it to ANY open-source frontier model and watch them struggle and go in circles while failing tool calls and randomly assuming things.

Claude used to be much worse than it is now, just as bad the open weights models are. And the open weights were worse. The labs will also try to keep the lead, but at some point people start seeing real value from open models. Maybe you say they're not ready yet for medium tasks, but everyone sees the writing on the wall.

New comment by foolswisdom in "A Beautiful Theory Falls to Ugly Data"

foolswisdom — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:00:25 +0000

Yeah, that's what bothered me when I read it, too.

New comment by foolswisdom in "John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement"

foolswisdom — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:06:50 +0000

Is this not about a separate class action lawsuit?

New comment by foolswisdom in "The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing"

foolswisdom — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:25:38 +0000

Maybe so, but the DOJ is not releasing lots of the evidence. I wonder if there's a solid enough case without that.

New comment by foolswisdom in "The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing"

foolswisdom — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:24:42 +0000

I recently read Economic Policy and Law in America (by William Letwin) and he discusses a bit (in the context of the early slow enforcement of the Sherman act) the fact that ultimately a prosecutor has limited resources, and any allocation comes at the expense of something else, so priorities absolutely do matter. And the prosecutor's office will coordinate with other law enforcement of course...

New comment by foolswisdom in "They’re made out of weights"

foolswisdom — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:01:38 +0000

This reminds of this article which contends that this mistake has carried across time, in every era people described the workings of the brain similar to the machines they knew how to build, which is why we have "ridiculous" descriptions that changed over time.

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-informati...

New comment by foolswisdom in "Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are both walking back AI jobs apocalypse predictions"

foolswisdom — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:46:15 +0000

There's a partial corresponding quote at https://www.commbank.com.au/articles/newsroom/2026/05/sam-al....

New comment by foolswisdom in "Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation"

foolswisdom — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:10:08 +0000

People with lots of power and clout contribute to making predictions reality by all making predictions that make similar assumptions. The predictions become more likely because people already behave as if they're likely.

New comment by foolswisdom in "Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent"

foolswisdom — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:50:10 +0000

Not just instinct, I'd need to be able to justify the choice against any potential downside of not choosing the default option.

New comment by foolswisdom in "Dutch suicide prevention website shares data with tech companies without consent"

foolswisdom — Wed, 13 May 2026 13:48:49 +0000

Marketing people like the features they're getting, and Google and Meta are dominant, so big that they're the default, in the same way that we talk about github being the default option, and "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM / (big tech company of your choosing)". I wouldn't dream of saying they should choose something else, without researching and guaranteeing that nothing they'd ever want from GA (and they may not know everything they'll want in the future right now) is missing in the alternative. In a role (marketing) that's completely out of my wheelhouse. So I don't even bother.

New comment by foolswisdom in "PySimpleGUI 6"

foolswisdom — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:03:17 +0000

Depends on exactly how the project is managed. Older python tooling (`pip` module) doesn't have a native mechanism to differentiate between the spec (direct dependencies) and freeze (all dependencies, including transitive).

New comment by foolswisdom in "PySimpleGUI 6"

foolswisdom — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:25:07 +0000

Given it was older code, were you not able to use an older version of pysimplegui that was freely available?

New comment by foolswisdom in "Incident with Issues and Webhooks – Resolved"

foolswisdom — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:36:02 +0000

In other words, the set of github core services has expanded because you don't use third party tooling for some of those services anymore.

New comment by foolswisdom in "Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API"

foolswisdom — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:46:58 +0000

The important part was the following paragraph(s) that explained why this coupling is a compelling problem. It's not the same as just having a platform API.

New comment by foolswisdom in "Ramp's Sheets AI Exfiltrates Financials"

foolswisdom — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 23:02:03 +0000

This reminds of the conversation the other day about the deleted production database at railway. "this person obviously didn't follow best practice of being hyper distrusting of LLM agents", and the response "yeah but every company is marketing it as safe. someone is gonna fall for it".