Hacker News: grensley

New comment by grensley in "Mind-altering drugs played key role in rise of Andean civilization"

grensley — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 04:49:21 +0000

The way I think of them is as a mulligan in a trading card game like Magic.

Sometimes you have a hand you can't keep, and it's better to draw a new hand with one fewer card. Don't want to do that too many times, or you will almost certainly have a losing hand.

New comment by grensley in "iPhone Duo"

grensley — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 04:42:28 +0000

The Apple Vision Pro is basically a developer kit.

New comment by grensley in "ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs"

grensley — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:35:54 +0000

I think the logo is pretty nifty actually. It's both "41" and "AI"

New comment by grensley in "Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?"

grensley — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:45:37 +0000

I have a number of theories for 4.7 onwards:

- Post autonomous weapons / DOD mess, I think they made some changes to make it more suspicious of what the usage is, particularly for malware. They also knew the government would be watching like a hawk, so its hedged to be extra safe.

- Because the tasks are running longer and more autonomously, they've raised the "self-confidence" level so it just makes decisions and stands by them more firmly.

- I think they've also slightly lowered the temperature so the outputs are more deterministic, so even if something has left context, it can make the same decision again with higher likelihood that it guesses the same thing.

- Lowering the temperature also makes it easier to sneak through some cached outputs (I think this likely only happens for first answers).

- They are deeply afraid of making sycophantic AI that creeps into the area of "addiction" like what happened with GPT-4o and opening themselves up to further legal liability.

New comment by grensley in "Americans Are Smashing Flock Cameras"

grensley — Sun, 17 May 2026 18:05:44 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Adams

New comment by grensley in "OpenClaw had a rough week"

grensley — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:59:45 +0000

OpenClaw's github is a thing of nightmares.

https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw

So many MRs

New comment by grensley in "I still prefer MCP over skills"

grensley — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 03:13:53 +0000

The "only skills" people are usually non-technical and the "only CLI" people are often solo builders.

MCP makes a lot of sense for enterprise IMO. Defines auth and interfaces in a way that's a natural extension of APIs.

New comment by grensley in "Decisions that eroded trust in Azure – by a former Azure Core engineer"

grensley — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 02:01:53 +0000

Absolutely textbook "Brilliant Jerk". Dude just whines and whines and whines. If you're so good, why can't you get anybody to work with you?

New comment by grensley in "MCP is dead; long live MCP"

grensley — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 21:09:57 +0000

On the other hand, I've seen over-centralization completely crush the hopes and dreams of people with good ideas.

New comment by grensley in "Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft"

grensley — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 02:54:22 +0000

Same as it ever was: Either trade secrets or license files that are treated as suggestions.

New comment by grensley in "Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras"

grensley — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 02:09:31 +0000

Here's a list of Flock's investors:

- Andreessen Horowitz

- Greenoaks Capital

- Bedrock Capital

- Meritech Capital

- Matrix Partners

- Sands Capital

- Founders Fund

- Kleiner Perkins

- Tiger Global

- Y Combinator

New comment by grensley in "Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs"

grensley — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 05:14:13 +0000

Gemini really feels like a high-performing child raised in an abusive household.

New comment by grensley in "Nvidia's $20B antitrust loophole"

grensley — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:38:06 +0000

A la carte in AI is going to be the name of the game for a couple reasons:

- Avoids regulatory scrutiny (for now at least)

- Nobody is actually entrenched enough for customers to matter

- Weird "celebrity" culture in tech, and AI especially. Everyone is looking for a "whisperer" or a "godfather" or whatever.

- Investors still get paid out

Smart operational talent will probably adapt by demanding higher salary, signing bonuses, severance packages in lieu of equity. Distribution of the true "lottery tickets" will get more uneven.

New comment by grensley in "A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash"

grensley — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 19:12:20 +0000

I was always looking for them because I was the weird nerd pointing out proper em dash, en dash, and hyphen usage years and years ago.

It's really only devs / engineers I see doing this, probably in some quest to create an indistinguishable voice in the name of productivity or something.

New comment by grensley in "A Proclamation Regarding the Restoration of the Dash"

grensley — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 18:49:22 +0000

I've noticed people using emdashes more in known non-AI text in what I assume is a smokescreen to maintain plausible deniability when they wholesale copy AI text.

It's so interesting to me that human writing is subtly changing to mirror AI writing.

New comment by grensley in "Analysis finds anytime electricity from solar available as battery costs plummet"

grensley — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 19:59:01 +0000

The transmission network is underbuilt, so it's mostly best to generate closer to where it's consumed (especially for data centers).

We'll continue to see a mix though of Residential / Commercial & Industrial / Utility Scale

There are about 7,000 Utility scale sites in the US right now, so even the big boys there are fairly distributed.

New comment by grensley in "How Anthropic teams use Claude Code"

grensley — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 05:20:28 +0000

Claude Desktop is one of the buggier applications I've ever used and one of our jokes internally is that it seems like it was very clearly vibe coded.

New comment by grensley in "OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive"

grensley — Thu, 22 May 2025 01:59:28 +0000

More like they see the future as more multi-modal, and they're probably right to think that is the best value approach vs. throwing more money at large language models.

New comment by grensley in "Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings"

grensley — Sat, 10 May 2025 23:38:47 +0000

I take screenshots because they're definitely going to forget to share the presentation.

New comment by grensley in ""Normal" engineers are the key to great teams"

grensley — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 01:02:13 +0000

I agree with you, but in a different directions. Often the software is owned by the company, who are just renting the engineer's labor.