Hacker News: iamleppert

New comment by iamleppert in "AI handles incidents, engineers lose touch with their systems"

iamleppert — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 01:11:08 +0000

I don’t find this to be the case. I use AI to help investigate and gather evidence much more efficiently than I could ever do manually. Then, I work through the evidence and possible failure modes given the observations with AI. It’s the exact same process I’d follow with a talented co-worker. Does it matter they are driving?

My intuition and instincts have been honed from years of troubleshooting complex systems so I find it refreshing not having to write probe scripts, queries or code under pressure. I can have a theory and test it very quickly and if it’s not the problem, I can quickly try something else. This greatly improves the time it takes to find the real root cause. Once found, I can do more elaborate testing that I might have skipped before due to complexity or time constraints to really have higher certainty.

If there is ever a time where the model does something I don’t understand, I ask it to explain it to me and I increase my knowledge of the system accordingly. It’s always patient and explains things in such depth without any sighs, patronizing, sarcasm, juxtaposition, etc. So refreshing!

I much prefer working with AI than any co-worker and I find I’m far more productive and efficient, especially with bugs and dealing with incidents. There’s no one to convince or argue with, no ego’s to trip over. It’s lovely.

New comment by iamleppert in "Qwen 3.8 27B available on Cerebras at 1500 tokens/s"

iamleppert — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 17:05:08 +0000

Completely unusable last time I tried it. You got hit with rate limits after the first few minutes of using it. It's fast but cannot sustain its claimed speed before it immediately hits its rate limit. What good is it if you can't finish a task? It's like having a sports car that can only drive 180 mph for 5 seconds every minute and then has to cool down for an hour.

Borderline fraudulent to advertise to developers when it's completely impractical to use. Their only support is their company Slack channel.

New comment by iamleppert in "Sony makes bold claim about game ownership"

iamleppert — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 19:05:50 +0000

The copy itself is incidental. It's the medium by which the performance of the license is executed through, and if some form of it requires a Sony online service to exist and to work or respond in a certain way and tied to your specific account, to gain access to the meaningful parts of the work, that's what you own. You can sell the physical copy, but you're only selling the actual material and whatever pieces exist on the disk itself. Caveat emptor.

The fact that some of the material exists in a form that is close to and within your control is irrelevant. That's like saying you own a copy of Google because some of the javascript code that runs the frontend is cached in your web browser. You don't.

"You will own nothing and be happy." better get used to that and make your peace with it

New comment by iamleppert in "Sony makes bold claim about game ownership"

iamleppert — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:21:33 +0000

You own that physical copy due to the physical nature of it. However, you still are limited in what you can do with it. You can't make a copy of it and sell that copy. You can't read that book aloud, and sell the recording. In certain cases, you can't even read that book for an audience. The fact that you own it has embrued certain rights to you due to the physical nature of the book.

Take away the physical medium and there is nothing physical left that you own. Therefore, you have no physical rights to it anymore. The publisher, at their sole discretion, can remove the medium of access by which you consume the book. And then you'll be left without a book.

This is exactly how the current system works, I am just explaining it to you. So don't shout at the wind.

New comment by iamleppert in "Sony makes bold claim about game ownership"

iamleppert — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:01:26 +0000

You can BUY a license to something, but it's still a license. You don't own the actual game unless you buy the rights to it from the publisher. The rights to a game can cost millions, and only then, do you truly, ever own it.

New comment by iamleppert in "No AI Fridays"

iamleppert — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:26:03 +0000

This is as silly as saying you shouldn’t drive your car on Friday’s and walk to work instead.

Why only Friday? What does “doing things the old way” one day a week prove or benefit when you spend 90% of your time working with AI?

Tech people who have their entire identities wrapped up in being smart or the best engineer in the room have suddenly learned that intelligence is now a commodity and a cheap one at that.

New comment by iamleppert in "Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX"

iamleppert — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:06:35 +0000

How TF do you trust people you don’t know from YouTube interviews? You don’t know them. They are strangers to you trying to sell you something.

New comment by iamleppert in "Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions"

iamleppert — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 01:08:25 +0000

Navigation needs to be low cognitive overhead to have mass appeal. There's a reason why people do not navigate with satellite or photo real maps. This is an interesting projection and visualization but doesn't have much practical value.

New comment by iamleppert in "The turbulent AI era is here"

iamleppert — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 02:22:13 +0000

This take is the correct one. You don’t need to go far to see what will happen. Just visit any former American coal town, or one that used to do manufacturing. They are desolate waste dumps. The people there are completely cut off from the economy. That’s what’s going to happen, only on a much greater scale. Say goodbye to all those office parks, small and medium sized companies. The future will be most of the country looking like a desolate wasteland, with a few very ultra rich areas. The process of consolidation will continue until there are only a few places left that actually participate in the economy.

New comment by iamleppert in "Omacom Foundation launches with $8M"

iamleppert — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 18:00:15 +0000

Agreed. I might be showing my age, but I remember the days of LightStep and associated window managers that did the same thing. This looks more like a highly connected techie raising a slush money fund of $8 million to put out his opinionated re-skin of Ubuntu and window manager settings file. The "year of the linux desktop" has nothing to do with some UI preferences but it probably sold well in whatever room he was in.

It must be nice to enter the blowhard stage of life where you can share your bash profile at a cocktail party in SF and go around the table collecting $1 million checks from all your yuppie friends.

New comment by iamleppert in "c100"

iamleppert — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:52:25 +0000

No specs on the CPU or anything but the memory and storage? This looks like a product for a wealthy, trendy maker studio.

New comment by iamleppert in "Asana cleared 5 years of engineering work in 2 weeks with Codex"

iamleppert — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:35:17 +0000

It does when you have a team of 100's of engineers every change has to pass through, 3 layers of management, SRE teams, DevOps YAML engineers, product management and a partridge and a VP.

New comment by iamleppert in "One Oakland police officer made $490k in overtime"

iamleppert — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:09:38 +0000

Why does a police department need an executive team, complete with corporate headshots? These officers need to be tried and convicted of fraud and whoever let this happen in the city needs to face charges for criminal conduct.

New comment by iamleppert in "GPT 5.6 Sol is the best "vision" model OpenAI ever released"

iamleppert — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:24:37 +0000

Where are the Qwen benchmarks in this? I would be more interesting to see how Qwen performs.

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

iamleppert — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:53:12 +0000

I love Claude but as soon as there is a viable replacement and I get around to it, I’m gone. I have zero loyalty to a chatbot and when the interface is just text the cost of switching is up to my personal whims.

New comment by iamleppert in "License plate reader searches should require a warrant"

iamleppert — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:28:36 +0000

I am for having it be completely open to the public, or require a warrant. The police should not have special privileges of information lifted directly from the public. Privacy cuts both ways.

New comment by iamleppert in "Dutch Train Map Simulator"

iamleppert — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:05:41 +0000

Too many style options give the illusion of choice and the trains are hard to see. Curate the style for the user and then offer controls that actually are meaningful to UX of the simulation. This looks more like a map style design tool than a train simulator.

New comment by iamleppert in "New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health"

iamleppert — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:01:30 +0000

I cancelled my Facebook account and all other active meta properties. Looking back, it feels like escaping some kind of abusive relationship. Complete the the urgent pleas to come back. It's one of those things that you really only can appreciate in hindsight.

Whatever Facebook was, or became, one thing is clear: it's toxic and people are far better off without it.

New comment by iamleppert in "GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability"

iamleppert — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:54:05 +0000

It's really crazy to me they can just be down for hours and can't recover their own systems. It shows they don't have the capability or infrastructure to roll back disastrous changes. These kinds of things are a tell on the organization and operational excellence (or not). As soon as a viable alternative surfaces for Github, I'm moving off and will advise all my clients to do so as well.

New comment by iamleppert in "Why Substack Is Collapsing: Subscription Model Has Maxed Out"

iamleppert — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 17:36:39 +0000

I regularly rotate my "subscriptions" credit card number. It's much easier to cancel everything this way (then fight through cancellation flows for each one) and then only add back what I truly need and/or care about. It forces me to make the purchase decision all over again. I feel bad for any businesses that count a subscription as ARR/MRR when, at least for me, it's definitely not.