Hacker News: jagraff

New comment by jagraff in "UAE to leave OPEC"

jagraff — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:50:29 +0000

I think right now, the vast majority of oil use is not because of corrupt officials using oil energy despite the fact that cheaper energy sources are available. Maybe that problem will eventually be a sticking point in removing all carbon-emitting energy sources, but right now the barrier is mostly production capacity and the scale of capital investment required to roll out renewables at scale. But if (as seems to be the case now) rolling out renewables is more profitable than rolling out additional fossil fuel use, the capital should become increasingly available. That's why I'm optimistic, even though of course there are a lot of challenges ahead in terms of creating a truly sustainable future.

New comment by jagraff in "UAE to leave OPEC"

jagraff — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:02:42 +0000

Large vehicles are safer for the occupants of the vehicle, however they do increase danger for pedestrians and drivers of other vehicles in a collision. There is a reasonable argument that reducing vehicle size would save lives overall

New comment by jagraff in "UAE to leave OPEC"

jagraff — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:59:01 +0000

Agreed - the good news is, in many circumstances renewable energy is cheaper for new energy capacity. As long as regulations move in the right direction, we are likely to see the global energy mix move towards renewable sources over time

New comment by jagraff in "You are falling behind because you haven't fed the insincerity machine"

jagraff — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 13:11:09 +0000

What's curious to me is, why does this not happen to all youtubers? For example, vlogbrothers, 3b1b, numberphile, etc, all seem to continue putting out great educational content and care about producing good wholesome content despite the strong incentives to do otherwise - how does that happen?

New comment by jagraff in "YouTube Blocks Background Listening Workaround for Free Users"

jagraff — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:05:36 +0000

Setting aside whether the payment with my data is worth it - I don't understand why youtube would be in the category of "things that should be actually free". They have server costs, and employee costs, and they pay out to creators - somebody has to pay those bills.

New comment by jagraff in "YouTube Blocks Background Listening Workaround for Free Users"

jagraff — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:43:50 +0000

Would it be better if youtube removed the free, ad supported version entirely, and only allowed paid users?

New comment by jagraff in "What the hell have you built"

jagraff — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 13:44:11 +0000

This is a good point - having your code broken up into standalone units that can fit into working memory has real benefits to the coder. I think especially with the rise of coding agents (which, like it or not, are here to stay and are likely going to increase in use over time), sections of code that can fit in a context window cleanly will be much more amenable to manipulation by LLMs and require less human oversight to modify, which may be super useful for companies that want to move faster than the speed of human programming will allow.

New comment by jagraff in "VOC injection into a house reveals large surface reservoir sizes"

jagraff — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:13:25 +0000

Interesting, it seems that the actual surface material of walls and/or furniture makes a large difference in how long VOCs stick around, due to differences in surface area at the microscopic scale.

I have a couple HEPA filters in my house that hopefully keep particulate exposure down. Does this mean that I have to run them longer? That I need more of them continuously running to keep exposure to VOCs low?

New comment by jagraff in "America's future could hinge on whether AI slightly disappoints"

jagraff — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 13:44:49 +0000

Polymarket gives a >50% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal, not that they would be refunded - the market only gives a ~8% chance of the tariffs being ruled illegal AND and order to refund: https://polymarket.com/event/will-the-court-force-trump-to-r...

New comment by jagraff in "CPI for all items rises 0.4% in August, 2.9% YoY; shelter and food up"

jagraff — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 13:58:45 +0000

I think, all things being equal, higher home prices should lead to higher rents, since at the margin people on the verge of buying a home would be more likely to choose to keep renting when prices are higher, thus increasing demand for rental units.

New comment by jagraff in "Second study finds Uber used opaque algorithm to dramatically boost profits"

jagraff — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 16:07:07 +0000

Groceries regularly do price discrimination (and have for a long time) via coupons. People mostly seem to be fine with it.

New comment by jagraff in "The bitter lesson is coming for tokenization"

jagraff — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 17:27:37 +0000

I think the median country GDP is something like $100 Billion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)

Models are expensive, but they're not that expensive.

New comment by jagraff in "Why top posting has won (2018)"

jagraff — Sun, 25 May 2025 17:22:01 +0000

I think there is perhaps a different conclusion that I come to - email is not the right tool for long discussions with multiple points of disagreement, because it is, generally, a linear medium, which makes it difficult to maintain different threads without careful formatting by every author in the email chain.

I am not sure if there exists a good tool for threaded discussions with multiple different focus areas - something like git but for conversations?

New comment by jagraff in "Sugar-Coated Poison: Benign Generation Unlocks LLM Jailbreaking"

jagraff — Fri, 23 May 2025 14:00:24 +0000

Very interesting. From my read, it appears that the authors claim that this attack is successful because LLMs are trained (by RLHF) to reject malicious _inputs_:

> Existing large language models (LLMs) rely on shallow safety alignment to reject malicious inputs

which allows them to defeat alignment by first providing an input with semantically opposite tokens for specific tokens that get noticed as harmful by the LLM, and then providing the actual desired input, which seems to bypass the RLHF.

What I don't understand is why _input_ is so important for RLHF - wouldn't the actual output be what you want to train against to prevent undesirable behavior?

New comment by jagraff in "A simple 16x16 dot animation from simple math rules"

jagraff — Sat, 10 May 2025 22:03:17 +0000

Moving, ever expanding circle: https://tixy.land/?code=%28x-10*t%2521%29**2%2B%28y-10*t%252...

New comment by jagraff in "What if we made advertising illegal?"

jagraff — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 17:36:35 +0000

Are products allowed to have labels? Am I allowed to tell my friends I like a product? What if I put a video on youtube and accidentally include a brand name in it?

New comment by jagraff in "Layoffs Don't Work"

jagraff — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 20:08:44 +0000

I think the solution for this would be for companies to proactively raise wages in order to keep up with the market.

New comment by jagraff in "Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50k cash"

jagraff — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 21:47:01 +0000

Banks are not required to file a SAR just because you withdraw (or even deposit) over 10k. They are required to report it, but the report is not a SAR - having a SAR filed can be bad, because too many filed about you will likely cause banks to refuse to open accounts for you.

New comment by jagraff in "Software development topics I've changed my mind on"

jagraff — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 14:39:03 +0000

> Contrarily, library development is about abstractions. Spend time hunting for an algebra

This line piqued my interest - what does an algebra mean in this context? Does anyone know of any good resources for further exploration?

New comment by jagraff in "Bacteria (and Their Metabolites) and Depression"

jagraff — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 16:41:29 +0000

I don't know about enzymes, but bacteriophages (viruses that target bacteria) are species specific, and have been used successfully as antibacterial treatments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy