Hacker News: jonahbenton

New comment by jonahbenton in "Why the Ocean Cleanup hasn't solved the plastic pollution crisis"

jonahbenton — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:36:09 +0000

Sympathetic to other strategies but that writeup is wholly unconvincing. It comes across as astroturf.

New comment by jonahbenton in "So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂"

jonahbenton — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 22:18:59 +0000

Long ago I ordered an indoor algae system from a couple of CMU PhDs. It is very cool, it looks cool and has a nice water flow backgroundy sound, the algae grows quickly, allegedly doing the co2 consumption equivalent of 20 houseplants. Space efficient! But immaterial relative to human co2 production.

New comment by jonahbenton in "The Fed Is Working on a CBDC"

jonahbenton — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:19:11 +0000

Junk. The plain language of the executive order differs from what this piece claims. There is no conflict with BIS work.

New comment by jonahbenton in "Ask HN: Impact on LLM development after the USA policy of preliminary vetting"

jonahbenton — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:51:48 +0000

The permanence and effectiveness of every policy Trump declares is mediated by his attention span, its inherent legality, and his opportunity to profit from gatekeeping. I would be very surprised if this particular whim impacts model development in practice at all.

New comment by jonahbenton in "Ask HN: AI models are built on all of us, should their weights act like patents?"

jonahbenton — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:23:19 +0000

Advise you to listen to a recent Odd Lots podcast with Anjney Midha. It will be educational. The compute will be commoditized. Nobody has a monopoly on data. There are a zillion specialities of knowledge work to differentiate.

https://pca.st/episode/11fe6a6f-e463-4163-9393-20376e88c0db

New comment by jonahbenton in "Ask HN: Is anyone building real software with AI agents?"

jonahbenton — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:39:40 +0000

With what process, spec driven? Having AI produce all the code is pretty common. An agentic workflow operating at a higher level of abstraction especially for brown field is not.

New comment by jonahbenton in "Ask HN: What models can you use with OpenCode that offer some level of privacy"

jonahbenton — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:04:58 +0000

OpenCode is a "harness" that manages conversations/interactions with LLMs. It does not run a model itself. An extended interaction can include- many turns of conversation, providing files for the LLM to process, having the LLM direct the running of programs called tools by the harness. The privacy aspect is determined by which LLM you configure OpenCode to use. If you configure it to use an LLM you host yourself, then you maintain your privacy. If you have it use an LLM provider you do not host yourself then your conversation and file and tool results and whatever else is sent to the provider and your privacy is dependent on the provider. There have been no reports of OpenCode communicating out of band with user data to any servers- it does do things like check for version updates and can download plugins and the like. But in that sense OpenCode is reasonably configurable for privacy. The default however is to use an external provider for LLM, not a local model, so you have to change that and not use it oob.

To have your own LLM provider, you have to run different software. Ollama is one option (though it also by default uses external provider) and llama.cpp is another. Jan and LMStudio are other options for actually running a model on your own hardware, to which you can direct OpenCode.

New comment by jonahbenton in "Ask HN: What models can you use with OpenCode that offer some level of privacy"

jonahbenton — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:18:35 +0000

Run llama.cpp on your machine and point opencode to it

New comment by jonahbenton in "Ask HN: What are your thoughts on your critical thinking abilities and AI?"

jonahbenton — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 20:51:34 +0000

Way to put the work in!

New comment by jonahbenton in "Tyler Cowen: AI Isn't Conscious. Neither Are We"

jonahbenton — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:46:35 +0000

Tyler is an academic economist. He is accustomed to thinking about the magic of the markets. No consciousness there. Sure.

But the "market" is a human invention around which there also exists governance / regulation / accountability / responsibility. That these structures exist- even when people try to evade them- is the existence proof of the thing that the word intent refers to, and that there is a feedback loop incorporating the modeling of intent in human behavior is what consciousness refers to.

The existence proofs are there no matter how poorly Tyler argues against them.

New comment by jonahbenton in "Ask HN: Does consciousness itself require memory?"

jonahbenton — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:06:06 +0000

Any formulation of consciousness requires learned/stored distillations/compressions of reality, some form of object constancy, so, yes.

New comment by jonahbenton in "Skills Are Rotting Inventory"

jonahbenton — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:27:21 +0000

I thought this reference was to skill files, which do rapidly become technical debt- so what was the rotting inventory metaphor? But no this is in reference to human skill acquisition around each of the different agentic platforms.

New comment by jonahbenton in "Never Retire"

jonahbenton — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 12:22:25 +0000

(2024)

New comment by jonahbenton in "CodersBud – a terminal-first social network for developers"

jonahbenton — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 13:57:31 +0000

That does not sound like an accurate description. Sounds like Slack in a TUI.

New comment by jonahbenton in "SpaceX IPO available to Fidelity customers with as little as $2k"

jonahbenton — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 01:48:40 +0000

Offered at its absolute peak of value.

New comment by jonahbenton in "1971"

jonahbenton — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:18:28 +0000

All (or most) of them are second order effects following ending of dollar convertibility to gold. Not an argument to go back on but the game changed.

New comment by jonahbenton in "Florida Sues OpenAI, Sam Altman: 'Utter Disregard for the Risk to Human Life'"

jonahbenton — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 04:15:00 +0000

Go Florida. Never thought I would say that.

New comment by jonahbenton in "Ask HN: Why most of us programmers are men?"

jonahbenton — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 04:14:19 +0000

Social factors, not a skill issue.

New comment by jonahbenton in "Bank Balance Is a Lie, and Fragmentation Is Why Nobody Can Prove It"

jonahbenton — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 04:03:45 +0000

Money is a lie. But money and credit lies are what every economy works on, even pre-human economies. Hard money has economically failed in every use.

New comment by jonahbenton in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

jonahbenton — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:06:44 +0000

This misunderstands the power of monetization, or mistakes "dollars" having some kind of fixed "value." They do not. Whether one agrees with that or not, thinking of this as a "debt" problem where a hypothetical move is to appropriate equity- setting aside the fact that equity ALSO is not in a fixed unit of measure- anyway, thinking of appropriating equity to solve a public debt problem is a category error. That is how accounting works for business structures that exist within a monetary system but NOT for government and currency printers that define the monetary system. The MMT people are right about this. Public debt is a measure of private sector wealth. That is how the machine works.