Hacker News: jtfrench

New comment by jtfrench in "Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell"

jtfrench — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:56:22 +0000

Excel gone SIMD

New comment by jtfrench in "Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust"

jtfrench — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:01:08 +0000

I wonder how many parallels there are between CUDA's Tile abstraction and that of Metal.

New comment by jtfrench in "Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust"

jtfrench — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 01:47:11 +0000

The good news is your attention to actually reading and understanding documentation will differentiate you more and more as others (short-sighted, IMO) outsource understanding to an LLM.

New comment by jtfrench in "Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust"

jtfrench — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 01:45:11 +0000

Land, chickens, and private local AI running sustainably on the farm sounds like the least dystopian version of this AI future!

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

jtfrench — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 08:38:12 +0000

The more code writes autonomously, the less intuition the human owners have about that code. Loss of intuition is a seed of technical debt that grows with time. Over a long enough horizon, it can make looking at your own codebase feel like the first day on the job (sometimes at a company you started).

Luckily, there are ways to mitigate this and essentially translate those human intuition of how the codebase “should” be into guardrails for the agents. But without that, your setting your sails in a stochastic sea where each wave looks nothing like the last.

New comment by jtfrench in "Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children"

jtfrench — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:11:59 +0000

LifeLog wins again.

New comment by jtfrench in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

jtfrench — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 01:51:16 +0000

Isn’t this also counting on the AI company faithfully reproducing the contents of the book, and no hallucinations or shenanigans occurring? How will we ever know what the book actually said if people wanted to argue its contents later?

New comment by jtfrench in "Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?"

jtfrench — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 17:29:24 +0000

Or maybe we’d have LLMs that fit in a handful of GBs (and we technically already do). It’s hard to tell without completely going down that parallel universe and simulating all the milestones in it, but it’s a fun thought experiment.

New comment by jtfrench in "Is the industry ready for tokens-constrained work?"

jtfrench — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:01:55 +0000

This is actually how Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google recommends doing thought exercises to challenge assumptions (watch is recent YX Startup School talk). The end goal isn’t “128GB of RAM”, the goal is “useful effective software”. If for whatever reason RAM was an immovable constraint, a different tech tree would emerge.

New comment by jtfrench in "At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis"

jtfrench — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 02:56:35 +0000

I’m in.

New comment by jtfrench in "At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis"

jtfrench — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 02:52:41 +0000

I live near Plum Island. Just look at the Google Map reviews to get an idea of the sentiment. Camp Hero, Plum Island…lotta material for Netflix series coming out of Long Island.

New comment by jtfrench in "Magnitude 7.7 Earthquake – 68 km NNW of Ende, Indonesia"

jtfrench — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 04:48:46 +0000

It does feel like a lot

New comment by jtfrench in "Apple is getting this wrong"

jtfrench — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 07:08:36 +0000

Hugging Face straight up asked for $100M in compute or something from OpenAI in response to the hack, if I remember correctly.

New comment by jtfrench in "The myth of Snow Leopard"

jtfrench — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:11:25 +0000

Snow Leopard _did_ focus on stability. It wasn't just marketing. Did new bugs (and even new features) slip in? Yes, of course. It's still an OS made by humans, making imperfect cost-benefit calculations on how to mitigate risk while providing increased value to the end user.

So to say that some people weren't happy with all iterations of Snow Leopard is par for the course for just about any OS or even software release, and IMO doesn't really change the ethos of Snow Leopard.

New comment by jtfrench in "Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF"

jtfrench — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 02:26:29 +0000

Those who know game dev know making good isometric maps can be deceptively difficult. You grabbed that bull by the horns and did so beautifully. Well done!

New comment by jtfrench in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

jtfrench — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 11:48:42 +0000

Nah, I was just listening to some Thievery Corporation and had some thoughts. You ever listen to the group? Brought me back to college days.

New comment by jtfrench in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

jtfrench — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 03:18:13 +0000

Until the industry addresses the Original Sin of Generative AI (and the ascendance of Thievery Corporations), we should expect more and more of this. So far, theft has been rewarded. As long as you make enough money, people seem to be okay with ignoring long-lasting impacts of intellectual theft. As long as you become King of the Cannibals, it seems many are happy to remember you as King and not as the Cannibal.

New comment by jtfrench in "GPT-5.6"

jtfrench — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 08:51:10 +0000

Yeah, don’t do that.

New comment by jtfrench in "Fable 5 is Back"

jtfrench — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:11:19 +0000

It's time for this bubble to pop already. We need to get past this centralized, unsustainable, undesirable, Big Brother stage of AI and get on to the "AI hosted in your kitchen" phase before we mess up the balance of power too much and effectively backdoor the US constitution to power hungry technocrats.

New comment by jtfrench in "U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

jtfrench — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 09:34:09 +0000

Superintelligence for me and not for thee.