Hacker News: jtr1

New comment by jtr1 in "Sam Altman's Creepy Eyeball-Scanning Company Gets in Bed with Zoom and Tinder"

jtr1 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:45:36 +0000

This is appalling and I agree the technology is creepy. However, human verification is already a big problem that seems like it will only grow from here.

It does seem to me that this should be solvable at the device level by having a biometric scan produce a signed key on your device that can be used to issue a token of authenticity, similar to the way payment systems or certificate authorities work.

Then again, this only intensifies a different, growing problem where access to a smartphone or computer becomes a basic requirement for participation in society. No easy answers.

New comment by jtr1 in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

jtr1 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:22:59 +0000

For many possible reasons, depending on where you live.

New comment by jtr1 in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"

jtr1 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:56:47 +0000

"But the economy" is an out-of-date framing. The cost of renewables has been plummeting for well over a decade. New renewables are now cheaper than new fossil fuel plants in most of the world, and in many regions they're already competitive with or cheaper than simply running existing fossil fuel infrastructure. As modern wars in Ukraine and now Iran are increasingly demonstrating, they are not only cost effective but rapidly a matter of energy sovereignty and national security.

That's not to say we won't need treaties and supranational entities for some aspects of decarbonization. Methane emissions outside of agriculture are notably a problem of enforcement.

We're badly in need of a collective update to our priors regarding renewables. In the US, a hostile policy toward renewables is not only shooting ourselves in the foot environmentally, we are now actively impoverishing ourselves due to entrenched economic interests across the fossil fuel industry and the cultural inertia they actively worked to develop.

New comment by jtr1 in "The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)"

jtr1 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:12:21 +0000

Maybe this is a naive question, but why wouldn't there be market for this even for frontier models? If Anthropic wanted to burn Opus 4.6 into a chip, wouldn't there theoretically be a price point where this would lower inference costs for them?

New comment by jtr1 in "The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)"

jtr1 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:08:39 +0000

The demo was so fast it highlighted a UX component of LLMs I hadn’t considered before: there’s such a thing as too fast, at least in the chatbot context. The demo answered with a page of text so fast I had to scroll up every time to see where it started. It completely broke the illusion of conversation where I can usually interrupt if we’re headed in the wrong direction. At least in some contexts, it may become useful to artificially slow down the delivery of output or somehow tune it to the reader’s speed based on how quickly they reply. TTS probably does this naturally, but for text based interactions, still a thing to think about.

New comment by jtr1 in "AI makes you boring"

jtr1 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 18:48:29 +0000

I tend to agree, this has been my experience with LLM-powered coding, especially more recently with the advent of new harnesses around context management and planning. I’ve been building software for over ten years so I feel comfortable looking under the hood, but it’s been less of that lately and more talking with users and trying to understand and effectively shape the experience, which I guess means I’m being pushed toward product work.

New comment by jtr1 in "Prism"

jtr1 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 16:27:40 +0000

At last, our scientific literature can turn to its true purpose: mapping the entire space of arguable positions (and then some)

New comment by jtr1 in "Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'"

jtr1 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:42:22 +0000

Yes. I think the concept you’re describing is proprioception:

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

New comment by jtr1 in "Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?"

jtr1 — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:27:32 +0000

I spent some very enjoyable time browsing courses and tutorials in the Santa Fe Institute’s complexity explorer![1]

I wish I had encountered complexity science earlier in life. It touches on so many of the questions that have sparked my imagination over the years, I’m so pleased to find such an accessible introduction.

New comment by jtr1 in "Classical statues were not painted horribly"

jtr1 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 16:15:16 +0000

The ending of the article left me feeling he had more of an axe to grind here. The mostly unspoken ideological background is that classical art is often appropriated by proponents of Western chauvinism to demonstrate their supposed innate cultural superiority. Poorly painted reconstructions undermine that image, but it does not mean this was done intentionally. I agree that a more neutral observer would have been interested in learning the thought process of those researchers.

New comment by jtr1 in "The "confident idiot" problem: Why AI needs hard rules, not vibe checks"

jtr1 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:57:26 +0000

Interesting. Like many people here, I've thought a great deal about what it means for LLMs to be trained on the whole available corpus of written text, but real world conversation is a kind of dark matter of language as far as LLMs are concerned, isn't it? I imagine there is plenty of transcription in training data, but the total amount of language use in real conversational surely far exceeds any available written output and is qualitatively different in character.

This also makes me curious to what degree this phenomenon manifests when interacting with LLMs in languages other than English? Which languages have less tendency toward sycophantic confidence? More? Or does it exist at a layer abstracted from the particular language?

New comment by jtr1 in "Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?"

jtr1 — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 00:06:46 +0000

What is your personal experience here?

New comment by jtr1 in "AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering"

jtr1 — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 21:10:15 +0000

On the flip side, the crypto hype machine pretty seamlessly flipped to the AI hype machine, so it makes sense the same anti crowd shifted pretty seamlessly. Given the practical applications of crypto were minimal and the externalities were mostly crime and pollution, I’m not at all surprised that many people expect the same for AI.

New comment by jtr1 in "AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering"

jtr1 — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 21:02:46 +0000

They were and we should push back and yes, there is a mountain of baseless hype. But if you train your fire on the wrong thing, you risk not addressing the actual problem.

New comment by jtr1 in "AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering"

jtr1 — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 14:31:53 +0000

I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly, there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new technology.

Why mesh networks break when big crowds gather

jtr1 — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 14:50:19 +0000

Article URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/mesh-network-political-protests-amigo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45656536

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jtr1 in "American solar farms"

jtr1 — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 13:15:37 +0000

I think you'll have a difficult time comprehending the phenomenon if you look for reasoned arguments. A much more productive framework, IMO, is to see it in terms of a feedback loop between funding sources and the aggregate valence of speech on a particular topic.

The energy industry is one of the largest in the world, with trillions of revenue on the line. The FF component of that industry has every incentive to turn sentiment against upstart competitors, but you do that at scale less by reasoned arguments and more by gut level appeals: "the people who want renewable energy hate your culture and way of life", "renewal installations are ugly and a blight on the landscape of your home", etc.

The Stakes, and Real Story, of Peter Thiel's Antichrist Obsession

jtr1 — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 15:48:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/the-real-stakes-real-story-peter-thiels-antichrist-obsession/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45492652

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by jtr1 in "Vertical Solar Panels Are Out Standing"

jtr1 — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:24:14 +0000

One thing Jenny Chase (longtime solar analyst with Bloomberg) likes to point out is that in many places, solar panels are actually cheaper than fencing materials [1]

1. https://www.ted.com/talks/jenny_chase_solar_energy_is_even_c...

New comment by jtr1 in "Nine things I learned in ninety years"

jtr1 — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 11:52:33 +0000

Thank for noting this! I had no idea while I was reading the piece, but I loved those books as a kid. What a delightful connection.