<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: kmacdough</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kmacdough</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 30 Oct 2026 08:52:48 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=kmacdough" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In theory, there is no reason it can't scale indefinitely using something similar to IP. It's already a self-building network. The hard part is how you incentivise transit nodes. Currently that's what ISPs and backbones provide. They are incentivised to interconnect because that's their core business model. So a truly decentralized Internet requires a decentralized incentive system.<p>This would enable circumvention, but it's also pretty easy to triangulate radio signals, so it's fairly easy for a belligerent organization to track that someone is sending something.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Oct 2026 21:40:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50236320</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50236320</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50236320</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's not the ugly design choices that make it popular. It's just that it was the first that did a decent job of being easy to read/write. Even if you write an objectively better language, you can't replace the ecosystem of libraries, education material and human support that comes with popularity. Popularity begets popularity, and since ease of use is the selling point, it's probably never going to practical to replace it as a general purpose go-to for beginners. And where people begin, they tend to stay. So instead we slowpy march on, bearing the burdens of original sin.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:31:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49450912</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49450912</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49450912</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And it's a reality check  that we live in a surveillance state. To a degree that most people find appalling, but the government is good enough at suppressing public awareness enough to cause an outcry.<p>It's also not whataboutism, the comment specifically wondered how else were being surrupticously tracked without our knowledge. This is a concrete example and I think many would be surprised such tracking also exists outside the digital realm.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:03:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435405</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435405</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435405</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No it's not ok, and most people are horrified when they learn. It's just a reality check that we've lived in a surveillance state for quite a while and it's time we take a stand. And a reminder that the government has done a good job of suppressing these realities from public awareness.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:59:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435346</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435346</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435346</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "MS Paint and Photos inivisibly watermark even locally generated output with GUID"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Your printer has been doing this for decades. There's an invisible-to-human dot matrix pattern that encodes things like model, serial number and i don't remember what else.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Aug 2026 14:57:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435300</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435300</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435300</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "LLMs reward expertise"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377653878_The_benefits_of_static_stretching_on_health_a_systematic_review" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377653878_The_benef...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:32:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49173761</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49173761</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49173761</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "LLMs reward expertise"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think you probably just don't like to stretch.<p>Can you share the source? This seems dangerously wrong.<p>I see a specific review making the very narrow claim that it can have detrimental effects on power/strength activities immediately following static stretching.<p>But by and large I'm finding a great deal of evidence for a wide range of other benefits, particularly in range of motion and injury prevention. I can't find anything widely damning, and I certainly don't see any reviews contesting the validity of the very vast body of research supporting the many benefits of static stretching.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:08:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171763</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171763</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171763</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "Bonsai 27B: A 27B-Class model that runs on a phone"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Its not about geometry, it's a parallel compute thing thing. CPUs typically don't have more than 10 or 20 cores. GPU have 100s to 1000s.<p>Matmul is very well parallelized. More, lower power cores will always pay off handsomely.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jul 2026 09:28:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48918272</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48918272</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48918272</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The problem is simple: qualified immunity has become a blank check. The officer can simply claim they didn't know the law. They somehow can't be expected to understand basic constitutional protections.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:50:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895384</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895384</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895384</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The government is not a monolith. Being owned by the city doesn't have to mean the cops are in control.  The municipality can determin by law exactly who operates the infrastructure, who has access to what, what process they must follow, and how that all will be monitored and enforced. "The government didn't handle this well, therefore they can't be trusted for anything like it again" is a misunderstanding of how governments are constructed and how power can be separated between legislatively mandated structures. Find the source of the abuse, then build a structure to check that abuse.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:48:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895350</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895350</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895350</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "GPT-5.6"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sold as learning, but that was a marketing term, not a technical one. From a technical perspective, the LLM is not learning. Only reacting based on its original training.<p>You might argue that the systems we've built around them are learning in a way, as they strategically condense and save artifacts from past interactions to pass into the LLMs context. But the LLM itself, which is the source of the intelligence, is not learning. It remains entirely unchanged throughout inference. This difference may seem trite, but it has significant impacts over the long term behavior.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:35:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48862846</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48862846</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48862846</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "GPT-5.6"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Context is not the same as learning. It's easy to conflate because they're tightly coupled in our brains.<p>The underlying structure and tuning of the LLM are entirely unchanged by context. It merely affects the attention and activation of the network. The LLM will not be able to work with this hypothetical new language unless it is in context. This does not fit the computational meaning of learning.<p>Smart is not a well defined term. Nor is it's general idea formally understood. Use it freely, but you won't be saying anything meaningful unless you define your usage.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:01:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48862516</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48862516</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48862516</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Unfortunately doesn't cover scrolling HN while the agent toils away.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:50:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48735470</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48735470</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48735470</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>With a striking lack of numbers, I'm not confident. I my experience, everything underspecified in a marketing release is unflattering. They're also not a chip designing company, but they're probably trying to keep up on the eyes of investors. As the article mentions, several of their competitors are chip designers and already have working procuction inference chips.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:07:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48670912</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48670912</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48670912</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Right, but the entire damn point is privacy protections enable people to be more honest. The entire point is supposed to be good data so we can make informed population wide decisions.<p>And race is a pretty big one under the current administration which has had hundreds of legal immigrants arrested for weeks to months off of "suspicion" that for lack of concrete evidence could only amount to racial profiling.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:13:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48520966</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48520966</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48520966</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "Claude Fable 5"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I believe there is hard evidence that role-playing prompts are effective at leading it towards particular strategies and trains of thought. Not sure that SWE has been specifically studied, but proper science is very slow in the context of rapid change and broad context. It's good to stay grounded in the science that has been done, but we're going to have to do our best in uncharted territory for a while.<p>"Don't make mistakes" does seem dumb. It's not guidance.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:47:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473879</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473879</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48473879</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "Claude Opus 4.8"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah just watch out, they're trying to eat your 401k and they've got a powerful easily influenced friend.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 09:31:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48320962</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48320962</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48320962</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hate to break it to ya, but this is how most C-suites operate. Their job isn't to run a company well. It's to appear to the board/investors that they're running a good company.<p>It is a better play to do the popular thing in a way that measures as "ahead". Then it's hard to argue against a raise. But if you stick your neck out on your thoughtful expertise, it can take years or more for the value to come thru. You can easily be replaced by then.<p>The only antidote is a board that has a real working nuanced understanding of the entire industry. But this rarely happens, for many reasons.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 11:28:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48167927</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48167927</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48167927</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "Bambu Lab is abusing the open source social contract"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> This is a separate issue, I think even Bambu Studio can't connect to printers in LAN mode on a different subnet.<p>Yes, that's the point. The nerworking is broken. The issue isn't unique to a specific slicer, their software sucks. Orca ran into the issue because they wanted to make a basic feature that works on every other printer on the market work on a bambu.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 16:55:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48124449</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48124449</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48124449</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by kmacdough in "The Rise of the Bullshittery"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This formatting is intolerable on mobile.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 20:18:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113925</link><dc:creator>kmacdough</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113925</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48113925</guid></item></channel></rss>