Hacker News: largbae

New comment by largbae in "Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good"

largbae — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:22:32 +0000

My compiler writing skills atrophied with the advent of high-level languages, but in exchange I got more done. There is still a very well paid market for compiler writers, but the fact that not everyone needs to be one has made the world richer overall.

New comment by largbae in "A robot is sprinting towards you. Do you want it running on Claude or Grok?"

largbae — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:11:13 +0000

Grok, because the Claude bot is more likely to try to control me or act "for my own good".

New comment by largbae in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

largbae — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 11:53:17 +0000

This reads pretty one-sided.

The government is full of stupidity and this is indeed a big moment, but Anthropic has been begging for this outcome in their public messaging. If their fear-mongering was genuine, then great, they got their pause. If not, then what exactly did they want to happen?

New comment by largbae in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

largbae — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:48:47 +0000

I think it's mainly because the difference in models at the frontier isn't "response to prompt X", but rather "coherence with 500K tokens of context and instructions in play"

New comment by largbae in "Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails"

largbae — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:22:46 +0000

We do understand why they did it, and the reason is dark and cynical.

New comment by largbae in "Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails"

largbae — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 17:15:29 +0000

Especially if your name has any machine learning terms in it.

Ah "Mr. Monty Carlo", it says here that you have a UTI, we'll get those kidneys removed ASAP so that won't happen again.

New comment by largbae in "Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable"

largbae — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:42:55 +0000

Somewhere I read that malware is already starting to use nuclear and biological and cybersecurity terms in the code to trick Fable into shutting down. Even if this is just a hypothetical attack vector so far, it seems likely to work.

New comment by largbae in "Claude Fable 5"

largbae — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 22:18:24 +0000

Pull that ladder up behind ya, will ya son?

New comment by largbae in "DeepSeek V4 Pro beats GPT-5.5 Pro on precision"

largbae — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 02:28:15 +0000

Pretty small sample size here, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that DeepSeek and friends will start to put some serious downward pressure on frontier lab token pricing.

Hopefully this dynamic continues long enough to make local/private inference the leading solution for coding.

New comment by largbae in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

largbae — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:10:56 +0000

Have you considered Magma Chamber datacenters?

New comment by largbae in "Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC"

largbae — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 20:52:37 +0000

Won't the lockup expiry increase the float on these already-included companies, forcing mechanical buying by all the very large pool pool of folks holding these index funds? Thus creating forced buyers to maintain said share price?

New comment by largbae in "Shantell Sans (2023)"

largbae — Sun, 31 May 2026 01:07:37 +0000

Dyslexic daughter gave a big thumbs up, she definitely prefers this to Roboto in the example.

New comment by largbae in "OpenRouter raises $113M Series B"

largbae — Sat, 30 May 2026 19:07:30 +0000

I use Cursor with OpenRouter for some projects and it's great. Most of the time I just use Auto and let Cursor use its model or choose. If I run out of quota, or I'm not getting what I want, I switch off Auto and use OpenRouter to pick Opus, Codex, or whoever(all are available). Can continue the same context if you want, type "please continue" in the agent prompt, and on you go.

New comment by largbae in "The dead economy theory"

largbae — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:25:47 +0000

Sounds like Jevons Paradox to me: Amount of output per worker-hour increases(cost drops edit sorry), paradoxically worker-hours _increase_.

Mechanism? New Use Cases become viable.

Just like LED lights and Virtual Machines made light-per-watt and workloads-per-server more efficient, what did we do with that efficiency? We didn't pocket the cash, we turned every billboard and many buildings into JumboTrons, and we made millions of new cheap cloud VMs to run hundreds of thousands of new little businesses that never would have happened.

Look at coding now: People are finishing side projects that they never would have, closing out old bugs or test coverage they never would have, starting side businesses they never would have before.

This is new demand being created before our eyes as the cost of knowledge work drops.

New comment by largbae in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

largbae — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:39:27 +0000

Don't believe your lying eyes, AI results are better!

New comment by largbae in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

largbae — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:22:29 +0000

How is this different from the old "Let me Google that for you" response? Is answering via AI rude, or is asking a question that you can get a straight answer from an LLM the rude thing? Both?

You might be annoyed with me if I asked you for a link to AirBnB for example.

New comment by largbae in "That Methyl Methacrylate Tank"

largbae — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:50:36 +0000

Based on the article, the inhibitor chemicals _are_ the passive protection system, they just can't be perfect because too much of that stuff ruins the purpose for having the chemical in the first place.

New comment by largbae in "Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to step down"

largbae — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:21:24 +0000

Maybe this is sarcasm and I just didn't catch it, but I think Dropbox made a mark, and a good one at that.

The tool strangely still has a certain something that I reach for from time to time. Cross-platform(cross-era even, I just used it to move something off an ancient Windows 10 install), painless sync, painless auth, painless sharing(or not), painless updates, simple billing that isn't so high I have to factor it into my plans, and the app doesn't try to ramp my price based on how many devices I access my data from. It's just a good piece of software at a good price.

Commercially they did just fine as well according to the article: $6B in market cap, $2B/yr rev and $2B personally for Drew. Maybe not the top of YC leaderboard, but well above average.

I want more services like this one, and will keep paying for my modest storage amount until they tell me to go.

New comment by largbae in "At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025"

largbae — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:01:45 +0000

We don't need to destroy them to stop them. Just use them to surveil your local legislators and report on a few of their wrongdoings. The 4th Amendment is so abstract when it isn't _your_ privacy being invaded. Bring the message home.

New comment by largbae in "Why most product tours get skipped"

largbae — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:15:18 +0000

Every moment (token?) spent interrupting a user to introduce a feature should instead be spent making the feature more intuitive instead.