Hacker News: linuxftw

New comment by linuxftw in "Understanding the AI Economy"

linuxftw — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 13:29:44 +0000

A friend of mine is a plumber. They use ChatGPT to write commercial bids. They developed a prompt, feed in some details, and out pops a detailed bid.

New comment by linuxftw in "Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%"

linuxftw — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:48:49 +0000

Depends on what you qualify as 'standard of living.' There's no amount of money I would accept to live in many parts of the world. To have the same size property and home I have today in France or Germany would be likely 10's of millions of Euros. My property is worth well less than $1M.

New comment by linuxftw in "Why were Covid vaccine trials so fast?"

linuxftw — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:34:20 +0000

Well, that's because you didn't get your booster soon enough.

New comment by linuxftw in "Why were Covid vaccine trials so fast?"

linuxftw — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:33:17 +0000

And we know this was an outright lie, because the clinical trials did not include contracting the virus as an endpoint. In fact, in Pfizer's data, they only used PCR tests on symptomatic people, rather than periodic testing.

So to say the clinical trials reflected absence of infection is a deliberate lie. Either they knew what the data said and lied, or they didn't know what the data said and stated they did, which is a lie.

New comment by linuxftw in "Why were Covid vaccine trials so fast?"

linuxftw — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:18:25 +0000

> far less than the virus

Unfortunately, this isn't a claim that can be made. We don't know how many people got the virus, or how many times. And IIRC, the cardiac issues of the virus were mostly in older demographics, the J&J was affecting young a healthy people.

New comment by linuxftw in "Why were Covid vaccine trials so fast?"

linuxftw — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:14:57 +0000

Debatable. For one, many people believed the stats were cooked. Hospitals had financial incentives to claim corona cases. They routinely didn't test people for corona if they were vaccinated during the worst part of the outbreak.

Even Pfizer's own trial data submitted to the FDA showed an all-cause mortality higher in the control group than the product group. Of course, they explain all the deaths away.

New comment by linuxftw in "Why were Covid vaccine trials so fast?"

linuxftw — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:07:01 +0000

You're aware that the J&J was pulled from the market due to cardiac issues, right? It's not a theory that actual people were actually harmed by the products, the only question is risk/reward.

New comment by linuxftw in "Slate EV truck starts at $24,950"

linuxftw — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:19:23 +0000

Small Block Chevy.

New comment by linuxftw in "Slate EV truck starts at $24,950"

linuxftw — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 13:52:58 +0000

GMC made a modular system for like 50 years, it's called the SBC.

New comment by linuxftw in "FDA advisors unanimously vote to approve Moderna's mRNA after agency drama"

linuxftw — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:26:55 +0000

More deaths in the new study group for this product. More overall adverse reactions for the new product.

Here's the top-line comparison:

Healthcare encounter:

new: 80 (0.4)

existing: 120 (0.6)

Each group had roughly 20k participants, mostly white.

No actual control group, no independent third party study. Junk.

New comment by linuxftw in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"

linuxftw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:16:53 +0000

I use Cursor for coding. I like to review the changes via the UI. Plan mode is also really strong in Cursor. It bugs me less about needing to search through files and basic coding tasks. I find it also saves the company a ton of money compared to Claude, Claude burns through tokens with no regard.

I typically use Claude for interacting with MCPs and skills to operate on live systems.

New comment by linuxftw in "What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes"

linuxftw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:55:59 +0000

If these ideas served some useful purpose, they would already be implemented in kubernetes. The platform is quite extensible.

New comment by linuxftw in "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation"

linuxftw — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:25:55 +0000

Of course not. Normal people are using gemini, it comes pre-installed on Android now.

New comment by linuxftw in "AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes"

linuxftw — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:30:29 +0000

I literally explained the thinking that the free builds on Linux aren't worth it. If you've ever shipped production software, you'd know this. Just because there's a free build available for Windows doesn't mean it costs the company $0 to release the free build. It's a lot of extra time and QA for each variant of a release. There might be many differences between the Windows and Linux builds, such as the Linux builds require proprietary 3rd party code with royalties, and they chose not to eat that cost.

There's no bait and switch. It's just people expecting things for free, as always, when this was never an open source project.

New comment by linuxftw in "AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes"

linuxftw — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:10:11 +0000

This software seems to never have been open source/freely licensed. That's not a bait and switch. They were giving you a commercial product, for free, and now have decided not to.

It's likely a case where maintaining separate builds for the free and commercial tiers was getting complex. Often times, this kind of software requires lots of manual reviewing and adding or removing modules, and they probably decided it's just not worth it.

New comment by linuxftw in "Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union"

linuxftw — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:01:06 +0000

Eh, the supply of drivers isn't as fungible as you might think. Insurance is quite expensive, that's what keeps me from doing it from time to time. That and I have zero desire to have to deal with the public.

New comment by linuxftw in "Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union"

linuxftw — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:57:57 +0000

They spent billions and billions on trying to make self-driving a thing.

New comment by linuxftw in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

linuxftw — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:26:16 +0000

LLMs are amazing at golang. They seem to have great training in the k8s world, so writing custom controllers and operators takes minutes instead of days now.

New comment by linuxftw in "I'm going back to writing code by hand"

linuxftw — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:55:39 +0000

Ostensibly, there may be a third party that benefits from the exchange, rather than the two exchanging ideas.

It is surprising to see how many are still in utter denial around here, though. Maybe we should all go back to punch cards.

New comment by linuxftw in "Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution"

linuxftw — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:39:26 +0000

That describes social media for the last 10 years, at least. Not dead yet.