Hacker News: luke5441

New comment by luke5441 in "The Amazon tax"

luke5441 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 16:37:22 +0000

For a while Amazon was good at discovering new books to read. Nowadays my ad-blocker blocks everything except for the book I am directly navigating to from the page. No discovery of new books is happening for me there anymore.

Another place to discover new books was Goodreads. Bought and left to rot by Amazon.

I don't buy many books anymore.

New comment by luke5441 in "When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs"

luke5441 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:02:55 +0000

Looking into the relationship a bit, I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

> Gebru and Torres argue that these ideologies should be treated as an "interconnected and overlapping" group with shared origins. They claim these constitute a movement that allows its proponents to use the threat of human extinction to justify expensive or detrimental projects and consider it pervasive in social and academic circles in Silicon Valley centered on artificial intelligence. As such, the acronym is sometimes used to criticize a perceived belief system associated with Big Tech.

New comment by luke5441 in "When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs"

luke5441 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 15:25:47 +0000

And before OpenAI, he was at FTX.

New comment by luke5441 in "Tell HN: Old.reddit.com Requires Login"

luke5441 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:13:13 +0000

New reddit also has blocking pop-ups after a while if you are not logged in since recently.

New comment by luke5441 in "The German Mittelstand"

luke5441 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:29:51 +0000

You forgot the last part about now no one having money anymore to buy the companies products, so you go into a deflationary spiral.

To solve that you'd want to increase wages by e.g. improving workers rights, giving them mandatory pensions etc. But that is scary: They might get too much power and revolt!

This works for China currently for a while, because they are exporting more and more. They have realized that they need to grow internal consumption, but are not managing to grow that sufficiently.

New comment by luke5441 in "The German Mittelstand"

luke5441 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:21:37 +0000

Germany has such a supply chain for some sectors (e.g. cars, chemicals). The question is do we want to protect it to some extent or let the free market do its thing?

New comment by luke5441 in "“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers"

luke5441 — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:54:49 +0000

Coding just often has a fast feedback loop. If you can't do it people are going to notice pretty fast. You can fail as an architect or prod management for a long time before people discover you are not good at it.

One thing that is good to have in all those positions is an understanding of the code base and where it can slowly evolve to and how that positions the code base best in the market. I'd say the best way to build this understanding is still to build parts of the system yourself. Not talk to experts or agents about the code base.

New comment by luke5441 in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

luke5441 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:12:57 +0000

Given it is being trained on your project, the latter isn't that surprising. For the former, you could use LLMs yourself for the probabilistic matching as alternative method? Probably you don't because the trade-offs (like performance) are not worth it...

New comment by luke5441 in "SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?"

luke5441 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:08:42 +0000

I don't think it is much of a problem that dabblers get into Internet arguments about things they are not experts in. After all the easiest way to get a correct answer/learn something is to say something wrong.

Of course this should be differentiated from a professional setting.

And under no circumstances should we put that stuff into the knowledge bases we base our "AI" on without making sure it takes into account the context.

New comment by luke5441 in "ChatGPT, Roblox to Fall Under Strictest EU Rules for Platforms"

luke5441 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 13:10:19 +0000

Note that this is of "sales" not of profit. So for OpenAI this would be 1.5$ billion. ( based on recent PR spin sales number)

New comment by luke5441 in "GCC steering committee announces AI policy"

luke5441 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 12:53:44 +0000

No?

1) Someone re-licenses GCC under a non-GPL license.

2) EFF sues them, to stop the behaviour

3) Court tells EFF that they have no standing to sue because LLM generated content has no copyright

Obviously this happening would be in the future after someone translated GCC to Rust with LLMs or something.

New comment by luke5441 in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

luke5441 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:43:57 +0000

I would claim the main cause why it is more complicated is having VAT and KYC/AML requirements. Transactions can be much easier if you ignore the VAT requirement.

New comment by luke5441 in "Airbus Takes Flight from AWS"

luke5441 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 14:16:56 +0000

We will up the defence spending until Trump doesn't have the "card" of removing Ukraine support anymore.

Then having a digital services tax starts looking like free money with few downsides to the EU. And the defence spending increases funding requirements.

The dependence would be eliminated by taxing it away.

New comment by luke5441 in "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making"

luke5441 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 14:43:57 +0000

And railways are now mostly state-funded infrastructure. Seems plausible to me that the same will happen with LLMs.

New comment by luke5441 in "Elon Musk Runs from Interview at Last Minute as SpaceX Stock Crashed [video]"

luke5441 — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 20:54:50 +0000

And Amazon went up 600000% from IPO. If SpaceX goes up by that amount it's worth like 60 times total world market cap.

New comment by luke5441 in "SQLite Is All You Need"

luke5441 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:49:58 +0000

At some point I thought I would be clever and just backup the file while no transaction is active (or manual WAL checkpointing and no WAL checkpointing active).

Ran into 2.2. https://www.sqlite.org/howtocorrupt.html -- the backup was close()ing the database file descriptor and canceling the SQlite locks.

New comment by luke5441 in "Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?"

luke5441 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 21:09:34 +0000

I think the last sentence has a word missing or something, because it contradicts the previous argument a bit.

New comment by luke5441 in "Count Binface"

luke5441 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:11:22 +0000

Since it is a first-past the post system it would have been best if the other parties coordinated to only let the best party compete.

Having Count Binface as the only other candidate is IMO a second-best option.

New comment by luke5441 in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

luke5441 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 22:04:11 +0000

Same as Russia, yeah. But Reliance Jio seems to have announced something. Don't know if it'll actually happen.

New comment by luke5441 in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

luke5441 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 18:56:49 +0000

And for that reason the EU, India, China and Russia will build their own Starlink alternatives.

To offset costs they'll then provide it for civilian use, competing with Starlink in the above areas.