Hacker News: lz400

New comment by lz400 in "How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?"

lz400 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:06:05 +0000

I've said this before in here but Zitron is completely captured by his audience at best and a grifter at worst. A couple of months ago he was tweeting that people were crazy talking about _agents_, that they didn't _exist_ and that people talking about them were shills or bots. The responses were full of incredulous software developers saying but but but I use them every day, they're so good they're scary actually...

Zitron is just, like Dan Luu says, wrong about everything and doesn't care anymore, he's in the business of extracting money from his engagement.

Do LLMs dream of electric sheep?

lz400 — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:16:38 +0000

Article URL: https://vpablo.dev/articles/llm-thinking.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49409029

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by lz400 in "Jane Street suffers $15B hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness"

lz400 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:32:37 +0000

It’s sketchy to invest in a fund they probably knew full well had terrible risk practices and was likely going under on the first drawdown.

When Leopold went to pitch NY investors they all passed and thought he was full of it. He could only convince California tech guys. Savvy finance guys saw SA for what it was (leveraged beta trade). Jane street are finance guys, not California tech bros.

New comment by lz400 in "Jane Street suffers $15B hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness"

lz400 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:30:14 +0000

One theory (I don’t necessarily believe it): Jane Street was after the private part of SA’s portfolio (Anthropic), which is difficult to come by. Losing a few million dollars investing and getting in that network was worth it for them to try to groom Leopold to eventually sell them the private stake

New comment by lz400 in "Jane Street suffers $15B hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness"

lz400 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:38:54 +0000

It's all so sketchy. Jane Street were investors in SA but presumably were much more sophisticated and savvy than Leopold. When SA got in trouble, 3 firms got into a bid war for the assets at fire sale prices: Citadel, Jane Street and a third I forgot. Citadel outbid the other 2, but it's all weird, like Jane Street wanted in on the popular boy's book that they knew was going to tank and just were waiting around in the water like sharks.

New comment by lz400 in "The German Mittelstand"

lz400 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:26:20 +0000

Agreed, it's that the free market _allows_ you to do. What's concerning is that we're used to the "semi-benevolent" image of the free market where a company succeeds and then returns value to stock holders, and the employees and the investors and the country all share of the riches. Of course the executives and main shareholders get outsized returns, inequality might raise, but many people see a bit, and capitalism works, kind of.

This new Chinese "involutioned" capitalism is much more scary and robotic. The companies never really make money, becoming just an operation that maintains itself on minimum wage workers, all to the service of reducing prices. Shareholders don't make money, employees are semi-poor, nobody sees any returns.

But the customers see cheaper prices! you say. Sure, yes, the products get cheaper, but now think of yourself as an employee not a customer. Imagine the involutioned companies triumph. Your previous company, where you had a good salary goes bust. You find a job in an involutioned company where everyone is almost poor and worked to death just to reduce prices. Your portfolio goes to shit because companies don't make money anymore.... Sure, everything's cheaper now but I'm not sure that makes it better.

New comment by lz400 in "The German Mittelstand"

lz400 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 02:38:43 +0000

re: the crisis of the Mittelstand in competing VS China, I'm reminded of this tweet. It's a fictitious illustrative case not a serious study but I think it describes some of the root challenges of western industrial culture when it comes to competing against China

https://x.com/AngelicaOung/status/1921364873444986888

New comment by lz400 in "Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI"

lz400 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 05:07:56 +0000

Basically yes, there will be more coding in that phase, more prototyping, the PRD phases will be shorter too, there will be more pressure to deliver quickly and the PRDs will be under more pressure to move more quickly. This is what I'm already seeing to be honest.

New comment by lz400 in "Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI"

lz400 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 04:48:36 +0000

Coding was expensive in the sense that once you decided what to do, it took a few engineers months / years to do moderately complex projects. That's not true anymore. Therefore the risk of "coding the wrong thing" is less.

New comment by lz400 in "Eight Myths on Software Engineering and GenAI"

lz400 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:38:41 +0000

Like many others in the comments, I feel there are a lot of assumptions in this piece. Before, coding is only 14% therefore, small slice. I think that's a very superficial assumption. That was because coding was expensive and we needed to be sure we didn't code the wrong thing. If code is as cheap as it is now, we will optimize differently, we will structure around it. Instead of so many meetings we will code 5 different versions of the same thing and choose, etc.

New comment by lz400 in "Situational Awareness and the Impending Stock Market Volatility"

lz400 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:18:45 +0000

I mean, so many people also went in on the boom, that's why it's a boom. Leopold somehow got it 100% right and _still_ managed to go bust

New comment by lz400 in "Situational Awareness and the Impending Stock Market Volatility"

lz400 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 10:08:30 +0000

I think the collapse of SA is very simple (as long as I'm not wrong about it of course hehe).

SA weren't geniuses, they weren't sophisticated. They just did the same thing everyone else did, all in on semi-conductor, AI and memory positions. They got great returns because 1) everyone got great returns and 2) they were leveraged through their ears. In fact, not only they weren't geniuses, they were pretty bad at risk management, so bad that the first mild drawdown triggered margin calls on their over-leveraged bets and they couldn't cover them.

TLDR: SA didn't have alpha, they just looked good through over-leveraged beta and got caught

New comment by lz400 in "Everyone should know SIMD"

lz400 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:24:30 +0000

Thanks, that's insightful. I haven't thought about it that way but in retrospect it's clear. In practice I think we've all seen that the numpy style construction is quick to write and performs (and reads) much better than "dumb loops", but if you really want to optimize your code, the highway version will give you more control (and will read similar to the dumb loop with some decorations). I guess just more tools in the toolbox!

New comment by lz400 in "Everyone should know SIMD"

lz400 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 04:14:22 +0000

Sure, but we're not talking about most code, we're talking about "code that would benefit from SIMD"

New comment by lz400 in "Everyone should know SIMD"

lz400 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 03:14:48 +0000

Isn't the better abstraction here to use a higher level library in the style of pandas/polars that will operate as vectors, compose and feel readable and inuitive, while (almost?) maxing out SIMD?

New comment by lz400 in "Anthropomorphism in Children's Interactions with LLM Chatbots"

lz400 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:17:04 +0000

When my daughter was 7yo and she talked to chatgpt, she repeatedly asked, what's your name? are you a boy or a girl? eventually she lost interest at the evasiveness of the answers, like she marked it as not fun to interact with, not a real person. It's different now, that she understands it can help with homework :D

New comment by lz400 in "Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt"

lz400 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 22:48:59 +0000

I have this tshirt. I'm relieved it's not a cognitohazard, virus or something, thanks!

New comment by lz400 in "EVE Online's Carbon engine is now open source: Fenris Creations explains why"

lz400 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 22:44:42 +0000

I used to play EVE on and off for years (decades?) and as many people here I loved more the idea of the game than the reality of it so I couldn't handle it for long periods.

I would love the possibility of setting EVE servers where we have like instanced pre-loaded scenarios (battle for a structure for 50v50 preloaded fits, alliance tournament style fights, etc.) and can do open source. Of course they'd need to open source quite a few more things, I wonder if they could franchise the game itself this way so people setting the servers pay a bit or something (or rent the capacity, cloud style?).

AFAIK, EVE is very profitable and EVE's mother company have been trying to use this cushion to branch out into other games and exploit the IP. I believe this has been mostly failed attempts and they've been bought, sold, etc. Maybe franchising EVE itself would work better? CCP plz?

New comment by lz400 in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

lz400 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:08:44 +0000

I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist but how much do we think this responds to the Trump admin having documented financial ties to openAI? Trump has proven to me very transactional in dealing with private business.

New comment by lz400 in "AI is slowing down"

lz400 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:40:47 +0000

FWIW I agree the financials are a bit crazy and OpenAI went a bit nuts with the circular deals. That said, honestly, I don't think it's the end of the world. I think there will probably be some correction/crash and it will probably be healthy. A lot of these circular deals will get canceled, but it's at the end of the day people changing imaginary numbers with each other. The underlying tech I still think it's revolutionary regardless, the same way that the internet was and the tech boom crash at the end of the day was a distraction from the fact that these companies did end up "ruling the world"