Hacker News: mrdependable

New comment by mrdependable in "I’m leaving OpenAI to build telepathy"

mrdependable — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:07:14 +0000

Sounds like a lot more work than just teaching communication skills.

New comment by mrdependable in "Discovery Loop"

mrdependable — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:06:27 +0000

Which engineering discipline touches most of these?

New comment by mrdependable in "Silicon Valley sees AI as the solution – for everyone else"

mrdependable — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:50:01 +0000

It's a globalization problem that countries have a hard time creating policy against. Countries don't have the enforcement power that they used to. The best we have come up with is using our own markets as leverage. In a hundred years I imagine wealth and income will look much more uniform across the world. Unfortunately, right now, we are stuck competing with people who can earn much less than people in the US. Now we have to worry about this AI disaster waiting to happen because countries have no real power to stop it. They say it looks like AI won't destroy jobs, but I think really we are just watching the various legs on a table be kicked out. It will still stand until it doesn't.

New comment by mrdependable in "Ask HN: Why are US tech workers so pro open borders?"

mrdependable — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 18:57:58 +0000

People support things that sound like a good idea to them, or that have been sold as a good idea to them, especially if they think it won't negatively affect them. It's easy to be pro open borders when you can't see how it would negatively impact you.

You say it clearly does not benefit them, but the problem is that nothing is really clear or obvious about it. There are a lot of different puzzle pieces, history, and order of effects that need to be considered which most people don't.

New comment by mrdependable in "I'm opening VSCode less and less every day"

mrdependable — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:55:09 +0000

Don't you need to look at the code you want to change in order to direct the AI in what you want to do, or are you simply telling it to make a feature and then looking at the changes it makes?

New comment by mrdependable in "Ask HN: Why are so many "AI evangelists" posting such insufferable content?"

mrdependable — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:12:40 +0000

I think of LinkedIn like walking into a Tony Robbins event. At least, what I imagine they are like from those old infomercials.

New comment by mrdependable in "Ask HN: Is "no source code was copied" still a sufficient copyright defense?"

mrdependable — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 18:29:47 +0000

A sad state of affairs when the law is what people look to in order to decide between right and wrong.

New comment by mrdependable in "Ad on the HN front page? Gauntlet AI?"

mrdependable — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:27:04 +0000

If I'm not mistaken, isn't this the same person behind Lambda School? I saw the same ad like a year or two ago.

New comment by mrdependable in "Claude Fable 5"

mrdependable — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:43:58 +0000

Hobbling the model may be smart tactically for them, but feels like it sets a really dangerous precedent.

New comment by mrdependable in "The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies"

mrdependable — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 16:57:05 +0000

I suppose if Spaghetti Inc and Olive Garden were in the business of creating and licensing recipes, they would both be in trouble. But they are selling labor and ingredients, which is what people are paying for. Also, pizza and spaghetti have been around a long time and patents don't last forever, so I don't see how this applies.

Maybe a better example would be to explain how drug companies are able to cover the cost of research and development, or how Studio Ghibli is able to invest in animating a movie that anyone can sell. Should everyone provide the full suite of services a business needs in order to earn a profit? That seems like an inefficient way to organize the economy. The mechanical engineer also has to be a marketer or else he doesn't deserve to be paid for an invention? How does that make sense?

> Sure, different inventions work differently. What does that matter?

You cut the sentence that answers the question.

New comment by mrdependable in "The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies"

mrdependable — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 07:09:14 +0000

An AI training is not equivalent to a human learning, despite how we like to anthropomorphize the process, and ideas are not protected by copyright in the first place.

Your point was that people that create something valuable are not entitled to stop others from capturing the value of their creation, ostensibly because they “don’t want to do the hard work.” My point is that even if someone did want to do the work, the benefit would go to the people with the money and infrastructure to act on it. In your vision, IBM would just take Windows and slap their name on it. Where would that have left Microsoft?

Computers and cars don’t rely on the intellectual output of others to function. AI still needs people doing the work that it is displacing, but it strips the economic incentive to do it.

New comment by mrdependable in "The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies"

mrdependable — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:25:44 +0000

You say means of production is an antiquated idea, but the world you are using as an example of the idea being unnecessary is a world where copyright exists. The world would look very different otherwise, and you can actually get a sneak peek of what would happen by looking at AI companies. These are not people using ingenuity to capture value that no else bothered to. They are owners of massive capital training for free on everyone's work to not only capture their value in ways the little guy can't, but to replace them outright.

New comment by mrdependable in "The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies"

mrdependable — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:05:45 +0000

What about something like carbon credits? Every citizen gets awarded a yearly AI usage credit. If a company wants to use an LLM, they have to buy the usage from the public market. People can use their own credits freely.

New comment by mrdependable in "The Public Should Own Half of the Big A.I. Companies"

mrdependable — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:32:40 +0000

It's entitled for others to believe they have any say in what happens with the work of others. The world without these protections would be worse off by far. What I gather from what you are saying is that if I write a song, or a book, anyone else should be able to take what I've done and make their own money off it. By that logic, a publisher wouldn't need to compensate writers. Record executives wouldn't need to compensate musicians. Whoever holds the means for extracting value are at a huge permanent advantage.

We haven't gotten to where we are in the world today by giving the wealthy huge permanent advantages. Look at the explosion in innovation that has happened since public education has become widespread. It used to be only the wealthy that could afford to be educated. Part of what makes capitalism work at all is by not allowing the means to capture value to be monopolized.

New comment by mrdependable in "AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study"

mrdependable — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:15:10 +0000

I wonder if this could be explained in a similar way to Hollywood movies. If the movies are designed to please the largest group of people, there is a greater chance people will choose to see it than another movie. The human law professors come with their own personalities, beliefs, and opinions that come through in their writing. An LLM has been trained to please the largest swathe of the population. That doesn't mean the answer is better; just like Captain America isn't necessarily better than American Beauty.

New comment by mrdependable in "AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers"

mrdependable — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:21:20 +0000

How do you envision that playing out? It would basically be like everyone that didn’t still have a job living off minimum wage. Would no one be allowed to work also?

New comment by mrdependable in "The dead economy theory"

mrdependable — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:21:39 +0000

You may not need to have a job to be happy, it varies person to person. However, the idea that the billionaires will save us and our leverage is not needed is ridiculous. It is much more likely we would see poverty like is seen in much of the rest of the world.

New comment by mrdependable in "The dead economy theory"

mrdependable — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:27:03 +0000

I think a lot of this would be solved if the government would actually enforce anti monopoly laws. The penalties against Google were such a damn joke it makes me sick.

Companies aren’t going to hold off on trying to automate tasks AI performs poorly at. They are going to change the task so AI can do it, putting the burden of making up for the deficit on everyone else. The only reason this is able to happen now is because all the competition has been crushed or absorbed.

New comment by mrdependable in "The dead economy theory"

mrdependable — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:19:54 +0000

You are ignoring the part where human labor is the leverage required for democracy to work.

New comment by mrdependable in "Claude Opus 4.8"

mrdependable — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:37:29 +0000

I am not talking about how much data is required to make intelligence. I am talking about how it uses the data it already has. It can tell you about every scam in the book, research about the scams, how to spot scams, who does the scamming, etc. Everything under the sun about scams. However, without the “skill” included in a prompt it will fall for scams.