Hacker News: offby_one

New comment by offby_one in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

offby_one — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:33:13 +0000

What failed was not the QR code because it was not a poor choice of technology. It was designed in such a way that it was good for one person to order but not for six people to negotiate. And that is how replacement technology operates. You study the activities of a human, and then you build automation around that. What you don't get is all the context the human is handling along the way. The social reading, the handling of exceptions, the time when someone passes on the cake and gets it out of the way. Replacement technology doesn't inherit any of this contextual intelligence. It can only handle the modal case. While, real life is mostly full of edge cases.

New comment by offby_one in "Why current LLM costs are not sustainable"

offby_one — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:30:17 +0000

This entire discussion is on the supply side chips, available weight, and switching cost. What is missing is the demand aspect. The firms that will be the most impacted when there is a drop in price are not Uber or Microsoft; it is that small privately-held firm using spreadsheets and hunches to make business decisions and cannot afford to invest in AI due to the high costs involved currently. The minute inference becomes affordable, an entirely new set of users joins the scene. The real issue is not what will happen to the laboratories it's what gets built for that next wave and whether it's actually useful or just cheaper versions of what already exists.