Hacker News: overflow897

New comment by overflow897 in "We're losing our voice to LLMs"

overflow897 — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 20:32:47 +0000

If/when the AI music gets good enough, how will you know the difference? I find small artists on spotify all the time that I enjoy and there's no way to know anything about their creative process.

New comment by overflow897 in "I don't care how well your "AI" works"

overflow897 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 14:29:44 +0000

And how is the quality of life for those factory workers? It's almost like the craft of making physical things has been devalued even if we're making more physical things than ever.

New comment by overflow897 in "The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting"

overflow897 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 12:32:17 +0000

I will happily let the internet fingerprint my browser to not have to go back to mailing checks. I am guessing this is true of most non-HN people.

New comment by overflow897 in "The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting"

overflow897 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 12:31:23 +0000

Most grocery stores in every place I have lived have security cameras so that if you did something illegal you'd be identified very quickly. At this point this is even true of small bodegas.

Also scammers can't waltz into my grocery store from the other side of the planet and wreak havoc.

Ultimately you can use privacy enhancing tools, just like servers can choose to block them. I wish there was a better system but that's what we've got.

New comment by overflow897 in "Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success"

overflow897 — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 18:47:51 +0000

There are very very few places in nyc not accessible via some combo of bus, metro and ferry. It's not as reliable as say Japan but the public transit network is pretty extensive.

New comment by overflow897 in "AI Saved My Company from a 2-Year Litigation Nightmare"

overflow897 — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 21:29:00 +0000

I think the AI advice is pretty important. You say you should understand and question everything the lawyers do but where do you even start without an AI to read and explain thousands of pages of contracts and legal process. Nevermind all the case law and it's trained on and has access to.

I think if he tried this ten years ago he'd have a pretty hard time with it.

New comment by overflow897 in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

overflow897 — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 16:17:50 +0000

At the rate they're going it'll just get cheaper. The cost per token continues to drop while the models get better. Hardware is also getting more specialized.

Maybe the current batch of startups will run out of money but the technology itself should only get cheaper.

New comment by overflow897 in "The Myth of Developer Obsolescence"

overflow897 — Tue, 27 May 2025 14:43:10 +0000

I think articles like this have the big assumption under them that we are going to plateau with progress. If that assumption is true, then sure.

But if it's false, there's no saying you can't eventually have an ai model that can read your entire aws/infra account, look at logs, financials, look at docs and have a coherent picture of an entire business. At that point the idea that it might be able to handle architecture and long term planning seems plausible.

Usually when I read about developer replacement, it's with the underlying assumption that the agents/models will just keep getting bigger, better and cheaper, not that today's models will do it.

New comment by overflow897 in "Thoughts on thinking"

overflow897 — Wed, 21 May 2025 18:39:14 +0000

There are parts of this I agree with and parts I do not. Being able to "talk" to documentation rather than dig through it to try to understand a concept feels like a way more efficient way to get to the same end.

I think digging through forums or comments or SEO garbage to try to find answers is a nightmare compared to having a solid llm do it for you. Being able to ask to explain a concept 5 different ways or compare concepts is incredible.

Or say - knowing nothing about 3d printing and being able to just ask it about current capabilities, materials, costs etc as an entrypoint. There are whole business ideas I wouldn't even consider exploring without it because it would be so overwhelming to research from scratch.

New comment by overflow897 in "LLMs get lost in multi-turn conversation"

overflow897 — Thu, 15 May 2025 10:54:40 +0000

I believe we're already using llms to evaluate llm output for training, I wonder if there's some variation of that which could be used to identify when one llm gets "stuck".

I guess chain of thought in theory should do that but having variations on prompt and context might behave differently?

New comment by overflow897 in "High tariffs become 'real' with our first $36K bill"

overflow897 — Fri, 09 May 2025 15:36:13 +0000

Genuine question but did folks feel poor during the heyday of the middle class? It seems like there was a period post-ww2 where you could make a living wage and still buy a house and sends your kids to college.

I'm not sure what the answer here is, but it does seem like this is something that has existed. Consumerism was pretty rampant in the 50s and 60s when a lot more was still made in the US.

New comment by overflow897 in "Is the world becoming uninsurable?"

overflow897 — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 13:34:56 +0000

I think the problem is suggest that an earthquake zone's fire problems would be solved by building houses like they do in a non-earthquake zone

New comment by overflow897 in "Is the world becoming uninsurable?"

overflow897 — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 13:22:57 +0000

"cooling a living space is always more costly than heating a living space" Man I wish this was true but it definitely isn't in anyplace that gets significantly cold. Heat pumps are super super efficient at cooling but they get less efficient at heating the colder it gets. Humans and appliances create a pretty negligible amount of heat.

New comment by overflow897 in "Money bubble"

overflow897 — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 21:28:51 +0000

AlphaGo and AlphaStar both started out based on human training and then played against versions of themselves to go on and create new strategies in their games. Modern LLMs can't learn/experiment as far as I know in exactly the same way but that may not always be true.

New comment by overflow897 in "Pixel owners report problems after installing January 2024 Google Play update"

overflow897 — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 16:34:16 +0000

Software update broke the (already very bad) fingerprint scanner on my 6a a few updates ago and no fix in sight. It feels like they're just focused on churning out devices and the quality has suffered tremendously. It's death by a thousand cuts and after resisting for a decade I think I'm ready to try jumping to apple.

New comment by overflow897 in "Why Tailwind CSS Won"

overflow897 — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 11:38:27 +0000

"Ship faster, do less, faster, faster, faster. To what end?"

You're on hacker news, which is pretty heavily focused on startups. Startups usually have a limited runway, wherein if they don't deliver they cease to exist. That seems like a pretty reason to ship faster?

Comparing "choose a framework that saves developer time and energy" to "choose porn over your family" seems a bit much.

New comment by overflow897 in "We at $Famous_company Switched to $Hyped_technology"

overflow897 — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 22:22:24 +0000

Evernote is pretty much ruined for me because of this. From a lovely, snappy native app to an electron monstrosity that's slow and barely usable.

Lucky for them their only competitor is Notion, another slow js app.

New comment by overflow897 in "Psilocybin 'promising' for depression"

overflow897 — Thu, 15 Apr 2021 17:31:50 +0000

I think people should be generally excited by the prospect of resolving long term psychological issues with just a few doses.

New comment by overflow897 in "Ask HN: A major USA bank is storing passwords in cleartext – what to do?"

overflow897 — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 22:38:09 +0000

"Person X reported a vulnerability, they must be a hacker! Get our lawyers" - Some non-technical bank person. Most companies don't like having their mistakes publicly exposed.

New comment by overflow897 in "Healthy habits add up to 10 disease-free years to your life, study reveals"

overflow897 — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 17:18:08 +0000

There are studies that show even moderate alcohol usage can have a damaging effect. And any amount of alcohol has been shown to raise risk of cancer.

https://www.bmj.com/content/357/bmj.j2353

The consensus is slowly moving towards there not being a healthy amount of alcohol consumption.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...