Hacker News: patrickk

New comment by patrickk in "Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit"

patrickk — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:51:00 +0000

He tried to back out of the purchase after signing an agreement, but was forced to buy it for $44b in the end.

New comment by patrickk in "Google releases Gemma 4 open models"

patrickk — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:33:01 +0000

For those who wish to do OCR on photos, like receipts, or PDFs or anything really, Paperless-NGX works amazingly well and runs on a potato.

New comment by patrickk in "Ask HN: How are you all staying sane?"

patrickk — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:14:38 +0000

I’m seeing loads of posts in the likes of /r/n8n where people are figuring out how to do the jobs of multiple people with just one person, using workflows built and enhanced by AI. Copywriting, cross posting on social media, blogging, cold email outreach, fully automated user generated video content, running Facebook and Insta ad campaigns, google ad campaigns and more. All this can can be done once you nail down a solid workflow, powered by the likes of n8n, Claude code etc.

New comment by patrickk in "OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub"

patrickk — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:27:55 +0000

In parallel, local models are getting better and better, so eventually they’ll get “good enough” to run fairly cheaply at a level close to the current Sonnet/Opus models (what I run Claudeclaw with), on Groq, Openrouter or whatever commodity provider. Perhaps even mid to high end consumer PCs when the current RAM madness subsides.

There’s loads of good discussions about local LLMs in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190997

New comment by patrickk in "Ask HN: How are you all staying sane?"

patrickk — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:28:10 +0000

We’re already seeing the impact of AI in the jobs market for junior devs, and in marketing and more. So there’s unquestionably going to be a rough adjustment period. My thought on it is to build something concrete that I own, and take advantage of the disruption of possible, instead of being crushed by it.

New comment by patrickk in "Ask HN: How are you all staying sane?"

patrickk — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:55:35 +0000

In a similar boat. I’m running “ClaudClaw” a clone of Openclaw to enforce discipline in my limited free time to get an AI agency off the ground, in order to try to escape the miserable corporate grind. On the one hand, it’s a massive productivity boost, on the other hand, this tech is going to further hollow out the middle class everywhere and make so many people redundant. I don’t have the luxury to simply quit and focus on it full time.

New comment by patrickk in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

patrickk — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 16:40:12 +0000

Several military leaders expressed surprise at how gung-ho Obama was with foreign policy regarding the gwot. He literally executed an American citizen via drone. He didn’t even pay lip service to hope and change. Dubya also ran on a non-interventionist platform, and Trump ran on “drain the swap” and non-interventionism as well.

Anyway this is missing the wood for the trees. The point is, the uniparty very much exists, despite the downvotes. Foreign policy, bailing out banks, bowing down to the military industrial complex are very much remarkably consistent uniparty positions.

New comment by patrickk in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

patrickk — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 13:12:39 +0000

So much of both parties is actually alike, underneath a window dressing of differences (eg woke/anti woke), and a complicit media which does its best to amplify and brainwash people into believing. When it comes to policies that actually affect the elites, the deep state military industrial complex/intelligence services or financial interests, it is a uniparty. Look at how Obama continued the war on terror for example, after running on “hope and change”.

New comment by patrickk in "Claude Code Remote Control"

patrickk — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 18:23:47 +0000

Maybe combine Claude Code + Obsidian, so Claude can use the node structure as a second brain for projects. I was just watching this video (not affiliated):

https://youtu.be/6MBq1paspVU

New comment by patrickk in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

patrickk — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 10:28:18 +0000

> The solution is to get rid of all the people who write and process reports and empower the people who actually produce stuff to do it better.

That’s the solution if you’re the business owner.

That’s definitely not the solution if you’re a manager in charge of this useless activity, in fact, you should increase the amount of reports being written as much as humanly possible. The more underlings under you= more power and prestige.

This is the principal-agent problem writ large. As the comment mentioned above, also see Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs essay and book.

New comment by patrickk in "The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline"

patrickk — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:49:33 +0000

> Being a woman used to be: limited choice (now we fortunately have tons of options for women - careers, etc. They can enjoy the same freedoms, fun, and personal investment as men.)

This is the real reason that birth rates are dropping. Women’s prime childbearing years are spent working in an office (usually through economic necessity), and the decision to have kids becomes “oh we’ll get to that later”. Once the switch flipped to DINKY (double income, no kids) being the norm, house prices inflated and that’s where you have to be as a couple to keep up.

New comment by patrickk in "A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw"

patrickk — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:42:08 +0000

> how’d you set it up?

I was disappointed by this section. He doesn’t mention which model he uses (or models split by task type for specific sub agents).

I tried out OSS-20B hosted on Groq (recommended by a YouTuber) to test it for cheap, but the model isn’t smart enough for anything other than providing initial replies and perhaps delegating tasks into expensive capable models from ChatGPT or Claude. This is a crucial missing detail to replicate his use cases.

New comment by patrickk in "Google confirms 'high-friction' sideloading flow is coming to Android"

patrickk — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 10:54:23 +0000

Apple only implemented USB-C due to pressure from the EU.

One area Android has a clear advantage is Android TV devices verified by Google, because there is a much wider array of streaming apps of all kinds available. However google doesn’t seem to focus on this very much, and if you look for forum recommendations for google android streaming devices it’s very often the NVIDIA shield pro from 2019. Hopefully that device will I’ll be supported for a few more years because there seems to not be good easily available alternatives.

New comment by patrickk in "When employees feel slighted, they work less"

patrickk — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 19:15:23 +0000

This comment comes across as written by someone who hasn't seen a toxic work environment.

Sociopaths often make up an unusually large percentage of the upper layers of management. They won't hesitate to step on people to get ahead, and use the typical conflict aversion of regular people to their advantage- causing drama and fights, wearing others down, and eventually getting their way because most people just want their pay cheque, not to go into battle constantly.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

New comment by patrickk in "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"

patrickk — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 06:49:33 +0000

The ship has sailed on that one. The telematics from the car can also be sent back to the mothership, i.e. if you’re driving like a lunatic, pulling donuts, harsh acceleration and so on.

New comment by patrickk in "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges"

patrickk — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 08:47:42 +0000

You can typically select certain rooms to clean rather than “clean all” on decent brands like roborock or Dreame. You can put it on a schedule too.

New comment by patrickk in "Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges"

patrickk — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 08:41:45 +0000

Word to the wise: installing Valetudo can be a nerve wracking task even for the tech savvy. On my model, a Dreame L10s Ultra (there’s about three similarly named models and only this exact one is valetudo compatible, and isn’t sold any more) you are strongly recommended to use a custom pcb and to use Debian to run the commands, and not in a VM. If something goes wrong you can permanently brick your device. I ran into all kinds of esoteric sounding errors, and I half gave up and one point since I was burning valuable free time on evenings and weekends to get it done (busy family with small kids and stressful job). The robot sat unused for several months but I eventually got it done. I’m glad I did it but it was an ordeal.

New comment by patrickk in "Unreal Tournament 2004 is back"

patrickk — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 13:08:06 +0000

The Unreal Tournament series are arena shooters[1] which has sadly died a death, partially due to Epic Games negligence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arena_shooter

New comment by patrickk in "Accepting US car standards would risk European lives"

patrickk — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 13:44:26 +0000

> The monstrously large (5.8 meters) G63 6x6 is considerably rarer (i have never seen one in person).

Those kinds of exotic variants are for the Dubais of the world, for rich Arabs to power up and down sand dunes, not for the Autobahn and narrow medieval streets. I’ve only seen it at a motorshow.

New comment by patrickk in "Meta Segment Anything Model 3"

patrickk — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 08:34:41 +0000

They're not doing it out of the goodness of their heart, they're deploying a classic strategy known as "Commoditize Your Complement"[1], to ward off threats from OpenAI and Anthropic. It's only a happy accident that the little guy benefits in this instance.

Facebook is a deeply scummy company[2] and their stranglehold on online advertising spend (along with Google) allows them to pour enormous funds into side bets like this.

[1] https://gwern.net/complement

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People