Hacker News: phainopepla2

New comment by phainopepla2 in "The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd"

phainopepla2 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:55:34 +0000

My strategy has been to follow accounts that just repost reviews by well respected film critics, usually older ones like Stanley Kauffman or Pauline Kael. Typically they're well written even if I disagree with the take, and they avoid the overwriting problem that even the more thoughtful Letterboxd users are prone to (easier to write a long, rambling review than a concise one). But those accounts get taken down occasionally, usually don't have any reviews for more recent movies, and have spotty coverage even for older movies.

New comment by phainopepla2 in "The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd"

phainopepla2 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:44:45 +0000

> On Letterboxd, the reviews can be as entertaining as the movies themselves.

Hard disagree here. There are some good reviewers on there but you have to wade through a mountain of terrible one-liners from wannabe comedians. No matter how many of these users I block there are always more of them popping up. I wish they had a character or sentence length filter for reviews that could be toggled on, for those of us who aren't looking for a "Twitter for movies" experience.

New comment by phainopepla2 in "GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis"

phainopepla2 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:37:47 +0000

Absolutely ludicrous comparison

New comment by phainopepla2 in "Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff"

phainopepla2 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:30:13 +0000

Reminiscent of when coding agents fail to fix a bug and keep digging themselves deeper into a hole.

> I understand the problem now, I just need to... > I was wrong before but the issue is now clear, let me... > I have complete clarity now! I'm going to...

New comment by phainopepla2 in "Running local models is good now"

phainopepla2 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:15:58 +0000

Sorry, I meant non-locally.

I'm assuming privacy is not a concern since you mentioned using Deepseek already. The cost of V4 Flash for small tasks is so minuscule as to be almost free, and you don't have to deal with a churning laptop (or even buying a high-end laptop, for someone who doesn't already have one).

I guess what I'm really asking is, what's the advantage of using these small local models if privacy isn't a concern?

New comment by phainopepla2 in "Running local models is good now"

phainopepla2 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:41:08 +0000

Why not just use DS V4 Flash for the small stuff? Very fast and extremely cheap.

New comment by phainopepla2 in "GLM 5.2 Is Out"

phainopepla2 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:26:55 +0000

Have any major open weight models been "open data"? Wouldn't that entail distributing vast amounts of copyrighted data?

New comment by phainopepla2 in "GLM 5.2 Is Out"

phainopepla2 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:24:03 +0000

That's because Qwen's flagship models are not, in fact, open weight. Qwen3.7 Max, Qwen3.7 Plus and others are closed weight.

You can use Qwen3.6 35B A3B (for example) on Openrouter with a US-based ZDR provider, because it's one of their open weight models

New comment by phainopepla2 in "PwC Report: AI Making Medical Bills Higher"

phainopepla2 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:56:48 +0000

Insurance companies spend a lot of time on bill review and disputes over coding. They will develop an adversarial AI process to counteract this (assuming they haven't already). Race to the bottom and we all win

New comment by phainopepla2 in "Core PPI up 9.6% annualized (0.8% MoM) in May"

phainopepla2 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:04:50 +0000

He allowed allowed the destruction of Gaza to start, and did nothing to stop it even when it was clear what was happening and it was within his power to do so. Of course, Trump would have been no better on that front. But that brings us back to...

The lesser of two evils is still evil

New comment by phainopepla2 in "Organic foods are not healthier or pesticide free"

phainopepla2 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:10:44 +0000

This is very true. My parents were organic farmers back before there was any legal or official designation, and keeping synthetic pesticides out of the soil and watershed was a bigger motivation for them than fear of eating conventionally grown food.

I think as organic food became more mainstream it also became more about an individual's health and less about larger environmental and social concerns, but those concerns are at the heart of the original organic movement.

New comment by phainopepla2 in "The Abundance Illusion"

phainopepla2 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:31:15 +0000

Ah, missed that. Well, I think the point remains that it's an abominable and misleading graph

New comment by phainopepla2 in "The Abundance Illusion"

phainopepla2 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:07:03 +0000

And to top it off both Y axes have the exact same label. The graph has no indication as to which line belongs to which axis. Of course, we can easily infer which is which from the surrounding article, but still... terrible data visualization

New comment by phainopepla2 in "Why are so many young people getting cancer?"

phainopepla2 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:42:22 +0000

What's forcing people to keep eating terrible diets and getting fat? What's forcing that results in . The answer is usually human weakness or someone seeking to make a profit by encouraging the bad habit, or a combination of the two.

As individuals, there's nothing we can do other than exert willpower, and we should. But as a society we should also be asking questions about the supply side of these bad habits.

New comment by phainopepla2 in "Why are so many young people getting cancer?"

phainopepla2 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:40:01 +0000

Where can I read more about this? I've been pilled on the co-sleeping thing, but hadn't heard this about "back is best"

New comment by phainopepla2 in "An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight"

phainopepla2 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 02:52:56 +0000

Meth is already incredibly cheap. Meth addicts would definitely still engage in this behavior even if meth were free, because they still need money for rent, gas, food, whatever.

New comment by phainopepla2 in "An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight"

phainopepla2 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 02:46:24 +0000

My apartment was broken into once and I knew it was a meth head because they color coordinated my closet before they left. Turned out to be someone I knew (on meth)

New comment by phainopepla2 in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

phainopepla2 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 15:52:14 +0000

Wood construction is not typically considered woodworking, although there is often a lot of overlap. But the skills needed to make furniture are pretty different from the skills needed to make decks, fences, etc.

New comment by phainopepla2 in "Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording""

phainopepla2 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:11:49 +0000

> Is there an actual quantitative check that says "AI or not AI"? I'm genuinely curious.

There are plenty of them that will give you a number, Pangram is a commonly-used one. Of course, whether they actually work well is a different matter. In my experience they have a huge false positive rates. I haven't tested the inverse.

New comment by phainopepla2 in "Why Janet? (2023)"

phainopepla2 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 17:49:06 +0000

I think pay per account (like the Metafilter model) would be better. If you charge $10 for lifetime access and ban slop-posters, it quickly becomes expensive to be a slop merchant