Hacker News: pixelready

New comment by pixelready in "Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index"

pixelready — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:24:00 +0000

Don’t forget the smoking guns! I think these new models have been reading too many Agatha Christie novels.

New comment by pixelready in "How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026"

pixelready — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:46:12 +0000

Yeah, I’m seeing this a lot too recently. I guess polarization comes for us all eventually. Nuance and cognitive dissonance are so painful for some they simply flatten their position to something that feels safely straightforward, even if ghoulish?

Social media’s a helluva drug.

New comment by pixelready in "Join Me in Jamverse"

pixelready — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:27:56 +0000

I think what we sense as “LLM design” now is what used to be “oh, they used a popular squarespace template or Wordpress theme”. Makes sense that as the models were training on UI, they would heavily favor recurring patterns such as re-used design templates and popular UI libraries over the bespoke stuff.

That plus the AI generated imagery being used in hero images on a lot of sites is built from lazy prompts and riddled with tells like weird shape choices, smooth glossy surfaces, or mangled text.

New comment by pixelready in "Americans are rallying against data centers. Surprisingly few are getting built"

pixelready — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:16:45 +0000

I think it’s just a breakdown of trust in the government to weigh the interests of the builder and tenants of commercial / industrial properties against the local community. When it seems like government doesn’t have your back in negotiating and enforcing the details, people will fall back to a “default deny” stance to exert what control they have over the process.

I think we’re seeing this in a lot of aspects of society. Commercial interests have pushed aside all other stakeholders in the power structure and people are increasingly resorting to brute force methods to express their grievance. Replacing city council seats over single issues, cutting down Flock cameras, etc…

New comment by pixelready in "The Three-Second Theft: Why AI Voice Fraud Outruns Every Defence"

pixelready — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:35:17 +0000

This thread just gave me a pang of nostalgia. I think the first time I saw this interaction was in an AOL chat room, or maybe an early MUD. I miss the good old silly internet…

New comment by pixelready in "Please stop the AI confidence theater"

pixelready — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:17:26 +0000

It strikes me as sort of civil society “arms dealer” type of role, like lawyers. In a utopia where everyone cooperated in good faith and behaved honorably we would not need them (or very few of them), but as soon as one group arms themselves, everyone must regardless of their feelings about it. Then the marketers become an interest group unto themselves and stoke the paranoia of everyone who might need their services, and the endless escalation eats away at the underlying system turning it into more noise than signal.

New comment by pixelready in "The US Government Is Now a Shareholder in 26 Companies"

pixelready — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:00:25 +0000

We’ll need a more apt parable for dueling superpowers and the effect on their citizens. Perhaps “The Giants and the Ants”, where the ants beseech the giants to stop stepping on them as they fight in the fields where they have built their nest. Each of the giants argue that if they look down to avoid stepping on the ants, their rival will gain advantage and win the duel. When the ants ask the giants why they must duel in the first place, the giants will not understand their question at all.

New comment by pixelready in "Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin"

pixelready — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:19:58 +0000

I’ve heard this is because a lot of symptoms are not from the disease itself but actually side effects of mounting an aggressive immune system response to the underlying condition. Once your body gives up the fight as a lost cause, you will get a burst of relief and restored function from the lack of immune activity but it happens just before total system collapse.

New comment by pixelready in "Salesforce to Acquire Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B"

pixelready — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:12:06 +0000

Yeah, I think AI support is great for those low effort calls where someone wants something simple and clear and company policy is set up to just give it to them. That’s why a lot of people like Amazon’s bot, it has direct access to account details and can auto-approve simple things like a return that is slightly outside the return window etc…

But what you shouldn’t do is try to dress up adversarial policies behind a friendly customer service bot and then fire your entire support staff. That is immediately obvious and will drive people bonkers.

New comment by pixelready in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

pixelready — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 04:19:44 +0000

I think without a clear, shared definition of “free” the term “free market” has no actual social value and just becomes a political football that sounds good but changes meaning at a whim. Some people use it to mean completely unregulated, some people use it as a synonym for “fair”, and ne’er the twain shall meet.

New comment by pixelready in "Apple Core AI Framework"

pixelready — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:12:14 +0000

I think there’s still an open question around are the ultra-large next-gen models worth it? For those of us without early access to Mythos, it’s hard to verify whether it’s been held back from the public due to actually being “too dangerously powerful to release yet” as implied or because the gains aren’t outpacing the costs.

New comment by pixelready in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

pixelready — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:48:25 +0000

Oh, is that the guy that sold Loopt by claiming it had hundreds of thousands of users and it turned out to have 500 DAU after his exit?

New comment by pixelready in "Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements"

pixelready — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:41:03 +0000

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment for details

New comment by pixelready in "AI is making me dumb"

pixelready — Thu, 14 May 2026 20:02:15 +0000

Pruning code is to software engineers what cancelling plans is to introverts :)

I think I need to work up a Claude skill named marie-kondo, so that when it breathlessly presents its triumphant solution, I can go “yes, but does it spark joy?” And have it go into an aggressive refactor loop with me.

New comment by pixelready in "[dead]"

pixelready — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:09:39 +0000

Remember that this is disclosed spend. There are many things players especially in the media and tech space do that can have far more impact on public opinion via undisclosed “in-kind” spending and agenda-setting, it’s just that their manipulation doesn’t fall under any political transparency laws.

Every media mogul puts their thumb on the scale of public opinion. Broadcast media aligns and controls talking points, while new media manipulates visibility of user generated content via algorithmic weights.

New comment by pixelready in "How David Sacks crashed and burned in the White House"

pixelready — Wed, 06 May 2026 23:28:30 +0000

Yeah, it’s the same reason that Alex Karp goes on those unhinged apocalyptic rants about Palantir. It’s not for public consumption, it’s for defense insiders. The old logic prevails: a world destroying system is bound to exist, so WE must control it. Spare no expense.

New comment by pixelready in "Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks"

pixelready — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:30:16 +0000

Sadly, polarization pushes people towards either wholesale “burn it down” anti-capitalism or full throated corporate bootlicking and I don’t think either tact is particularly useful. There’s a more subtle critique about our indoctrination in the west towards concepts like the “efficiency of the free market” demanding that we overlook rampant alienation among the working population that is more what a lot of people are vibing on, but it’s being expressed as diet anarchism because that feels more poignant online.

I think most folks do, in fact, want to “perform a skilled role or responsibility that's useful for your tribe”, but find themselves railroaded into bullshit office jobs full of performative nonsense, soul crushing frontline service work, or body destroying blue collar work with no safety net, all of which are recipes for burnout later in life. Compare Keynes’ “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” [1] to what we ended up with and you’ll find the root of the discontent is perhaps warranted.

[1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

New comment by pixelready in "Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI"

pixelready — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:40:08 +0000

Here’s everyone’s daily reminder that the Luddites were an anti-exploitation movement that were retconned into knuckle dragging technophobes by Capitalist propaganda. It is, was, and always will be, about the fair distribution of returns from productivity gains.

New comment by pixelready in "What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable"

pixelready — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:49:25 +0000

Yeah, the more I learn about American history, the more I realize American elites were never bought in to the “moral project”, but were happy to use it as PR to a largely religious public.

Though I’m not particularly looking forward to living through the decline of the empire, I cling to the hope that a post-imperial America can emerge and attempt to live up to the dream of FDR, MLK, and that Jesus guy everyone seems to like so much but ignores all the inconvenient tolerance and sharing stuff he was so obsessed with.

New comment by pixelready in "60 Minutes Havana Syndrome report finds U.S. government tested energy weapon"

pixelready — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 22:47:59 +0000

It would seem the best place to hide a real conspiracy is underneath a fake one.