Hacker News: quicklywilliam

New comment by quicklywilliam in "A few words on DS4"

quicklywilliam — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:40:30 +0000

I think the big idea here is that you can get a lot more performance if you take an integrated approach. This specific model made to work with this specific inference engine made to work with this specific harness/agent. When everything is done separately, developers of a given pieces have no idea what they are targeting for all the other pieces.

This is currently a huge advantage that Anthropic has over open weights models – they control the whole stack. Indeed, they train new models against Claude Code!

It's early days on this project, but just imagine it gets enough traction that future models start training against ds4. Indeed, in the post Antirez even seems to be hinting at some sort of collaboration with DeepSeek?

New comment by quicklywilliam in "Pushing Local Models with Focus and Polish"

quicklywilliam — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:09:28 +0000

Picture the early days of the PC - local models are like that. While there are scattered groups of hobbyists who tinker endlessly to get a few lights blinking, almost everyone doing “real work” is using a large, expensive, centralized product. Despite the exponential performance curve of smaller models (not to mention the rapidly increasing cost of using frontier models), we are all still stuck using mainframes and minicomputers. Why? Because few of us have the time and resources to build a computer from raw components.

The problem with local models isn't that they are local, it's that they are not integrated. Hobbyist testing the latest local models are great (thank you!), but we also need someone building the Apple I.

New comment by quicklywilliam in "David Silver of DeepMind raises $1B to build AI that learns without human data"

quicklywilliam — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:08:25 +0000

Same question. Given the people involved I am inclined to take it seriously, given the money and hype involved I am somewhat less inclined.

Their website doesn’t even have a hint of what the approach is.

New comment by quicklywilliam in "There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning"

quicklywilliam — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:11:30 +0000

Agreed, there is probably a theoretical world where we got enough money/compute together and had this explosion happen earlier.

Or perhaps a world where it happened later. I think a big part of what enabled the AI boom was the concentration of money and compute around the crypto boom.

New comment by quicklywilliam in "Show HN: Tolaria – Open-source macOS app to manage Markdown knowledge bases"

quicklywilliam — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:23:08 +0000

This is a really cool list and repository of ideas. Seems like the focus of the work is on making knowledge legible to AI. I wonder if you (or others) have done a similar level thinking about the inverse – making AI more legible to humans?

New comment by quicklywilliam in "Show HN: Tolaria – Open-source macOS app to manage Markdown knowledge bases"

quicklywilliam — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 20:51:00 +0000

Curious if you looked at using SwiftDown (https://github.com/qeude/SwiftDown), MarkupEditor (https://github.com/stevengharris/MarkupEditor) or any other libraries for live/WYSIWYG Markdown editing.

New comment by quicklywilliam in "You're about to feel the AI money squeeze"

quicklywilliam — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:31:34 +0000

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about Anthropic and others turning the screws on their subscription plans, skyrocketing costs for enterprise customers. This is driving more and more folks to consider cheaper and non-proprietary models (which are getting more capable) for some of their tasks. This article goes into both of these trends.

You're about to feel the AI money squeeze

quicklywilliam — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:31:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/917380/ai-monetization-anthropic-openai-token-economics-revenue

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47879585

Points: 9

# Comments: 6

New comment by quicklywilliam in "Making beautiful work is getting harder"

quicklywilliam — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:11:37 +0000

I wrote a thing about why the current direction of AI tends to produce such terrible work — and what I think we could be doing with AI instead.

Making beautiful work is getting harder

quicklywilliam — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:11:37 +0000

Article URL: https://slowlywilliam.com/2026/04/21/why-everything-is-terrible.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876690

Points: 7

# Comments: 1

New comment by quicklywilliam in "Tesla Cybertruck sales inflated: SpaceX bought 1,279 units"

quicklywilliam — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:24:03 +0000

The real question is who bought the other 5,742 of them

New comment by quicklywilliam in "Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)"

quicklywilliam — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:16:07 +0000

Interesting read. I don't know if I quite buy the evidence, but it's definitely enough to warrant further investigation. It also matches up with my personal experience, which is that tools like Claude Code are burning through more and more tokens as we push them to do bigger and bigger work. But we all know the frontier model companies are burning through money in an unsustainable race to get you and your company hooked on their tools.

So: I buy that the cost of frontier performance is going up exponentially, but that doesn't mean there is a fundamental link. We also know that benchmark performance of much smaller/cheaper models has been increasing (as far as I know METR only looks at frontier models), so that makes me wonder if the exponential cost/time horizon relationship is only for the frontier models.

New comment by quicklywilliam in "Show HN: PanicLock – Close your MacBook lid disable TouchID –> password unlock"

quicklywilliam — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:11:24 +0000

Great idea and implementation! If you are hesitant to install this for any reason, you can accomplish the same thing with this one liner:

  sudo bioutil -ws -u 0; sleep 1; sudo bioutil -ws -u 1

Edit: here's a shortcut to run the above and then lock your screen. You can give it a global keyboard shortcut in the Shortcuts app. https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/9362945d839140dbbf987e5bce9...

New comment by quicklywilliam in "Leaving Gas Town – What Happens When the AI Bubble Bursts?"

quicklywilliam — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:16:42 +0000

There's been a ton of debate about whether we are in an AI bubble, but I've read a lot less about what will happen when the bubble bursts. I took it for granted that this is a bubble, and in particular that frontier AI companies are heavily distorting the market by subsidizing inference costs. Here's what might happen if those subsidies suddenly go away.

Leaving Gas Town – What Happens When the AI Bubble Bursts?

quicklywilliam — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:16:42 +0000

Article URL: https://slowlywilliam.com/2026/04/12/leaving-gas-town.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47797355

Points: 13

# Comments: 1