Hacker News: qwerpy

New comment by qwerpy in "Meta’s chaotic AI strategy"

qwerpy — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:45:07 +0000

I don't know. I've always worked at the big companies and they all had slightly different variants of the same nonsense. New companies may begin with mission-driven people but once it grows beyond a certain point, enough money/power-driven people join that the company irrevocably changes. Seems inescapable. Given that, and the fact that being mission-driven doesn't pay for my kid's piano lessons as well as FAANG did, I held my nose and compartmentalized work into the working hours as best as I could. There's less corporate backbiting in the less glamorous parts of a FAANG (test/QA, internal tools, etc.) but the pay is just as good, so that's where I always gravitated.

New comment by qwerpy in "4 things to know about the new sunscreen ingredient the FDA approved"

qwerpy — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:00:46 +0000

No one cares more about sun protection than Asian women living in SoCal. My wife and her friends usually use Korean or Japanese brands that they buy here in the states. Seems to work just fine.

New comment by qwerpy in "Meta’s chaotic AI strategy"

qwerpy — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:27:22 +0000

If I had taken a Reddit/HN approved job instead of working at FAANGs for 20 years, I’d be looking at another 20 years of soul crushing work. Instead, I’m retired. Sure you have to roll your eyes at the corporate nonsense sometimes but I’m happy I made that trade-off.

New comment by qwerpy in "Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity"

qwerpy — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 22:05:18 +0000

Funny, I moved to SoCal (Orange County) from the Seattle area and have also found it to be a huge improvement in everything except air and water quality. Can’t have everything I suppose. But the politics are much more sane, crime is low, and there are so many parks and playgrounds that can be used year round. The city government listens to residents (no, we don’t want dense housing, we want a big park) and although cost of living / taxes are high, we get a great quality of life in exchange.

New comment by qwerpy in "Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity"

qwerpy — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:49:29 +0000

Every forum with overly online people goes this way. I’ve stopped visiting Reddit, and let Google summarize their content for me so I don’t have to wade into the sewage. HN isn’t as bad yet but it has noticeably gotten worse since the 2024 election.

New comment by qwerpy in "Texas is America Inc's new centre of gravity"

qwerpy — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:44:51 +0000

I can confirm this. Fairly conservative family guy, love it here in OC. Not sure if due to balanced politics or apathy to politics but it’s awesome. After leaving the Seattle area where I was getting hostility from randoms on the street just for driving a Tesla, I feel at home here.

New comment by qwerpy in "Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware"

qwerpy — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:14:38 +0000

I just discovered it a couple of months ago when I spitefully unsubscribed from Apple Music. It’s exactly what I’ve wanted. Offline music that I can FTP files to from my file server.

New comment by qwerpy in "SpaceX's president is floating a Tesla merger as the company begins trading"

qwerpy — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:22:29 +0000

Where I live (Orange County, California) they are selling decently well. There’s one parked in every street. I guess when you have a high Asian immigrant population, they ignore the politics and just buy what makes sense for them.

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

qwerpy — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:56:54 +0000

Minneapolis does seem to have a penchant for attracting property damage and economic fallout. Last time it was $500 million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arson_damage_during_the_George...

After inflation maybe that one was more expensive!

New comment by qwerpy in "Meta launches Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp subscriptions"

qwerpy — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:22:31 +0000

Of all of the sites/apps that are immune to DNS adblocking, I thought YouTube was at the top of the list. Not that DNS adblocking isn’t a good thing, but I’d think Google & meta would make sure they couldn’t be defeated so easily.

New comment by qwerpy in "Driver, 87, dies after Tesla on Autopilot mode crashes into pond"

qwerpy — Sat, 30 May 2026 18:47:28 +0000

Yeah but that was Waymo. This time it’s Tesla.

New comment by qwerpy in "Cars are trying to spy on you, and it's only just the beginning"

qwerpy — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:43:47 +0000

At least you get that benefit. Most cars spy on you and can’t drive themselves!

New comment by qwerpy in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

qwerpy — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:07:34 +0000

I also see the other side. I wish it wasn’t Google that currently has the best free product, because their well-oiled ad machine is going to inevitably turn the crank to find that sweet spot where the product is barely tolerable due to ads. But if I want free, fast, mostly correct lookups to plain English questions, what’s my alternative? Paying OpenAI or anthropic doesn’t seem to really change much. They’re going to do ads too. Abstain from AI entirely and continue to use non-AI Google search and take 10x as long to learn? Google still wins and I lose.

New comment by qwerpy in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

qwerpy — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:14:39 +0000

“Someone’s handing out free carrots but it may be sticks someday so I’m gonna be mad about it today and grow my own carrots. That’ll show ‘em! My neighbor’s roasted carrots sure do smell good though.”

New comment by qwerpy in "DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode"

qwerpy — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:31:27 +0000

I'm as anti-Google as anyone out there. I block all their ads, refuse to pay for youtube, go out of my way to avoid their hardware, etc. But I have to admit AI mode is great. It's fast, free, not yet cluttered with ads, and useful. I treat it as a search engine that does a fuzzy search rather than the more literal text match search that we're used to.

I recently bought a Bambu 3d printer after Reddit/HN drew my attention to them and AI mode has been really useful for me to learn about my new printer and troubleshoot things. There is so much information and I don't have time to read everything. I just want to ask a targeted question and have something summarize the literature's answers for it.

It will be a sad day when Google inevitably enshittifies it, but for now I'm happy for them to subsidize my expensive LLM queries.

New comment by qwerpy in "Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union"

qwerpy — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:21:16 +0000

Unfortunately, even if we'd prefer to not accept it, we live in a world where those people exist. So I hope that they are being driven by their self-driving car when they inevitably drink and drive or fall asleep at the wheel. And to mitigate the impact of the ones driving a non-self-driving car, I'm going to use my self-driving certified-safest car to drive my family around.

New comment by qwerpy in "Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union"

qwerpy — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:09:58 +0000

You're technically correct of course, but the fact of the matter is every driver gets distracted/tired and having the FSD safety net only makes things safer, assuming you don't go out of your way to get distracted. I've lost count of the times I looked over at a "dumb" car being driven by someone on their phone. Would you rather that person be in a Tesla using FSD or in their Subaru Crosstrek?

New comment by qwerpy in "Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union"

qwerpy — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:21:53 +0000

It doesn’t have to be completely unsupervised for the driver to realize huge improvements in quality of life. I don’t even notice when people drive slow or cut me off. I’m just relaxing, fiddling with the music or talking to my family. And managing two toddlers is a lot easier when my brain doesn’t have to run a constant background job.

I do hope that unsupervised comes soon though. The tech is there, or at least far enough that I consider it better than my own driving. The hurdle is regulatory now.

New comment by qwerpy in "Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union"

qwerpy — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:53:48 +0000

From an admittedly selfish point of view, I also don't mind this. I don't use rideshare anymore. I use my self-driving cars when I'm at home, use private vans to go to the airport, or rent a self-driving car when I'm traveling. Uber/Lyft were becoming too expensive for the low quality of service and I'd rather just pay for better quality at this point. They also drive terribly and make the road less safe for other drivers and pedestrians.

New comment by qwerpy in "The real cost of owning a home"

qwerpy — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:18:18 +0000

I've been through this cycle a few times.

Rent (because I'm a college student or in my 20s)

Buy (because American Dream and FOMO)

Buy a few rental properties (diversify income)

Buy a vacation home (seemed like a good idea at the time)

Sell everything and rent a house (move to an area better for my kids) <--- I am here

Buy one primary home and stay there forever <-- the plan next year

Renting a house is a great financial decision for my current market but the landlord is erratic (will he raise the rent? sell the house? move in?), I still have to deal with a HOA, and there are several big upgrades/changes I want to make and I can't: double the solar/battery, add some covered storage, put in wired cameras, put in a high quality RO water filter, devote most of the backyard to an orchard/garden, etc. And the rent will keep going up, whereas insurance/property tax will go up much slower because I plan to buy in cash.