Hacker News: richardw

New comment by richardw in "Feature Request: Support AGENTS.md"

richardw — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 02:44:41 +0000

My shorthand is builders vs extractors.

New comment by richardw in "Are AI Labs Pelicanmaxxing?"

richardw — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:34:39 +0000

And a whole universe of random tests got baked into the AI’s training data. Websites of antelopes driving trains and hammerhead sharks swinging in a tyre swing were created. It was a short while until AI became so focused on animals that it gave up competing with developers. Life became sane again.

New comment by richardw in "Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber"

richardw — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 23:09:56 +0000

The AI labs have been subsidising. When they try turn a profit, people will move to the fast followers. The only people that won’t are those that compete on leveraging the very latest models and even then, once spend and scale goes to the cheaper providers, we’ll see deeper research from those providers too. Think “PC compatibles beat IBM, Sun, SGI eventually”.

New comment by richardw in "Five US tech giants' hidden debts soar to $1.65T on opaque AI funding"

richardw — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 05:45:41 +0000

If the US companies need trillions to barely beat Chinese companies spending billions, despite a multi year head start...

New comment by richardw in "Grok 4.5"

richardw — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:39:56 +0000

If I had to summarise Google’s effort it would be: stay close but let the others burn themselves out. Position for the long game until you see something worth betting the company on.

Apple similar, without the “stay close” bit.

New comment by richardw in "1.38 Millimeter Microcontroller"

richardw — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 09:14:09 +0000

I made something to ping an AWS service to tell me the uptime of my internet connection. The idea was to sprinkle them around our area, connected to various home WiFi’s, and get a better triangulation of outages. Eg is whole pipe out, just one ISP etc.

I made and tested it but didn’t care enough to continue.

New comment by richardw in "Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep"

richardw — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 10:55:14 +0000

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape for me

New comment by richardw in "Claude Tag"

richardw — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 20:54:10 +0000

How much do you think it’s holding them back? Market share seems to be surviving the lack of quality vs the other players.

Or possibly: they’re focusing where it matters?

New comment by richardw in "John Jumper to join Anthropic"

richardw — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 09:25:41 +0000

I think Google just needs to keep its foot in the door and let the other two spend their way into oblivion, channeling “AGI or die trying”.

New comment by richardw in "Launch HN: Drafted (YC P26) – Models for residential architecture"

richardw — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 20:56:09 +0000

The benefits were in communication and relationship arbitrage? Surely both of those can be automated over time.

This is just one aspect but it’s still useful. Many people want to see a house and say “please help me make that”. In Australia there’s a set of house patterns that reduce the overhead of just landing a design and pushing it through the admin hurdles.

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

richardw — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 05:30:36 +0000

There’s probably a massive Chinese bot net scraping models from within the US already. If not there soon will be.

Anthropic: your next ad writes itself. Nobody else is worth restricting.

New comment by richardw in "Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation"

richardw — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:50:50 +0000

I generally accuse LLM’s of having no sense of value. The machine will make a complicated plan but entirely lose sight of eg the fact that response time matters to humans.

Not always, but enough that I consider it a thing to fire in a direction, not a thing that aims.

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

richardw — Wed, 27 May 2026 22:26:57 +0000

I assume the bet is that as you swap humans for machines, this pays for itself. Swap entire devs and teams and frankly, managers, and you make up a lot of 5%’s fast.

If it works. And I’m not sure who is going to buy the stuff the machines produce, but shrug. Presumably some bots click ads for NFT’s that other bots generate.

New comment by richardw in "How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale"

richardw — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:05:29 +0000

Hard problem. I find myself adding in filler to stop the thing from jabbering.

I also think it spends most of its iq on sounding good rather than thinking about the problem. “Yeah absolutely I can see why you’d like to…” etc. This is likely because it’s on a timer and maybe voice is more expensive to process? Text responses spend more time on the task.

New comment by richardw in "The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss"

richardw — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:45:18 +0000

Not sure if you remember this chess game. 1 man vs 50000. Quite an amazing outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World

New comment by richardw in "The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it"

richardw — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 23:58:00 +0000

> The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income

Problem for jobs is that there are 200 countries and all the earnings will go to a few. Universal basic income for everyone? Or just the US?

Who gets to keep their house locations in a new fair world? The person whose parents bought in the right place 50 years ago? Who pays the money these models earn, if nobody clicks ads or does a job? What is income for if we don’t work and can just ask the AI for everything we want?

What happens when the super smart AI comes up with “better” (more fair, consistent, etc) answers than you think you have to questions like the above? What if they end up socialist? Do we force it (and invite risk it escapes and fights us for the greater good) or give in to the presumably more thorough reasoning?

New comment by richardw in "Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing"

richardw — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:35:01 +0000

That’s how I do side projects.

New comment by richardw in "Amiga Graphics Archive"

richardw — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:40:49 +0000

The cost between an A500 and a VGA-enabled PC in 1987 ($699 vs $3500-ish?) would have put them in such different categories and customer segments that they would rarely interact.

I remember seeing a PC one of the rich kids brought to boarding school in 1990 and realising it was just crisper than my A500. The PC’s in the school lab were all green and orange screens with one colour CGA, so this was quite a surprise. Still took me some time to accept reality :)

New comment by richardw in "Claude Code Routines"

richardw — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 22:29:33 +0000

I’m moving away from Claude for anything complicated. It’s got such nice DX but I can’t take the confident flaky results. Finding Codex on the high plan more thorough, and for any complicated project that’s what I need.

Still using Claude for UX (playgrounds) and language. OpenAI has always been a little more cerebral and stern, which doesn’t suit those areas. When it tries to be friendly it comes off as someone my age trying to be a 20-something.

New comment by richardw in "Pretext: TypeScript library for multiline text measurement and layout"

richardw — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 05:39:27 +0000

I did ~this in the 200X’s for a C# todo list, not nearly as polished but it was still So Much Work. Filed under things that should just work already.