Hacker News: robertlagrant

New comment by robertlagrant in "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"

robertlagrant — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 11:47:28 +0000

Do you mean you also disagree with the person above saying "Nothing wrong with that"?

New comment by robertlagrant in "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"

robertlagrant — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:49:57 +0000

> Nothing wrong with that.

There definitely are many things wrong with that, of course. Lighting someone else's money on fire and walking away is highly unethical.

The real question is: what are the motivations for companies to pretend that their AI is world-ending, and what do they want out of the disquiet caused by them saying that?

New comment by robertlagrant in "GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone"

robertlagrant — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:30:31 +0000

I wish things like bikes came with mostly-written manuals. Maybe a few diagrams. If anything, things are too pictorial these days.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Cloudflare OHTTP gateway"

robertlagrant — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 13:03:26 +0000

This is slightly worse than Cloudflare's usual excellent writing.

But that aside - surely this won't help for websites with Google tracking code embedded, which are the sorts of sites that track you anyway?

New comment by robertlagrant in "Pi 1.0"

robertlagrant — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 08:53:59 +0000

Has anyone got it running on a Pi?

New comment by robertlagrant in "Google breaks promise to provide 10 years of updates to Chromebooks"

robertlagrant — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:01:04 +0000

> or use the money for education

Totally agree. Would love far fewer computers in schools.

New comment by robertlagrant in "NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart"

robertlagrant — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:45:47 +0000

I'm also too young to have ever seen one, but I've always liked the SOP for evading an incoming missile: accelerate.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Oracle cites 'force majeure' to shield itself on controversial data center"

robertlagrant — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 09:10:07 +0000

I agree about the JVM. I think the big difference between C# and Java is just that C# has allowed breaking changes, and so has improved various things at the language level. Java hasn't really.

New comment by robertlagrant in "ChatGPT Pro 500"

robertlagrant — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 08:58:56 +0000

> Uber back in the 2010s was incredible, you could get damn near anywhere for less than 5 bucks or so

Back then the trips were subsidised by VC money, and also the drivers were contractors, so far lower internal costs for Uber.

New comment by robertlagrant in "ChatGPT Pro 500"

robertlagrant — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 08:57:35 +0000

> What they’re doing with billions of tokens every week, beats me. But these users absolutely do exist.

I think you can just become slightly careless and off it goes. I just have a £20/mo ChatGPT and I'm getting it to do some HomeLab Kubernetes YAML for me that I have no desire to hand-type. I asked it a question and it zoomed off looking at all sorts of websites, running various git commands, doing anything except asking me for an answer to a question.

It ran through about 60% of my 5-hour allocation in those few minutes, which was an unheard-of rate for me before that, and I can imagine if I had zillions of tokens available I just wouldn't have noticed. As it is, my AGENTS.md now exists and is fairly stern.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Coding is not solved"

robertlagrant — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:03:10 +0000

I have also done those three and we definitely did!

New comment by robertlagrant in "First Principles Thinking"

robertlagrant — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:45:15 +0000

I haven't tried Opus, so perhaps I'm living in ignorance!

New comment by robertlagrant in "SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today"

robertlagrant — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:31:19 +0000

Very excited. Watching it with my wife. So glad it didn't have to end early.

New comment by robertlagrant in "HomelabFest will be in St. Louis in September 2027"

robertlagrant — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 12:45:06 +0000

I've just got into your videos and they are really excellent. If only I were in the US I might come along.

(Currently adding Flux so my Gitlab k8s things auto-apply to my Homelab. No such thing as too much overkill.)

New comment by robertlagrant in "Starlink ground station in Poland hit by fire in suspected arson attack"

robertlagrant — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 12:30:41 +0000

Yes, fair point. I meant that ground stations don't need to be everywhere Starlink customers are now.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Oracle cites 'force majeure' to shield itself on controversial data center"

robertlagrant — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 12:29:31 +0000

Oh, agreed. I'm only talking about their database.

New comment by robertlagrant in "First Principles Thinking"

robertlagrant — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 12:06:58 +0000

Yes, I think you're right. It could be I haven't experienced the cutting edge of AI, but it a) doesn't seem there yet, and b) goes off on tangents assuming outcomes of decisions and needing to rewrite things a lot. So I quite like reading the output.

New comment by robertlagrant in "Plan mode is dead"

robertlagrant — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 11:09:42 +0000

I totally disagree. This perspective only works if you don't care about token cost.

I'm using Astra for some homelab work and I tell it I want to do something and then it burns through a giant percentage of my 5-hour allowance (on the £20/mo subscription) doing that in a really weird way. I've had to tell it to stop zooming off and doing things, calling loads of tools and looking up websites, and just have a quick conversation first. It's much better now, but I've basically just reimplemented plan mode via AGENTS.md.

New comment by robertlagrant in "First Principles Thinking"

robertlagrant — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:01:23 +0000

How are you going to read the code if it's not structured in a way you understand?

New comment by robertlagrant in "Show HN: Hamilton – a no-internet Android health dashboard, named after my dog"

robertlagrant — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:09:18 +0000

Thank you. I took CA8V5VUY1FAMEN1GUL6HP31.

At the start of my fitness journey, so I will check this out!