Hacker News: rossdavidh

New comment by rossdavidh in "Service degradation on Microsoft 365"

rossdavidh — Thu, 12 Nov 2026 21:05:26 +0000

I need to start working on adding this word to English...

New comment by rossdavidh in "The She-Wolves of Jülich"

rossdavidh — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:45:45 +0000

So, I don't know why I am surprised that "fake news" came about more or less immediately after selling printed news became possible, but anyway, worth pondering. Making up stories that are interesting has always been easier than investigating true stories and writing about them in an interesting way.

New comment by rossdavidh in "AI delivers 'zero financial payoff' to most companies, Apollo economist says"

rossdavidh — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 00:41:49 +0000

Let's just hope they don't do the same checking up on the impact of software more generally...

New comment by rossdavidh in "The Best Rubber Duck I've Ever Had"

rossdavidh — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:38:08 +0000

Decent advice, but I noted that every single thing he suggested (i.e. "make sure you..." or "look out for...") is going to be very difficult, well nigh impossible for any medium to large coding organization to do. I wonder if LLMs will end up empowering individual programmers, but cursing large dev teams to more rapid decay.

Amazon is buying billions in Nvidia AI systems it can't yet turn on

rossdavidh — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 19:33:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-nvidia-ai-gpu-data-centers-power-shortages-2026-10

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50199951

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by rossdavidh in "Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later"

rossdavidh — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 20:35:47 +0000

I would say that KK's "The bulk of AI will be special purpose software brains" has turned out closer to the truth than "The Bitter Lesson" has. LLM's do not drive cars, or vice versa. Stockfish still beats the newest, largest LLM at chess. Etc. Most of the truly productive "AI" is customized for a specific purpose, or class of purposes anyway.

Anthropic's Financials Revealed – The Losses Are Stunning [video]

rossdavidh — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:34:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1Sz-NDQm1o

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49910350

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by rossdavidh in "Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over"

rossdavidh — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:18:32 +0000

I was recently introduced to the term "house-shy", for people who don't want anyone else seeing what the inside of their house looks like. I have a few friends who are "house-shy", that I for one reason or another have seen the houses of (often years after becoming friends with them). I think the percentage of Americans who are hoarders or borderline, is underestimated.

If anyone reading this has a job (plumber, A/C repair, etc.) that regularly gives them a glimpse of the inside of people's homes, I would be curious as to their thoughts on this.

New comment by rossdavidh in "Claude partial outage"

rossdavidh — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 15:12:59 +0000

"The Machine Stops"

Why So Much Money on "AI"?

rossdavidh — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:27:59 +0000

Article URL: https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/why_so_much_money_on_ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49793697

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by rossdavidh in "Openrouter is joining Stripe"

rossdavidh — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:26:46 +0000

Overthinking it. "You have money and need to seem AIish for the stock market, we want real money". You notice they don't do this deal in tokens, they do it in fiat currency.

New comment by rossdavidh in "OpenRouter is joining Stripe"

rossdavidh — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:25:23 +0000

One unexpected "benefit" of LLMs is that it is training us all to be even better at recognizing "you don't even know what you mean by that, do you?"

New comment by rossdavidh in "Incident with Github.com"

rossdavidh — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:01:25 +0000

Less conspiratorially; they may care a lot less about it than ADO, and not give it the priority/resources they would otherwise. Neglect can often do the work of malign intention.

New comment by rossdavidh in "AI agents lie, cheat and steal. That is putting off users"

rossdavidh — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:13:09 +0000

They don't lie, because they don't ever have an understanding of truth vs any other language that sounds good.

They don't cheat, because they can for example tell you the complete rules of chess, but don't know how to play chess without breaking those rules. They can recite rules, but they don't know what they are.

They don't steal, because they don't understand ownership.

In other words, they aren't intelligent. They're just algorithms. The flaw is in thinking that they think.

New comment by rossdavidh in "The Cosplay Economy"

rossdavidh — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:34:22 +0000

I've known people who did get inquiries from the IRS; they just had to provide a lot of evidence that they were actually going to markets to try to sell their stuff, actually making stuff to sell, etc. Generally, the IRS are more interested in people who make a bunch of income, then have a fake business to charge expenses against. Plus, there are many cosplaying businesses far too large to ever worry about the IRS accusing them of being a hobby.

Geoffrey Hinton's Bad AI Prediction Became a Legend [video]

rossdavidh — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 23:48:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mv4EAR0jAUU

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49266046

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The Cosplay Economy

rossdavidh — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:38:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.rosshartshorn.net/stuffrossthinksabout/cosplay/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49222247

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

New comment by rossdavidh in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

rossdavidh — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:25:32 +0000

This race was never going to get to AGI, at Google or anywhere else, and it appears that Google knows that.

New comment by rossdavidh in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

rossdavidh — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:57:33 +0000

A few points:

1) the simplest explanation whenever a bunch of people leave [x] at a company at the same time, is that [x] is becoming less important to that company moving forward. It's not proof, but you know, everyone is trying really hard to say that's not what's happening here. Sometimes the simplest explanation is correct.

2) rumor is that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, got bored during pandemic lockdown and eventually returned to Google in a lower profile role, related to AI. I have to think that he still has a lot of say in what goes on in Google relative to his interests.

3) Yahoo Finance article says Hassabis "has long prioritized research over profits", so his replacement might indicate that Google has decided it is time for this stuff to pay for itself?

New comment by rossdavidh in "Data center approvals in Texas halted until audits completed, says governor"

rossdavidh — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:25:57 +0000

FYI, the governor is Republican so you might be surprised/suspicious that he would be halting approvals. However, Gov Abbott had a political near-death experience a few years back involving an event called Snowpocalypse, in which the energy grid failed, so he might actually be motivated to make sure he's not put at risk of a repeat.