Hacker News: scottmcmac

New comment by scottmcmac in "Nobody Has Actually Built a Software Factory"

scottmcmac — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:03:42 +0000

Yeah, I'm amazed at how quickly I spotted this one. I didn't even read any prose since the first section header was visible before I started reading and somehow my brain jumped there first and it was a dead giveaway.

I think I may be developing defensive scanning strategies, that are probably useful for avoiding slop, but not good for my focus or general reading comprehension.

New comment by scottmcmac in "Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived"

scottmcmac — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:48:08 +0000

My first run got Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE...

That is surprisingly similar given how few people seem to have commented so far. Makes me wonder if some part of this is starting from a constant seed or something...

"Any Korean Ever"

New comment by scottmcmac in "Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived"

scottmcmac — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:44:10 +0000

"You have died of Dysentery [on the Korean Peninsula in 3064 BCE at 2 months old]"

I was actually a bit surprised since it also said I was exclusively breastfed which seems to be fairly protective against diarrhea. I have a feeling this didn't account for all the joint probability distributions...

New comment by scottmcmac in "AWS Bedrock to require sharing data with Anthropic for Mythos and future models"

scottmcmac — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:49:06 +0000

I mean, they were already capacity constrained and just introduced a larger model that takes more capacity to run... They were gonna have to hand some business to competitor one way or another.

New comment by scottmcmac in "Lies we tell ourselves about email addresses"

scottmcmac — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:42:20 +0000

Yeah, I do the same, but without the catchall for exactly that reason. If I start getting spam, the e-mail gets disabled.

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

scottmcmac — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:14:18 +0000

A recent NBC News poll gave "AI" a -20% net approval rating. If you're in the U.S., the people you run into IRL are kinda weird.

(I didn't quickly find polls for the rest of the world)

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

scottmcmac — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:46:14 +0000

Maybe we use search differently, but I very often don't just want an answer, I want to find a website to help me. Maybe it is because I need to do business with a company and need to find their website to interact with them, or maybe I saw a cool site awhile ago that's relevant to what I'm doing now and didn't bookmark it (because I dropped that habit when Google search was good), or want to read the official documentation about a product I bought, that someone already put a lot of effort into making complete enough and digestible to a wide audience... and the LLM responses tend to get in the way.

Like the parent I use good/paid AI when I want an AI response. So, yeah, an omnibox that knows when I want "an answer" and one that knows when I want to find a thing sounds slightly more convenient than switching between two tools, but Google search is not that Omnibox.

New comment by scottmcmac in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

scottmcmac — Fri, 22 May 2026 22:58:00 +0000

Yes, but more specifically, it's 20% on top of your marginal rate on your capital income which maxes out at 20% federal in the U.S. for long term gains However, it is much closer to 0% for the most wealthy Americans because they never realize their gains, which is the only time the U.S. taxes capital gains. They just fund their lifestyles with debt against their assets. Then when they die, their heirs get a basis step up at death.

Graham gets this totally wrong, adding the 20% to 37%+4.75%, which are rates applicable to labor income (and short term capital gains, but those are very rare among the most wealthy Americans). That is such a major error it is hard to take any of the argument seriously.

Edit: Updated account for short term gains.