Hacker News: seattleeng

New comment by seattleeng in "Alphabet tops $100B quarterly revenue for first time, cloud grows 34%"

seattleeng — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 16:20:22 +0000

So they’ll just die when Google has a seamless AI-first mobile experience where consumers just ask their Pixel to do X and it happens. Disruption comes for everyone, hardware isnt a moat

New comment by seattleeng in "Zuck's Haul: Tracking Meta's AI Talent Acquisitions"

seattleeng — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 05:17:38 +0000

These numbers are certainly wrong lol

New comment by seattleeng in "Tencent's 'Hunyuan-T1'–The First Mamba-Powered Ultra-Large Model"

seattleeng — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 18:43:13 +0000

It’s more like conditioning the posterior of a response on “Ok, so…” lets the model enter a better latent space for answering logically vs just spitting out a random token.

New comment by seattleeng in "Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?"

seattleeng — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 08:11:43 +0000

I think you're almost right

I suspect its more a structural issue

e.g. because of Big VC (a16z, other firms with dozens or hundreds of investing staff), VCs don't stick around firms long enough for real returns (cash distributed) to matter. If you're at a place and your stuff is marked up 10x after 4 years, you just hop to become a GP and try to ride the next markup wave. Even if these people exit VC after 10 years that is still 10 years of deals that all flopped.

This might not even be the individual VC's fault -- there may just be too many venture dollars chasing too few power law returns, so you get a surge of startups circa 2019-2022 that all disappear

New comment by seattleeng in "DeepSeek Open Infra: Open-Sourcing 5 AI Repos in 5 Days"

seattleeng — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 08:06:07 +0000

literally how openai attracted talent with deepmind as the boogeyman. its a playbook that works

New comment by seattleeng in "TinyStories: How Small Can Language Models Be and Still Speak Coherent English? (2023)"

seattleeng — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 01:56:01 +0000

As is usually the case, check the data! A lot of the dataset used has fairly morbid scenarios, so the model is working as expected. All the data was synthetically created with GPT4

New comment by seattleeng in "AI Is Shattering Hope of a Net Zero Future [video]"

seattleeng — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 18:41:41 +0000

Yes, the climate boogeyman shows up as a common anti-tech trope since most people don’t look into the breakdown of emissions. Basically everything in direct consumer control pales in comparison to transit (car/truck/boat/plane).

Speed and scale has a good breakdown: https://speedandscale.com/tracker/

Plus most new AI datacenters are trying to go pure nuclear wherever possible

New comment by seattleeng in "Can AI do maths yet? Thoughts from a mathematician"

seattleeng — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 05:45:52 +0000

Im reviewing linear algebra now and would also love to know that book!

New comment by seattleeng in "'A place of joy': why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky"

seattleeng — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 02:48:44 +0000

I actually think there are a few, only some have achieved critical mass with smaller subnetworks. BlueSky and Threads both seem to have attracted non-tech networks although Threads downranked political content, so BlueSky seems like the natural next mass appeal product.

Others:

Mastodon: many tech subnetworks (security, data)

Nostr and Warpcast: Crypto

New comment by seattleeng in "AI Hype Is Cooling"

seattleeng — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 22:45:06 +0000

This is exactly how Ive seen things occur. It makes a lot of sense, given some tools are great new additions (coding especially), but others fall flat (IMO, search)

New comment by seattleeng in "Looking into the Nintendo Alarmo"

seattleeng — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 19:58:19 +0000

You can learn things top-down or bottoms-up. I can read & understand most reverse engineering posts like this because I have a strong "bottoms-up" foundation with an EE degree and worked with microcontrollers. But when I read posts by hobbyist mechanical engineers about some 3D printed piston that uses ball bearings I have to approach it in a top-down "recreate what they did and go deep any time I'm lost" manner.

New comment by seattleeng in "Learning not to trust the All-In podcast"

seattleeng — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 19:42:04 +0000

I think you’re exactly right, it’s a show for insiders to know what these 4 people think so the next time they directly or indirectly encounter them they are known quantities. Its masked as news & informative media but its principally brand marketing for these 4 people and their funds & companies.

New comment by seattleeng in "Why Tech Employees Are Ready to Revolt"

seattleeng — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:34:43 +0000

Cut 80% of jobs and 80% of revenue

That is not what shareholders want, hence why no one is copying it

New comment by seattleeng in "Adobe's new image rotation tool is one of the most impressive AI tools seen"

seattleeng — Thu, 17 Oct 2024 18:35:27 +0000

preserving the vector art after transforming is really cool, anyone know the relevant papers? or was this original research done by Adobe?

New comment by seattleeng in "Scuda – Virtual GPU over IP"

seattleeng — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 20:28:47 +0000

Why is working locally important?

New comment by seattleeng in "Predicting the future of distributed systems"

seattleeng — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 05:40:29 +0000

A new programming model for distributed computing is desperately needed. Something between a full operational system a la Temporal, but without the extreme operational overhead + a sane cooperative runtime like Golang.

I think we're probably too early to build this today. Ray is used at my current job for scaling subroutines in our distributed job system. It's the closest I've seen.

New comment by seattleeng in "SnapDiagram – Instantly Convert Hand-Drawn Diagrams to Digital with AI"

seattleeng — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 20:18:02 +0000

A credit based model with minimum add amounts like that does sound like a great alternative if people prefer usage based pricing. From what Ive seen usage pricing actually drives a lot of anxiety even if the end cost is lower

New comment by seattleeng in "SnapDiagram – Instantly Convert Hand-Drawn Diagrams to Digital with AI"

seattleeng — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 15:58:46 +0000

I get your point but its $3/mo or $18/yr. If a diagram isnt worth 1.80 to you then you probably wouldnt have bought it even with pay as you go

New comment by seattleeng in "Midjourney web experience is now open to everyone"

seattleeng — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 15:35:18 +0000

Its cool but this feels really late. I just use Ideogram now. The social features are nice

New comment by seattleeng in "Microsoft CTO: Thoughts on OpenAI (2019)"

seattleeng — Sun, 05 May 2024 19:59:32 +0000

Was gonna say, the email reads similarly to this famous thread about Java (with the old CTO of MS!): https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-im-literally-losing-...

Really makes you think about the structure of mega corps and how powerful the “defender’s advantage” is. These giants knowingly sleep on disruption and wait to time their entry, and are generally rewarded. I dont know if its good or bad, it probably depends, but I think the capitalism game devs need some balance tweaks.