Hacker News: sigwinch

New comment by sigwinch in "Owner of ICE detention facility sees big opportunity in AI man camps"

sigwinch — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:26:47 +0000

Could be that the temporary housing for construction workers transitions into detainment. Having an AI data canter close to a detainment facility streamlines security. Will the whole facility run on diesel and StarLink? Independent of the surrounding community and conveniently-failure-prone power and Internet?

New comment by sigwinch in "The Future We Feared Is Here"

sigwinch — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:32:43 +0000

Feels very accelerationist. Whomever is advising Hegseth properly identified risks to funding as a soft underbelly. By using it for target acquisition, even against the contractual terms, Claude is now a munition. OpenAI by extension.

So, the obvious path to nationalizing Anthropic would be DPA. Instead, Hegseth's group chose to try weakening it, especially among its close competition. So what I smell is an attempt to extract its core and Musk it into Grok.

Anthropic might be quite strong in court. Putting the best reasoning model into CPU-ring-0 survival mode was not on my 2026 bingo card.

New comment by sigwinch in "US asked Ukraine for help fighting Iranian drones, Zelensky says"

sigwinch — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:19:43 +0000

Less, actually. Lockheed Martin made 620 MSE last year.

New comment by sigwinch in "Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario"

sigwinch — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:44:29 +0000

You could make it a little more convincing:

1. An uncertain Pacific launch seemed like a weak point. Instead, an arctic launch. Because volcanology studies things like CO2, maybe we fired the climate scientists who could tell whether a thermal bloom in the arctic could be volcanic instead of missile.

2. Make the President more contemporary. Have his phone full of spyware. Have him continually screen calls from his kids, influencers, and other seekers of patronage. Have him dodge the hovering sycophants and pardon-seeking lawyers. Demonstrate what he’s actually doing instead of preparing for the hardest part of the job.

3. Acknowledge that we have limited interceptors and that perfectly deploying them means that the first and last missiles get through.

New comment by sigwinch in "Nuclear War: An LLM Scenario"

sigwinch — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 13:19:21 +0000

My experience is that wargaming has a decent track record. In hindsight, Nimitz looks much more prepared than MacArthur, even if their early careers suggest the opposite.

New comment by sigwinch in "What if the Hormuz closure will not be brief?"

sigwinch — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 12:34:11 +0000

It was a convenient misunderstanding about a call to the Palm Beach Sheriff. The FBI has a recording of the call, but probably ambiently from the Sheriff’s side. It’s a small ray of innocence for a guy like Trump. And he forgot all about it until by luck it was in the Epstein files.

New comment by sigwinch in "China's Agentic AI Controversy"

sigwinch — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 12:26:43 +0000

I think a better treatment of the development heritage of Chinese superapps:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46916021

China's Agentic AI Controversy

sigwinch — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:56:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/china-s-agentic-ai-controversy

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47296616

Points: 6

# Comments: 3

New comment by sigwinch in "The Future We Feared Is Here"

sigwinch — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:49:59 +0000

It was inevitable for the mainstream media to connect Musk with the pressure campaign on Anthropic. Among people who use the English language professionally, the sloppy redefinition of “woke” raised a lot of red flags. It was never sharp, just a dull thought-ending judgment, always insanely rejecting Trump superiority. Is it clear enough to kill a corporation? If corporations are people (in the US, the Supreme Court has given them people rights), is this the right way to administer exile or even the death penalty? The mainstream media seems to wonder now, do we talk about that or will Elon Musk control Anthropic’s assets six months from now?

The Future We Feared Is Here

sigwinch — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 11:29:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/08/opinion/ai-anthropic-claude-pentagon-hegseth-amodei.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47296490

Points: 8

# Comments: 3

New comment by sigwinch in "Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues"

sigwinch — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 11:37:48 +0000

ICE played an important role in those cases with long supply chains. Seems quaint now, but I think we should acknowledge any criminal who does not participate in a child abuse ring. Those counterfeit DVDs were not illegal content, just illegal storefronts. If today’s ICE or FBI uncovered such a ring, who would they call first?

New comment by sigwinch in "Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs"

sigwinch — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 11:21:58 +0000

If you like ribbonfarm, the comment section in his follow up is worth reading:

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/12/13/random-promotions-and-...

I wouldn’t be surprised if research like Cornell’s was inspired there.

New comment by sigwinch in "Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs"

sigwinch — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 11:00:51 +0000

> mortified to show off a $10,000 watch, but excitedly tell you about their $100,000 kitchen remodel filled with 100-mile diet cookbooks and single-origin Japanese knives, or their 6-month work sabbatical they spent powerlifting. This is a group of people where a Subaru is a higher-status car than a Cadillac, but the highest status car is none.

Very Boulder, CO

New comment by sigwinch in "Anthropic vows to sue Pentagon over risk designation"

sigwinch — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 07:57:01 +0000

Oh, the staffers representing the government in court will blithely use Claude for a few days before they realize why they shouldn’t.

New comment by sigwinch in "Trump fires Homeland Security Secretary Noem after criticism"

sigwinch — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:41:28 +0000

I don’t see evidence for that. She expressed ambition to run for President. That threatened the secretive succession plan around Trump.

New comment by sigwinch in "Noem Can't Explain Why She Hired 8-Day-Old Company for Ad Campaign"

sigwinch — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:25:44 +0000

My understanding is that Trump in early 2025 pushed all procurement toward GSA. For Noem to demand spending authority seemed prone to self-dealing.

New comment by sigwinch in "Timeline: Anthropic, OpenAI, and U.S. Government"

sigwinch — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:37:53 +0000

Secondary title was attempted by an executive order. It demands recognition, but the law hasn’t caught up.

New comment by sigwinch in "Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’"

sigwinch — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:59:52 +0000

I think this is supported. Hegseth has said numerous things about curly hair. I read that his reaction to Dario started with his hair.

New comment by sigwinch in "Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’"

sigwinch — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:50:31 +0000

We must conclude that they’re wary of Grok. Maybe it’s the incentive for bias and sabotage.

New comment by sigwinch in "I Hired a Lab to Counterfeit-Test a Dozen Suspicious Beauty Products"

sigwinch — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:49:56 +0000

We’re going to have to put more confidence into testing like this and Consumer Reports.

For example, what if a product is contaminated with glyphosate? One-time supporters of RFK Jr would expect a recall, but I wouldn’t bet on today’s RFK Jr.