Hacker News: siliconc0w

New comment by siliconc0w in "Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes"

siliconc0w — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:10:32 +0000

It's just fraud, but they just know the current government will not prosecute so it's 'legal'. If they do, eventually, get held accountable the fine will likely be less than the savings.

New comment by siliconc0w in "America.gov"

siliconc0w — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:39:18 +0000

Sadly needed because insanely Google is allowed to show mitm/malicious ads when people search for government services.

New comment by siliconc0w in "GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities"

siliconc0w — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:17:13 +0000

Yeah this is other other-side of the coin. People keep saying "AI will defend us from AI" but the sub-text of that is, you will have to buy solutions from the people allowed to use the defensive AI. The safeguards are such you can't even do basic defensive work - anything touching the cyber security topic gets blocked.

New comment by siliconc0w in "Pacing the Frontier is not the actual goal for AI labs"

siliconc0w — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:27:57 +0000

It's pretty frustrating to do cyber security work and not have access to the best models. OAI is a little more liberal here and I was able to get access to daybreak-blue but I have to use the lesser last-generation models. Essentially this gives a small number of orgs a huge advantage in the 'application layer' for that domain (including OAI or ANT themselves).

New comment by siliconc0w in "Show HN: How long do I need to work at my salary before I can coast, or retire?"

siliconc0w — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 04:40:42 +0000

Don't forget the unbounded liability that is the US healthcare system!

New comment by siliconc0w in "DHS 'Predictive Policing' Unit Is Analyzing Americans' Financial Habits"

siliconc0w — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:31:45 +0000

I think the problem is the parallel construction and lack of warrant

New comment by siliconc0w in "Corporate America is getting hooked on open-source AI"

siliconc0w — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 18:33:15 +0000

My hot take is that open models don't really save you money and introduce more router complexity and security risk (because you're now sending your company data through more less trustworthy providers). Look at cost per task not cost per token and the pareto curve is largely owned by closed models.

Just use Fable 5.1/Opus max for the hardest problems, GPT Sol high as your workhorse, and maybe terra for async batch stuff you don't really care about. Gemini 3.8 High also looks pretty good and is quite fast if you're already a GCP shop. You can basically benefit from open models without using them because they force the frontier models to be cheaper.

New comment by siliconc0w in "Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business"

siliconc0w — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 23:37:02 +0000

We should just progressively tax monopolies. Companies will break themselves up to compete, no decade long DOJ case needed.

New comment by siliconc0w in "Google Has Removed MV2 Extensions from the Chrome Web Store, Including UBO"

siliconc0w — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:04:05 +0000

Agreed

It's not just malicious software ads, they also sell ads to entities mitming every government service.

New comment by siliconc0w in "Agentic Trust Controls"

siliconc0w — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:53:03 +0000

Seems like lead-generation for Vanta or other agentic-security tools? I tried to signup to take a look at the MCP and am forced to "Become a contributor" and supply a bunch of details to continue.

New comment by siliconc0w in "Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees"

siliconc0w — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:42:28 +0000

I like 1-2 days in-office if the team is actually local but the problem is that companies can't decide what they want (in-office vs cheaper LCOL labor) and it ends up being the worst of both worlds where you drive into the office just to sit alone in conference rooms on video calls with people in other offices.

New comment by siliconc0w in "Opus 5.0 drives incoherence into the stratosphere"

siliconc0w — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 18:30:12 +0000

I call it 'agent speak' and it's pretty exhausting. Another pattern is it'll emit dense enumerations of a possible answer and then emit dense enumerations of what isn't the answer. It's still helpful to help rough out/frame a document but then you have to go in and edit it pretty heavily. "Make it shorter", "Make it more concise" doesn't seem help all that much because it still keeps a lot of the same patterns.

New comment by siliconc0w in "The Amazon tax"

siliconc0w — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:43:49 +0000

Competition and Open models will keep AI providers more honest - Google and Amazon are monopolies so they can enshittify and users have no recourse.

New comment by siliconc0w in "The Amazon tax"

siliconc0w — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:45:21 +0000

I'm hoping AI will disintermediate most retail and we'll finally get an aggregator that isn't going to add a tax on both sides of the market.

"Buy me the best Air Fryer" -> finds the best given my preferences and constraints and directly purchases it from the cheapest distributor

New comment by siliconc0w in "Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+"

siliconc0w — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:58:52 +0000

Enterprises don't just send their data to any company with GPUs - they need security reviews, contacts, etc. They're assuredly using BYOK - not the marketplace.

New comment by siliconc0w in "Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+"

siliconc0w — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:06:08 +0000

I don't really understand the value -add, so far "smart" routing currently produces worse results at higher cost and static routing can be done yourself trivially. Plus the risk of sending the most sensitive data you have to a third party.

New comment by siliconc0w in "The AI Situation in Software Development"

siliconc0w — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 19:34:33 +0000

What I like to do is to go back and forth on the spec, break it into very detailed tasks and milestones, and then set a /goal to complete the milestone and verify. Each task is verified with 'fresh eyes' or a clear context.

That said, I'd really like to see data to compare which approach works the best.

New comment by siliconc0w in "Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index"

siliconc0w — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:52:00 +0000

That is more FOMO and maybe some end-game where SpaceX essentially owns a vertical slice of ISP+Datacenter+AI+application stack.

New comment by siliconc0w in "Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index"

siliconc0w — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 18:54:51 +0000

Competition keeps service quality high and pricing low - even if you aren't using Grok, the mere existence of Grok keeps pricing for whatever provider you use lower and service faster and more reliable.

New comment by siliconc0w in "Degrees of Wealth"

siliconc0w — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:41:40 +0000

There are cost externalities that generally unaccounted for- maintaining an underclass paid subsistence wages or using disposable products that as a society you eventually have to grapple with.