Hacker News: silverlake

New comment by silverlake in "1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6"

silverlake — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 09:03:52 +0000

I have Codex and Gemini critique the plan and generate their plans. Then I have Claude review the other plans and add their good ideas. It frequently improves the plan. I then do my careful review.

New comment by silverlake in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

silverlake — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 09:21:56 +0000

It’s the same as buying a house. I want to buy a house for $1.2m. I put down $200k and borrow $1m. The bank determines the value of the house. My equity absorbs a 20% drop in prices, so the bank is fairly protected. Businesses are different because they really can go to $0. Banks will need more collateral and/or make many different types of loans to dilute the risk.

New comment by silverlake in "Anthropic and Alignment (Ben Thompson)"

silverlake — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:33:54 +0000

Yep, once you accept “might makes right” the laws in a democracy become polite suggestions. Oh, your town is in the way of hydropower? Too bad the gov’t has more guns than you. That’s how you get the Three Gorges Dam in China. Nevertheless, the Trump Mafia is demonstrating how paper thin democracy and rule of law really is in the US.

New comment by silverlake in "MIT Living Wage Calculator"

silverlake — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:24:56 +0000

The true cost of labor is paid for by taxes. The bottom 50% in the US pay little to negative taxes due to government benefits. Most taxes are paid by the rich. Therefore, the true cost of labor is paid for by the rich, rather than by consumers in the form of higher prices.

New comment by silverlake in "Show HN: 25 years of house prices in England and Wales"

silverlake — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 07:43:59 +0000

Since 2014 most bits of central London have seen 10-30% increase, which is below inflation and far, far below stock returns. This should persuade my wife not to buy here. Thanks!

New comment by silverlake in "50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player"

silverlake — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 12:39:05 +0000

This resonates with me. I have a hobby where I transform classic books into hand-written papyrus as the author intended. There is something almost meditative in unspooling a 10kg scroll where the sometimes illegible ink allows me to wonder what that sentence even was.

New comment by silverlake in "AI has a deep understanding of how this code works"

silverlake — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 22:38:24 +0000

I don’t know. But at least you’ve identified the real problem: lazy people generating trash code. AI isn’t bad, people are.

New comment by silverlake in "AI has a deep understanding of how this code works"

silverlake — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 22:32:09 +0000

Enough that stacked PRs are a thing. At my job people sometimes build large features on a branch for 6 months. Then it’s a massive PR and no one can review it.

New comment by silverlake in "AI has a deep understanding of how this code works"

silverlake — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 18:35:48 +0000

Hi, AI apologist here. This scenario is a problem with or without AI. You can’t drop a 13k line PR you don’t understand without prior discussion. There are many ways to use AI. Your scenario (keynote speech) is a bad way to use it. Instead, a PR where you understand every line, whether you or an AI wrote it, should be fine. It would be indistinguishable from human generated code.

AI is a tool like any other. I hire a carpenter who knows how to build furniture. Whether he uses a Japanese pullsaw or a CNC machine is irrelevant to me.

New comment by silverlake in "Mosh Mobile Shell"

silverlake — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 16:35:03 +0000

I used ET but it requires a server process also. Some machines are too locked down to allow this. Wish there was a way to kick start the server on demand.

New comment by silverlake in "What's the strongest AI model you can train on a laptop in five minutes?"

silverlake — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 13:44:19 +0000

It’s a glib analogy, but the goal remains the same. Today’s training sets are immense. Is there an architecture that can learn something with tiny training sets?

New comment by silverlake in "What's the strongest AI model you can train on a laptop in five minutes?"

silverlake — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 13:31:51 +0000

I’m actually working on just this. What’s the smallest training data set required to learn tic-tac-toe? A 5yo doesn’t need much training to learn a new game, but a transformer needs millions of samples.

New comment by silverlake in "Installing a mini-split AC in a Brooklyn apartment"

silverlake — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 15:58:57 +0000

Also, most of them are shockingly incompetent. It took years to assemble a list of quality service providers. I pay a little more but stuff works now.

New comment by silverlake in "GitHub CEO Warns Developers: "Either Embrace AI or Get Out of This Career""

silverlake — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 13:36:36 +0000

There is a mountain of code that needs to be written that can’t be due to costs. A project that needs 100 developers may be prohibitively expensive. But 10 10x developers would be within budget. Think health care, manufacturing, government, finance, etc.

New comment by silverlake in "Gemini CLI"

silverlake — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 14:59:34 +0000

I tried to get Gemini CLI to update itself using the MCP settings for Claude. It went off the rails. I then fed it the link you provided and it correctly updates it's settings file. You might mention the settings.json file in the README.

New comment by silverlake in "Show HN: Personalized Wealth Management – Institutional Meets Consumer"

silverlake — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 13:32:43 +0000

I’ve been talking to wealth management firms and am truly underwhelmed. AFAICT, they charge 0.5%-1.35% for therapy and the chance to put you in high fee products. Roboadvisors are a brilliant product for most people. In fact, a simple Boglehead portfolio is all you need. Most people have simple and similar risk profiles.

The feature I think would be useful is how to manage taxes. Roth conversions, selling the right lot, qualified dividends, tax loss harvesting, etc. A related feature would be generating income while minimizing taxes, i.e. Schwab’s Intelligent Income.

New comment by silverlake in "How I program with agents"

silverlake — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 01:55:40 +0000

Here’s the real rebuttal to my overconfidence in LLMs. Thanks for the link!

New comment by silverlake in "How I Program with Agents"

silverlake — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 17:13:10 +0000

No one is an expert on all the things. I use libraries and tools to take care of things that are less important. I use my brain for things that are important. LLMs are another tool, more flexible and capable than any other. So yes, grandpa goes to Best Buy because he’s running his legal practice and doesn’t need to be an expert on computers.

New comment by silverlake in "How I program with agents"

silverlake — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 16:43:41 +0000

You’re clinging to an old model of work. Today an LLM converted my docker compose infrastructure to Kubernetes, using operators and helm charts as needed. It did in 10 minutes what would take me several days to learn and cobble together a bad solution. I review every small update and correct it when needed. It is so much more productive. I’m driving a tractor while you are pulling an ox cart.

New comment by silverlake in "Why Cline doesn't index your codebase"

silverlake — Tue, 27 May 2025 20:22:45 +0000

Have you guys at Cline considered using LLMs to create summaries of files and complex functions? Rather than read a 500 line function, feed it a short comment on what the function is doing. I'd like to use a local LLM to create summaries at every level: function, file, directory. Then let the LLM use that to find the right code to read. This is basically how I navigate a large code base.