Hacker News: spunker540

New comment by spunker540 in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

spunker540 — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:35:36 +0000

I've hit my claude quota and felt a scary helplessness - but honestly, what if someone took away the toy that is the internet? or the toy that is npm or the toy that is AWS, or the toy that is C# to name a few other toys? plenty of developers can spend their entire careers focused on a single toy and be helpless without said toy.

New comment by spunker540 in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

spunker540 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 05:15:37 +0000

may i ask what number theory breakthrough you refer to? i suspect computing in general or perhaps something more specific?

New comment by spunker540 in "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports"

spunker540 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 01:37:36 +0000

Whats lost on this thread is these caches are in very tight supply - they are literally on the GPUs running inference. the GPUs must load all the tokens in the conversation (expensive) and then continuing the conversation can leverage the GPU cache to avoid re-loading the full context up to that point. but obviously GPUs are in super tight supply, so if a thread has been dead for a while, they need to re-use the GPU for other customers.

New comment by spunker540 in "Anatomy of the .claude/ Folder"

spunker540 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 16:00:10 +0000

Yeah there are almost certainly times when it is gen ai and you just didn’t notice.

New comment by spunker540 in "Florida judge rules red light camera tickets are unconstitutional"

spunker540 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:25:11 +0000

No. Running a red light is when your possession crosses an intersection while the light is red, and should apply to the registered owner.

New comment by spunker540 in "Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help"

spunker540 — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 15:33:09 +0000

Does Google have a better track record when it comes to arbitrarily locking people out of their digital lives?

New comment by spunker540 in "FLUX.2: Frontier Visual Intelligence"

spunker540 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 18:17:50 +0000

Does SD1.5 suffer from resolution / coherence / complexity issues?

I understand most outputs could be fine tuned for most domains, but still felt sd1.5 had a resolution ceiling, and a complexity ceiling no matter how good the fine tuning

New comment by spunker540 in "I may have found a way to spot U.S. at-sea strikes before they're announced"

spunker540 — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 19:06:52 +0000

They may have some idea, but they definitely don’t know for sure— there could very well be innocent people on the boat. I’m not sure why arrests are not an option in these cases. It would be great press to announce “x kilos of cocaine captured”, “6 drug smugglers apprehended”

Instead it’s just “boat bombed, terrorists killed, drugs destroyed” with no proof that they’re terrorists or that there are drugs.

New comment by spunker540 in "Doing well in your courses: Andrej's advice for success (2013)"

spunker540 — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 14:46:42 +0000

I am the same way— I find note taking distracts me such that I end up missing important things, and my notes are usually worthless too. I did pretty well at school with my no-notes approach. Obviously it’s useful to write down assignments, or the occasional verbatim example from the whiteboard. But for me, notes usually hinder more than they help.

New comment by spunker540 in "I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery"

spunker540 — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:28:34 +0000

I like this idea. While it’s great to have all the music at my fingertips via Alexa + Apple Music (or Spotify etc), it’s actually not very conducive to browsing or recalling all the music and albums I like.

Something physical to browse like this is a pretty fun way to marry the physical world with digital music catalogs.

New comment by spunker540 in "I built physical album cards with NFC tags to teach my son music discovery"

spunker540 — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 00:23:54 +0000

Not op, but to me this resonates because none of it is “mine”, none of it exists in the real world. There’s a huge difference between the music I physically collected (from libraries, friends, Best Buy, Christmas gifts, used cd stores) and uploaded into my iPod and lived with for years vs music I searched on a whim, listened to for a month while it was in my “recents” and then eventually forgot about once it was pushed out by something else.

New comment by spunker540 in "The dangerous intimacy of social location sharing"

spunker540 — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 16:28:02 +0000

I think they are “convincing you” because you are on the opposite side of an opinion.

You’ll notice in this thread, many anti-tracking people are trying to convince pro tracking people, and vise versa. This is common when there are two opposing sides of an argument.

New comment by spunker540 in "Stephen Miller's Quota Likely Drove Korean Arrests in Immigration Raid"

spunker540 — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 22:20:41 +0000

What is the fascist lubricant you refer to?

New comment by spunker540 in "Survey: a third of senior developers say over half their code is AI-generated"

spunker540 — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 22:22:18 +0000

I’m not yet up to half (because my corporate code base is a mess that doesn’t lend itself well to AI)

But your approach sounds familiar to me. I find sometimes it may be slower and lower quality to use AI, but it requires less mental bandwidth from me, which is sometimes a worthwhile trade off.

New comment by spunker540 in "In 2025, venture capital can't pretend everything is fine any more"

spunker540 — Sun, 11 May 2025 15:36:23 +0000

I agree with your take, but at the same time, I’m not sure these things should ever do math. I know that they can, but it seems impossible to draw the line of math they can do vs math they shouldn’t do. A part of me suspects they should always be outsourcing any math to a tool.

New comment by spunker540 in "Duolingo will replace contract workers with AI"

spunker540 — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 04:48:41 +0000

A lot of naysayers here, and I get it’s more about the tactics and messaging more than anything else— but in defense of Duolingo (I’m not a user):

There is a good possibility that in 5 years people have moved on from Duolingo because new ai tutoring apps that can perfectly tailor content to your level and offer unlimited speaking practice sessions, may surpass Duolingo’s “old-fashioned” offering—-the same way Duolingo jumped ahead of websites, which jumped ahead of CDs and cassette tapes, which jumped ahead of books.

New comment by spunker540 in "Your phone isn't secretly listening to you, but the truth is more disturbing"

spunker540 — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 22:30:35 +0000

Same with drivers licenses and passports having a photo requirement too

New comment by spunker540 in "Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court"

spunker540 — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 21:37:04 +0000

Actually Instagram was iOS only at the announced time of acquisition. It was a pretty big bet at the time and almost no one believed it was worth $1B.

New comment by spunker540 in "Reasoning models don't always say what they think"

spunker540 — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 03:02:47 +0000

i've heard it actually depends on the model / hosting architecture. some are not deterministic at the numeric level because there is so much floating point math going on in distributed fashion across gpus, with unpredictable rounding/syncing across machines

New comment by spunker540 in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

spunker540 — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 05:16:19 +0000

Obviously to a mega super genius like yourself an LLM is useless. But perhaps you can consider that others may actually benefit from LLMs, even if you’re way too talented to ever see a benefit?

You might also consider that you may be over-indexing on your own capabilities rather than evaluating the LLM’s capabilities.

Lets say an llm is only 25% as good as you but is 10% the cost. Surely you’d acknowledge there may be tasks that are better outsourced to the llm than to you, strictly from an ROI perspective?

It seems like your claim is that since you’re better than LLMs, LLMs are useless. But I think you need to consider the broader market for LLMs, even if you aren’t the target customer.