Hacker News: strange_quark

New comment by strange_quark in "The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers"

strange_quark — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 01:25:14 +0000

Management doesn’t care. This sort of thing is becoming more common at my workplace too. More outages, more embarrassing bugs, even bugs that leak customer data. The solution is always more AI, and if you’re still shipping bugs and causing outages, it’s because you did’t use the AI correctly. Leadership makes all the right noises about quality and ownership, but when it comes down to it, the incentive structures clearly prioritize shipping things faster, all else be damned.

New comment by strange_quark in "The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers"

strange_quark — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 01:14:11 +0000

In case it wasn’t obvious, I was being facetious. You can’t just let the AI rip without putting effort into constructing good input and verifying the output and expect anything good to happen, which is what the gp was asking.

There’s no secret into how people are getting “10x”, or at least claiming to, they’re just working more.

New comment by strange_quark in "The Human Cost of 10x: How AI Is Physically Breaking Senior Engineers"

strange_quark — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:44:10 +0000

I mean, why do you think people are burning out?

New comment by strange_quark in "The human cost of 10x: How AI is physically breaking senior engineers"

strange_quark — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:38:34 +0000

If if this person really is a distinguished engineer, then they are part of leadership and it's their responsibility to set realistic expectations. Leadership knows this, they just don't care and won't care until the job market improves.

New comment by strange_quark in "Molotov cocktail is hurled at home of Sam Altman"

strange_quark — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 01:10:37 +0000

I agree with you, it’s mostly hype. But it doesn’t really matter whether it’s true or not because the vibes are clearly bad. These execs keep “warning” us about that AI will take all the jobs then keep pouring more money into AI, the press credulously reports it, and people are obviously worried. Most people aren’t digging through economic data themselves to figure out these execs are full of shit.

New comment by strange_quark in "A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8B Company"

strange_quark — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:33:27 +0000

I’m struggling to see how anything he did is AI at all. Literally everything about his company is outsourced to an army of contracting firms. All this guy did was generate a marketing site that was filled with fraud.

New comment by strange_quark in "Why are executives enamored with AI, but ICs aren't?"

strange_quark — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 23:47:30 +0000

Reads like an extended slop LinkedIn post. The author poses a question with an obvious answer yet answers with the most galaxy brain take possible while dropping in some academic concepts to make themselves sound like a thought leader despite probably only taking an intro class in college 10+ years ago.

New comment by strange_quark in "Flighty Airports"

strange_quark — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 03:39:36 +0000

Last year Flighty literally saved me from an overnight delay because it notified me the incoming aircraft was still on the ground at the previous airport. I was able to snag the last couple seats on a later scheduled flight which actually departed. My original flight ended up getting canceled.

New comment by strange_quark in "Pentagon formally labels Anthropic supply-chain risk"

strange_quark — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:52:03 +0000

We're all trying to find the guy who did this!

New comment by strange_quark in "Layoffs at Block"

strange_quark — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 03:50:32 +0000

Right, there are dozens of open source versions of wikis/task trackers/CRMs/ERPs/whatevers. Just because you can vibecode your way to a bad version of a bunch of SaaS products shouldn't fundamentally change anything. Companies buy SaaS products to make running the thing someone else's problem. It's times like these where I wish we had a functional SEC; I really wonder how much market manipulation is going on.

New comment by strange_quark in "Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation"

strange_quark — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:13:53 +0000

The timing of the Claude Code guerilla marketing campaign that seems to have started around new years is now making much more sense.

New comment by strange_quark in "AI-First Company Memos"

strange_quark — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 18:06:17 +0000

Probably yes? Definitely. See also articles like this one [1]. These guys all run in the same circles and the groupthink gets out of control.

https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t...

New comment by strange_quark in "Waymo exec reveals company uses remote workers in the Philippines"

strange_quark — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 23:48:14 +0000

Their scale is like 2000 cars…

New comment by strange_quark in "We mourn our craft"

strange_quark — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 21:09:03 +0000

> Wait, you're completely skipping the emergence of reasoning models, though?

o1 was something like 16-18 months ago. o3 was kinda better, and GPT 5 was considered a flop because it was basically just o3 again.

I’ve used all the latest models in tools like Claude code and codex, and I guess I’m just not seeing the improvement? I’m not even working on anything particularly technically complex, but I still have to constantly babysit these things.

Where are the long-running tasks? Cursor’s browser that didn’t even compile? Claude’s C compiler that had gcc as an oracle and still performs worse than gcc without any optimizations? Yeah I’m completely unimpressed at this point given the promises these people have been making for years now. I’m not surprised that given enough constraints they can kinda sorta dump out some code that resembles something else in their training data.

New comment by strange_quark in "We mourn our craft"

strange_quark — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 20:49:09 +0000

ChatGPT 3.5 was almost 40 months ago, not 24. GPT 4.5 was supposed to be 5 but was not noticeably better than 4o. GPT 5 was a flop. Remember the hype around Gemini 3? What happened to that? Go back and read the blog posts from November when Opus 4.5 came out; even the biggest boosters weren't hyping it up as much as they are now.

It's pretty obvious the change of pace is slowing down and there isn't a lot of evidence that shipping a better harness and post-training on using said harness is going to get us to the magical place where all SWE is automated that all these CEOs have promised.

New comment by strange_quark in "Coding agents have replaced every framework I used"

strange_quark — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 15:58:02 +0000

The absence of evidence is evidence in its own way. I don’t understand how there haven’t been more studies on this yet. The one from last year that showed AI made people think they were faster but were actually slower gets cited a lot, and I know that was a small study with older tools, but it’s amazing that that hasn’t been repeated. Or maybe it has and we don’t know because the results got buried.

New comment by strange_quark in "Claude Opus 4.6"

strange_quark — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:06:07 +0000

Don’t forget they’ve also publicly stated (bragged?) about the monumental accomplishment of getting some text in a terminal to render at 60fps.

New comment by strange_quark in "AI is killing B2B SaaS"

strange_quark — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:54:28 +0000

So… next week then?

New comment by strange_quark in "Claude is a space to think"

strange_quark — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 17:55:09 +0000

History is littered with challenger companies chest thumping that they’re never going to do the bad thing, then doing the bad thing like a year later.

New comment by strange_quark in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

strange_quark — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:53:08 +0000

When the radiation burns out a GPU, just dump as much heat into it as possible and yeet it into the atmosphere. Ez.