Hacker News: sublimefire

New comment by sublimefire in "The next era of social media: built and run in Europe, ruled by our laws"

sublimefire — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:01:23 +0000

There is a reason why countries in Europe have such laws. US did not have a major war for quite a while on their own soil which affects your thinking. We do not want to reignite national socialism or communism, we do not like to see news channels lying to us. We do not like Russian bot armies spreading propaganda in chats.

What truth is it that you cannot say in Europe? You can say pretty much anything and be critical and nothing will happen to you. And if something happens there are instruments like European court system which you can use to fight your case (there is no need to be rich for that).

New comment by sublimefire in "When AI writes the software, who verifies it?"

sublimefire — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:45:19 +0000

At the end it mentions what the future engineers will do:

> Engineers spend more time writing specifications and models, designing systems at a higher level of abstraction, defining precisely what systems must do, what invariants they must maintain, what failures they must tolerate.

We do that already and the abstractions are very high. The other part is about knowing what the system is supposed to do way in advance, which is not how a lot of engineering is done because it is an exploratory problem. Very few of us write crypto or spend much time in a critical piece of code. And most importantly no user ever said if the software they buy is using proofs. Just like security these concerns are at the bottom of a barrel.

New comment by sublimefire in "Layoffs at Block"

sublimefire — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:43:43 +0000

And if you kept everyone and used AI you could expand the business. Oh wait, they are out of ideas.

New comment by sublimefire in "Google API keys weren't secrets, but then Gemini changed the rules"

sublimefire — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:34:45 +0000

It shows their red teams were preoccupied with something else. Even the primary rejection of this issue by G themselves shows some serious ignorance.

New comment by sublimefire in "Google API keys weren't secrets, but then Gemini changed the rules"

sublimefire — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:32:01 +0000

Have you been on these reviews? The idea that the review will catch a misuse of the key generation infrastructure is a bit over the top.

New comment by sublimefire in "Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)"

sublimefire — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:54:45 +0000

However you like it or not banning just one company is not a recipe for success. IMO the issue is in the procurement and how these tenders are worded. For instance, if the requirement is data residency backed by private keys and conf compute then put it in writing. The idea that some other vendor will come in and solve this problem without such a requirement upfront will not hold for long.

By and large MS problem is that our world gets fragmented and you need to have products that adapt, eg great firewall in China, strict data residency in Europe. It is difficult to achieve that without segmenting your products as well.

New comment by sublimefire in "We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science"

sublimefire — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:33:42 +0000

Irish infra is not great if you compare it to many advanced European countries. I hate they still do not have a train/tram connection from the airport to the city. Taxes also make you weep. Not to mention an immense risk of losing all those corp taxes and industry if US pushes ahead and creates barriers for companies to trade. It is great at many things but also has some downsides.

New comment by sublimefire in "US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere"

sublimefire — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:11:55 +0000

What limits? You can do pretty much what you want but make sure you can defend yourself in the court. I feel there is a bit of a disconnect in terms where people get the news where in US you kind of expect biggest news providers to be biassed, eg Fox, hence reliance on social media. In Europe gov media is quite strong and objective, and the idea that it restricts something is odd. A great example is the banning of RT, they lost licenses IMO in multiple countries, but the agency was spreading a lot of lies. IMO what we all want is objective news reporting.

New comment by sublimefire in "We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler"

sublimefire — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 09:24:11 +0000

> Isn’t one agent fast enough? Why lose accuracy over +- one week to write a compiler?

My thinking as well, IMO it is because you need to wait for results for longer. You basically want to shorten the loops to improve the system. It hints at a problem that most of what we see is a challenge to seed a good context for it to successfully do something in many iterations.

New comment by sublimefire in "My AI Adoption Journey"

sublimefire — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 09:09:39 +0000

Very much the same experience. But it does not talk much about the project setup and the influence of it on the session success. In the narrow scoped projects it works really well, especially when tests are easy to execute. I found that this approach melts down when facing enterprise software with large repositories and unconventional layouts. Then you need to do a bunch of context management upfront, and verbose instructions for evaluations. But we know what it needs is a refactor thats all.

And the post touches on a next type of a problem, how to plan far ahead of time to utilise agents when you are away. It is a difficult problem but IMO we’re going in a direction of having some sort of shared “templated plans”/workflows and budgeted/throttled task execution to achieve that. It is like you want to give a little world to explore so that it does not stop early, like a little game to play, then you come back in the morning and check how far it went.

New comment by sublimefire in "European Alternatives"

sublimefire — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:00:20 +0000

Buy local is a well known and used tactic globally in many places big and small. Another observation, saying it is nationalistic is odd given it involves multiple nationalities. US has protectionist policy EU has it, there is nothing new here. The odd thing is that it triggers the person for it being so small.

New comment by sublimefire in "European Alternatives"

sublimefire — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 17:48:56 +0000

It is good to have a dedicated location to find these. The problem is that you want a sufficiently large company when buying the services so that it does not fall apart or get acquired and runs to the ground, and we have a few. Also, putting a country flag to the service is cringe, it might even be odd to some because it implies a specific language/culture. We just all want to consume a proper business staffed with pros and the one which does not resell AWS services.

New comment by sublimefire in "Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced"

sublimefire — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:41:32 +0000

Did a bit of soul searching and manually optimised to 1087 but I give up. What is the number we are chasing here? IMO I would not join a company giving such a vague problem because you can feel really bad afterwards, especially if this does not open a door to the next stage of the interview. As an alternative we could all instead focus on a real kernel and improve it :)

New comment by sublimefire in "Dead Internet Theory"

sublimefire — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 11:13:01 +0000

IMO the idea of providing more in OSS usually stems from various third parties who use that code in production but do not really contribute back to it. The only sensible thing the person publishing code online needs to do is to protect their copyright and add a license. This weird idea that somehow you become responsible for the code to the point that you need to patch every vulnerability and bug, and now identify the use of AI is wrong on so many levels. For the record I’ve been publishing OSS for years.

New comment by sublimefire in "Apple picks Gemini to power Siri"

sublimefire — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:57:56 +0000

Personally for me, who is bought into the Apple ecosystem this is worrying. I am aware how PCC is supposed to work (which is the likely target platform) but the deal with Google of all the companies sends bad signal to consumers who are privacy focussed. If such a feature will be baked in without a way to switch it off, the next device will not be iphone or macbook or ipad.

New comment by sublimefire in "Apple picks Gemini to power Siri"

sublimefire — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 09:50:34 +0000

You can already run quantized models without much friction, people also have dedicated apps for that. It changes very little for people because they everyone who wanted to do it already solved it and those who do not they dont care. It is marginal gain from consumer, a feature to brag about for apple, big gain for google. Users also would need to change existing habits which is undoubtedly hard to do.

New comment by sublimefire in "Ireland recalls almost 13,000 passports"

sublimefire — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 12:03:37 +0000

Software update affected printing, country code missing, meaning you cannot use passports at automatic scanning machines.

Ireland recalls almost 13,000 passports

sublimefire — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 12:03:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ireland-recalls-almost-13-000-passports-over-missing-irl-code/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46565019

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

New comment by sublimefire in "How Google got its groove back and edged ahead of OpenAI"

sublimefire — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:17:51 +0000

Depending on Google’s explicit product to build a startup is crazy. There is a risk of them changing APIs or offerings or features without the ability to actually complain, they are not a great B2B company.

I hope you just use the API and can switch easily to any other provider.

New comment by sublimefire in "Why we're taking legal action against SerpApi's unlawful scraping"

sublimefire — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:08:09 +0000

I bet the core of the problem for Google is that more folks use programmatic access to search which is not great on their side. Naturally you end up using Serp or other similar search APIs as they are great for the job. I believe this is also an issue especially in cases where search is performed on behalf of the user (scripts, ai tools). Google is just losing ground here, why would they bother otherwise, think what will happen to their stock if the search usage will drop? Another thing is that this builds pressure to whoever is integrating such a search tool in their products, clearly Google wants to grab that market as well.