Hacker News: tbrownaw

New comment by tbrownaw in "Leaving GitHub for Forgejo"

tbrownaw — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:48:45 +0000

> Software has been open long before it was subsidized by large corporations.

Software then was also rather different from software now. It's not a government-funded research project these days.

New comment by tbrownaw in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

tbrownaw — Wed, 06 May 2026 23:25:35 +0000

> Vibe Coding (and LLMs) did not create undisciplined engineering organizations or engineers.

Loss of discipline can be a result of panic or greed.

Perhaps believing that your own costs or your competitors' costs are suddenly becoming 10x lower could inspire one of those conditions?

(Also for greenfield projects specifically, it can plausibly be an experiment just to verify what happens. Some orgs are big enough that of course they can put a couple people on a couple-month project that'll quite likely fall flat.)

New comment by tbrownaw in "Life During Class Wartime"

tbrownaw — Wed, 06 May 2026 23:16:16 +0000

There is a difference between "most homeless" (your comment) and "most visibly homeless" (comment you're replying to).

IIRC, most people who obtain "homeless" status only keep it for a short time, and don't live on the streets during that time.

You'll get very different statistics if you count transitions into (or out of) homelessness over some window, vs systematic point-in-time counts of current homeless status, vs point-in-time counts of people camping on the street, vs trying to measure QALYs.

New comment by tbrownaw in "Zuckerberg 'Personally Authorized and Encouraged' Meta's Copyright Infringement"

tbrownaw — Wed, 06 May 2026 01:35:22 +0000

Well the article says this is the start of a lawsuit, so maybe wait for it to work its way through the courts?

New comment by tbrownaw in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

tbrownaw — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:53:35 +0000

Shouldn't the filesystem be set to encrypt everything before it hits the physical storage layer?

New comment by tbrownaw in "Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks"

tbrownaw — Tue, 05 May 2026 00:57:10 +0000

> The common way to get to FIRE, unless hitting the lottery or getting a crazy RSU payout, is to be super frugal with a high savings rate.

Then they get to retirement and realize that doing the amazing things like traveling the world requires a lot of money.

Partition living expenses from hobby expenses, and once you have enough to not have to work for living expenses switch to doing just enough part-time to cover hobby expenses?

New comment by tbrownaw in "'Point of no return': New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level"

tbrownaw — Tue, 05 May 2026 00:06:06 +0000

Was he wrong? That sounds like it was about some sort of mandatory-mitm scheme or ban on e2e encryption. Like, yes, you can pretty easily make it impossible for the government to decrypt your bits, but the government can just as easily arrest you for it.

New comment by tbrownaw in "DAG Workflow Engine"

tbrownaw — Mon, 04 May 2026 19:47:21 +0000

These are always a fun couple-day project. :)

New comment by tbrownaw in "Let's Buy Spirit Air"

tbrownaw — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:17:38 +0000

This, um, seems kinda sus. An obvious AI-generated site trying to raise money for something implausible?

New comment by tbrownaw in "Let's Buy Spirit Air"

tbrownaw — Mon, 04 May 2026 04:01:33 +0000

A merger would be more orderly, especially if overall capacity only needed to go down by part of what's in the chunk being cut out.

New comment by tbrownaw in "Let's Buy Spirit Air"

tbrownaw — Mon, 04 May 2026 03:53:54 +0000

But without a sense of urgency the marks might stop to think first.

New comment by tbrownaw in "New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag"

tbrownaw — Sun, 03 May 2026 20:31:41 +0000

> there is no doubt on the meaning at all

Which flag? Or, what kind of flag? Or does it matter?

New comment by tbrownaw in "Largest Digital Human Rights Conference Suddenly Canceled"

tbrownaw — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:11:22 +0000

> Who would have to be threatened so much to cancel this?

What?

The government of the host country said some of the themes were potentially at odds with their national policy, and they weren't sure they liked some of the people involved.

That doesn't sound like anyone was threatened, it sounds like they should have picked somewhere with a stronger tradition of free dialogue.

New comment by tbrownaw in "Kyoto cherry blossoms now bloom earlier than at any point in 1,200 years"

tbrownaw — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 01:15:46 +0000

I don't think the local plants and animals there match what used to be typical around the world prior to our current ice age.

New comment by tbrownaw in "Kyoto cherry blossoms now bloom earlier than at any point in 1,200 years"

tbrownaw — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 22:52:28 +0000

Have we ever actually tried?

New comment by tbrownaw in "Mistral built a $14B AI empire by not being American"

tbrownaw — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:50:57 +0000

You are conflating three very different things.

The thing with Anthropic and the military was about whether vendors can tell the military what operations it's permitted to do. It has no bearing on the commercial sector, and isn't actually about AI.

The thing with NVIDIA cards is a continuation of how we've restricted tech exports for quite a while. You can find old news articles about game consoles being export-restricted over nuclear proliferation concerns. This AI-related one was about whether or not custom AI models are relevant to national security, and whether restricting graphics card sales can have a meaningful impact on them.

Any issue with selling chat tokens internationally would be more akin to the recent tariff shenanigans.

New comment by tbrownaw in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

tbrownaw — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 22:30:45 +0000

It's an AI-enhanced "the script had a bug in it".

New comment by tbrownaw in "Humpback whales are forming super-groups"

tbrownaw — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:30:40 +0000

Weakening predictions until they become unfalsifiable seems like an odd approach to being taken seriously.

New comment by tbrownaw in "There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning"

tbrownaw — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:46:27 +0000

> The conventional wisdom is that it was the combination of (1) exponentially more compute than in earlier eras with (2) exponentially larger, high-quality datasets (e.g., the curated and hand-labeled ImageNet set) that finally allowed deep neural networks to shine.

I'd thought it was some issue with training where older math didn't play nice with having too many layers.

New comment by tbrownaw in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

tbrownaw — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 02:39:05 +0000

Maybe present it as proving out technology that could be helpful in building a self-sustaining Mars colony?