Hacker News: the_snooze

New comment by the_snooze in "Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs"

the_snooze — Sun, 24 May 2026 19:33:31 +0000

Bringing on new fabs takes many years and billions of dollars. You're exposing yourself to a lot of risk if you build now and find that the gold rush is over by the time your new capacity is online.

New comment by the_snooze in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

the_snooze — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:59:26 +0000

That kind of inevitability rhetoric is a big reason why people dislike AI. It's an impressive technology sure, but impressive doesn't automatically mean operational. It's got serious issues with reliability today, and appealing to some possible future state is less rigorious engineering and more unfalsifiable magical thinking.

New comment by the_snooze in "Google Declaring War on the Web"

the_snooze — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:48:22 +0000

We're going back to the mainframe model. Client-side general-purpose computing is an impediment to recurring subscription revenue and vendor lock-in.

New comment by the_snooze in "AI is a technology not a product"

the_snooze — Sun, 17 May 2026 17:34:13 +0000

>Absolutely agreed. It feels like tech companies forgot that they are supposed to add value to users.

They lost the plot long ago. They're firmly in extraction mode now: how much value can they get from end-users?

New comment by the_snooze in "I spent my whole career building passive income. Here's what I got wrong"

the_snooze — Sat, 16 May 2026 14:53:34 +0000

I'm of the same mind. Money is simply a means to an end. The workplace is just somewhere to exchange your time and skills for money, which you use to pursue priorities outside of that.

No job will ever tell you you've done enough and so you should do something else. If you don't make that call yourself, whose life are you actually living?

New comment by the_snooze in "Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise"

the_snooze — Wed, 13 May 2026 15:03:02 +0000

You don't. You accept that social bandwidth is a real-world constraint that you work with, not magic away. That's real engineering.

New comment by the_snooze in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

the_snooze — Tue, 12 May 2026 20:07:31 +0000

This is why I asked:

>And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around?

A bottom-up approach has a far better chance of finding those particularly good use cases, and if you lean on the people how found those fits, they're more persuasive than top-down edicts. They actually know what they're talking about. If the point is to leverage AI for better work outcomes, someone with your experience is far more valuable than "here's a dashboard, make the number go up," which seems to be what's going on at Amazon.

New comment by the_snooze in "Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools"

the_snooze — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:08:28 +0000

My questions for that approach are: Why treat AI as a special technology that needs enterprise-scale exploration to come up with a useful application? And why not take the alternative approach of identifying the subset of people who have indeed found solid uses and spread their best practices around?

The top-down approach to encouraging (mandating?) AI usage strikes me as infantilizing to the workers, who are perfectly capable of choosing which tools they use and when.

New comment by the_snooze in "How are we going to get out of Meta? (Or social media in general)"

the_snooze — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:06:16 +0000

>I do agree that it is still a tool to keep in touch with some people, yes, but… Are there no alternatives that require a lower price to pay?

The sustainable alternative I've arrived at is private group chats with notifications disabled. Engagement is entirely on my own terms (i.e., I have to manually open the thing to see any updates), and there's no formalized moderation or amplification because it's human-scale enough to let shared social norms govern it.

New comment by the_snooze in "The left-wing case for AI"

the_snooze — Sun, 10 May 2026 12:47:52 +0000

These benefits make sense up-front, but we have 15+ years of direct experience with "democratizing" technology that ultimately end up ensnaring people. Unless you get these benefits from a local model, you're establishing a deep dependency on an AI service provider whose interests may not necessarily align with yours.

New comment by the_snooze in "Why most product tours get skipped"

the_snooze — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:19:39 +0000

Too much of modern consumer-facing software think they're the ends, not the means.

New comment by the_snooze in "Trademark violation: Fake Notepad++ for Mac"

the_snooze — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:39:54 +0000

altek has been given a number of off-ramps and alternatives to proceed. His continued resistance to take those isn't a sign of naivete, it's a sign of bad faith.

New comment by the_snooze in "Spotify adds 'Verified' badges to distinguish human artists from AI"

the_snooze — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:06:10 +0000

I gave up on Spotify when they did their push into podcasts and audiobooks. It became clear that they weren't really interested in serving their core customer base of people who just want to listen to music.

New comment by the_snooze in "Maladaptive Frugality"

the_snooze — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:54:53 +0000

This is really the heart of it. Understand what matters to you, and align your finances (and decisions as a whole) with that. If you optimize for some external metric without examining your own values, you're basically adrift.

New comment by the_snooze in "To my students"

the_snooze — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:53:02 +0000

I wouldn't necessarily say "idealistic," but certainly constrained. Microsoft has always been scummy in one form or another, but always-on internet connectivity has allowed them to be scummy in persistent ways long after your purchase of their product. It's a serious money-maker, but I think that explosive growth has bred a whole generation of tech "professionals" these days that think more like Wall Street bros than sober engineers: make line go up, damn the consequences.

New comment by the_snooze in "The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it"

the_snooze — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:48:31 +0000

They got way over their skis on this one. There's a difference between "impressive" tech vs. "operational" tech. That difference usually boils down to prioritizing engineering rigor over marketing.

New comment by the_snooze in "Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their"

the_snooze — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:15:03 +0000

Exactly, these are highly-paid professionals with very broadly applicable skills. They have the means to uphold professional values.

New comment by the_snooze in "AI cybersecurity is not proof of work"

the_snooze — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:26:07 +0000

>It's restricted because it's genuinely good at finding vulnerabilities, and employees felt that it's not a good idea to give this capability to everyone without letting defenders front-run.

It's a possibility, but it doesn't eliminate the possibility that it's hype. If these claims were indeed serious, they would submit it for independent analysis somewhere.

This isn't some crazy process. Defense contractors are required to submit their systems (secret sauce and all) for operational test and evaluation before they're fielded.

New comment by the_snooze in "YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney"

the_snooze — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:58:25 +0000

>Even searching for specific topics is hard.

It's the tyranny of the marginal user. How I wish YouTube (and generally other platforms for user-generated content) would have fine-grained search and filtering controls that let me specify exactly what I want, no recommendation algorithm trying to guess what I actually meant. But such a feature won't attract and retain the least interested people, so we'll never get it.

New comment by the_snooze in "The AI School Bus Camera Company Blanketing America in Tickets"

the_snooze — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:43:09 +0000

Yeah I'm of the same view. If you're driving, the least you can do is take the responsibility seriously and give your surroundings proper attention.

An automated fine is the least painful way to enforce that.