Hacker News: thoughtpeddler

New comment by thoughtpeddler in "Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't"

thoughtpeddler — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 16:06:20 +0000

> You don't really need to work for a company anymore, because a solo dev can absolutely build crazy things

Don't conflate what is theoretically vs. realistically possible. In the real world, successful companies have moats from data, patents/IP, network effects, and so forth. Just because you can develop something in 1/100th the time doesn't make it instantly feasible to build a new business around. Look around the tech industry today.. plenty of companies that could be disrupted by spry AI-powered buidlers, but they are not (owing to these lock-in effects).

Killed by GPT

thoughtpeddler — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:47:02 +0000

Article URL: https://killedbygpt.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479053

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by thoughtpeddler in "Investment leaders share views on AI job displacement as next big risk (2021)"

thoughtpeddler — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:37:05 +0000

Unpaywall'd: https://archive.ph/AxvIE

Investment leaders share views on AI job displacement as next big risk (2021)

thoughtpeddler — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:36:33 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-12/what-do-wall-street-leaders-think-is-the-next-big-risk

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419773

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by thoughtpeddler in "32GB of DDR5 now costs $375 – AI shortage continues to squeeze PC building"

thoughtpeddler — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:22:53 +0000

I understand that standing up memory fabrication plants is no small feat, but how much of this is due to memory fabricators' patent moat? To what degree is this caused by IP barriers vs. the difficulty in actually manufacturing the things? If it's the case that even older-generation / process-node RAM is also going up in value, aren't those 'easier' to produce?

New comment by thoughtpeddler in "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)"

thoughtpeddler — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:39:09 +0000

Agreed, and this is exactly what we see happening. Your posts back then were prescient ... there's literally now 'Copilot for Excel' and 'Claude for Excel' etc. But what do you propose the people/commons can still do at this stage to redistribute the inherent power found in RL data loops to a more stable equilibria of sharing participants?

New comment by thoughtpeddler in "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)"

thoughtpeddler — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:07:10 +0000

Thanks dang for compiling this. I suspect the Nov 2018 resurgence was due to Google publishing BERT [0] around that time? The release of OpenAI’s GPT-1 [1] was earlier that year in June, so unlikely that. Of course Jan 2023 needs no explanation… And now in 2026 things are at a fever pitch.

Interesting to trace these 10yr old AI posts from then to the present moment. The other one with a similar vintage would be “Should AI Be Open” [2] from Dec 2015, which is fascinating to juxtapose against the recent public battles.

[0] “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding“: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805

[1] “Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training”: https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-unsupervised...

[2] “Should AI Be Open?” | Slate Star Codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/

New comment by thoughtpeddler in "I made my phone slow on purpose"

thoughtpeddler — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:48:38 +0000

+1 for One Sec, a fantastic app, if one has the patience to wire it up using Apple’s first-party Shortcuts app (which is probably the main reason most normies aren’t going to use it). Really helped curb my Instagram usage down from about ~15 minutes per day to around ~5 minutes/day at most, and often now a few days go by without me checking the app at all. It is remarkable how much a 4, 6, or 10 second wait will just cause me to say “nah, forget it, I don’t care anymore”. Like, how much of a dumb ape am I?

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)

thoughtpeddler — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:43:07 +0000

Article URL: https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48360137

Points: 161

# Comments: 243

New comment by thoughtpeddler in "Show HN: Breathe CLI – Paced resonance breathing in the macOS terminal"

thoughtpeddler — Sun, 31 May 2026 19:02:54 +0000

Very cool project. Is this similar to the Apple Watch ‘mindful minutes’ breathing feature? I assume it’s based on the same research as is cited in this project’s repo?

Dotcom layoffs and the first knowledge-worker bust (2001)

thoughtpeddler — Sat, 30 May 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.economist.com/business/2001/03/29/dotgone

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48338989

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by thoughtpeddler in "Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become most valuable AI startup"

thoughtpeddler — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:57:54 +0000

Ya, super interesting research area the authors explored of basically trying to answer the question: "Is there a canonical/intrinsic way that concepts/representations/information are 'stored' in the universe/reality?".

They tested that by performing "spectral analysis of over 1100 models - including 500 Mistral-7B LoRAs, 500 Vision Transformers, and 50 LLaMA-8B models ... by applying spectral decomposition techniques to the weight matrices of various architectures", and concluding that "deep neural networks trained across diverse tasks exhibit remarkably similar low-dimensional parametric subspaces", showing that "neural networks systematically converge to shared spectral subspaces regardless of initialization, task, or domain".

Not just philosophically interesting but also has practical implications for being smarter about how to reuse models, model merging, developing more sustainable training and inference algos, etc.

Paper source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05117

New comment by thoughtpeddler in "Anthropic surpasses OpenAI to become most valuable AI startup"

thoughtpeddler — Sat, 30 May 2026 15:54:51 +0000

Mechinterp in general is just completely undervalued right now (and agreed Anthropic's team is doing the most rigorous work, now accompanied by Goodfire). They're doing the closest work to neuroscience's in vivo 'thought-tracing', which is just the most wild science fiction sort of thing to be working on, and yet I feel the average person has no idea this sort of work is happening. When combined with the idea of the 'universal subspace hypothesis' (explored under the paper of the same name), you really start to bridge the gap from engineering to something more philosophical and spiritual. But I digress...

New comment by thoughtpeddler in "Various LLM Smells"

thoughtpeddler — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:21:06 +0000

Does anyone else use the 'smells' as a sort of 'game' to ensure you properly go through a given LLM output (of any kind, be it document, presentation, code, etc) and 'make it your own' by eliminating them? I have a high bar for sharing content so I always do a rigorous pass to eliminate the em dashes, the contrastive negations, the 'quietly', and any other extraneous verbosity, and find that it helps me just really thoroughly polish it up.

New comment by thoughtpeddler in "Show HN: Hallucinate – Massively Multiplayer Online Rave"

thoughtpeddler — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:00:13 +0000

Feels like if Minecraft and Turntable.fm had a baby. I say that endearingly.

AI turning software building into cultural arbitrage

thoughtpeddler — Mon, 25 May 2026 11:25:54 +0000

Article URL: https://xcancel.com/levelsio/status/2058196816877797888

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48265615

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Cursor hits $3B in revenue and now has 3K+ customers paying at least $100K each

thoughtpeddler — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:07:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-21/cursor-hits-3-billion-annual-sales-rate-ahead-of-spacex-deal

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48236068

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by thoughtpeddler in "I’ve joined Anthropic"

thoughtpeddler — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:00:19 +0000

Wondering what the plan is to steward Eureka Labs, LLM101n, and whatever else was being cooked up. As a fellow educator, was very much looking forward to seeing how this would have evolved things.

Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints

thoughtpeddler — Fri, 15 May 2026 01:08:04 +0000

Article URL: https://writing.antonleicht.me/p/cut-off

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48143284

Points: 228

# Comments: 216

Google TIG reports first example of AI used offensively for zero-day vulns

thoughtpeddler — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:56:19 +0000

Article URL: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/ai-vulnerability-exploitation-initial-access/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096712

Points: 18

# Comments: 0