Hacker News: throwyawayyyy

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone"

throwyawayyyy — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 22:49:05 +0000

AI could be a huge net benefit, and justify large layoffs.

AI could be a huge short-term benefit, justify layoffs now, so long as you (the exec doing the laying off) don't have to worry about the long term

AI could have middling net benefit, but be a great excuse to justify layoffs now. In this scenario, the people laid off and those that remain bear the cost (one, losing their jobs; those that remain, burning out with the extra workload) etc etc, many scenarios to consider...

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

throwyawayyyy — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:25:27 +0000

Same! Every so often I remember that I can juggle, and spend a minute or two juggling, and feel better for it. And then I forget for weeks or months.

(I taught myself while procrastinating from exam revision, many years ago. I started with a large bag of oranges. Just enough of an incentive not to drop them, no real harm when they did hit the floor.)

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "Meta acquires Moltbook"

throwyawayyyy — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:46:13 +0000

I do find it hilarious that after all the machine learning optimizations done on people's feeds over the years, all the promos got for a 1% improvement on this metric, every E7 and E8 who can claim x% of this or that, after all of that work, we might genuinely, and not even as a joke, be in the situation of needing to throw _other_ AI agents at this selfsame feed in order to extract any real value from it. What a world we've built.

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "Meta acquires Moltbook"

throwyawayyyy — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:42:35 +0000

Vibes-CEOing! Only one person at Meta actually matters of course.

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "Agents that run while I sleep"

throwyawayyyy — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:31:54 +0000

Well hang-on, in this case it is _neither_ reliable in terms of availability _nor_ correctness. Worst of all worlds.

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "Agents that run while I sleep"

throwyawayyyy — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:51:48 +0000

I am afraid that we are heading to a world in which we simply give up on the idea of correct code as an aspiration to strive for. Of course code has always been bad, and of course good code has never been a goal in the whole startup ecosystem (for perfectly legitimate reasons!). But that real production code, for services that millions or even billions of people rely on, should be reliable, that if it breaks that's a problem, this is the whole _engineering_ part of software engineering. And we can say: if we give that up we're going to have a whole lot more outages, security issues, all those things we are meant to minimize as a profession. And the answer is going to be: so what? We save money overall. And people will get used to software being unreliable; which is to say, people will not have a choice but to get used to it.

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub"

throwyawayyyy — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 21:06:41 +0000

I'm reminded of Douglas Adams's take on video recorders as machines to watch television so you don't have to. He should have been around to see Marvin built for real!

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "FLASH radiotherapy's bold approach to cancer treatment"

throwyawayyyy — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 19:01:43 +0000

I learned about Therac at college in the 90s.

Some years later, I interviewed at Knight Capital, just a couple of weeks before their blowup. (Dreadful interview at which I did dreadfully, being asked to write C _over the phone_ by a supremely uninterested engineer. Quite a red flag in retrospect.)

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "How to talk to anyone and why you should"

throwyawayyyy — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:42:40 +0000

I've rather assumed this is half the use of airpods.

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "OpenClaw surpasses React to become the most-starred software project on GitHub"

throwyawayyyy — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:40:58 +0000

A lack of imagination on my part perhaps, but I can't think of anything I'd use it for which isn't either: 1) cheating myself and others of leisure (e.g. I suppose I could use it to fake-keep up with friends..? Or plan a holiday and book a load of stuff for me. But I like doing that!), 2) not feasible (loading and unloading the dishwasher, which is already the robot I used to wash dishes), 3) utterly insane (it's tax time in the US).

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "Layoffs at Block"

throwyawayyyy — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 01:46:15 +0000

I do see fewer Square terminals these days, more Toast (and other options too I think).

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "Layoffs at Block"

throwyawayyyy — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 01:41:11 +0000

I do genuinely wonder about the endgame here. Why would the objective winners of the _current_ system, our billionaire class, want to disrupt that system? Do they really believe that they will necessarily be winners in the new world too, are they that arrogant?

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

throwyawayyyy — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:35:29 +0000

What I find interesting, and reflects my ignorance of how these things are used, is that if you look at, say, FAANG companies, Office isn't used. I've worked for two FAANGs over the past couple of years, and everything is done via Google docs. Replacing a giant suite like Office looks hard, replacing something simpler like Google docs looks very much simpler, and surely should suffice?

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "Altman on AI energy: it also takes 20 years of eating food to train a human"

throwyawayyyy — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 17:45:11 +0000

I haven't watched the whole interview. In the clip, a couple of things jump out:

1. He was speaking to a receptive audience. The head nods when he starts to make the comparison between the energy for bringing a human up to speed versus that for training an AI.

2. He is trying to rebut a _specific_ argument against his product, that it takes even more energy to do a task than a human does, once its training is priced in. He thinks that this is a fair comparison. The _fact_ that he thinks that this is a fair comparison is why I think it is too generous to say that this is just an offhand comment. Putting an LLM on an equal footing with a human, as if an LLM should have the same rights to the Earth as we do, is anti-human.

It also contains a rather glaring logical flaw that I would hope someone as intelligent as Altman should see. The human will be here anyway.

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "Privilege is bad grammar"

throwyawayyyy — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 02:09:00 +0000

Just a random comment but: what a delightful blog. Even though I disagree on the virtues of cats (they really aren't all monsters. Ours is only occasionally evil).

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "AI is going to kill app subscriptions"

throwyawayyyy — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:18:53 +0000

That is an underappreciated point. Wrappers around LLMs are _many_ magnitudes more expensive to run than current SaaS apps.

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, Polarization (2025)"

throwyawayyyy — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 23:56:07 +0000

If I think about my own use of social media (and I have a facebook account from waaay back in the day, shortly after they dropped the requirement for a US edu email address), I wonder what value it ever had, over and above just emailing those people I'd like to stay in touch with every-so-often (which is what I do now). The reason why facebook switched to an algorithmic feed is because the previous method was failing, people were starting to give up posting. Algorithmic feeds didn't kill social media, they were an attempt at keeping alive what was already moribund. Social media, in the strict sense (so, not just online clubs or societies), never needed to be invented.

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "We (As a Society) Peaked in the 90s"

throwyawayyyy — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:39:40 +0000

True! But so indelibly linked to the 1997 election, and all the promise and promises of the incoming Labour government.

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "We (As a Society) Peaked in the 90s"

throwyawayyyy — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:25:35 +0000

Agreed. Though I hated it at the time, in retrospect I am grateful for how often I was bored, growing up in the 80s and 90s. I'm sure I owe my career to it, I started programming computers from a lack of anything else to do.

New comment by throwyawayyyy in "We (As a Society) Peaked in the 90s"

throwyawayyyy — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:18:49 +0000

If you want to sum up the 90s in the UK for people like me who became adults then, it would be the song, "Things can only get better". A little embarrassing, yes? Naive? and yet there really was an optimism then. If things weren't great (and objectively it was a poorer country), they were getting better, and they could get better, and they would. Happiness is more about cake tomorrow than cake today, and in the 90s you really could believe it. Do we have that belief now? Managed decline, it feels like, is the best the UK can offer.

To make this a bit more pithy: in the 1990s we were excited about the coming 21st century. In 2025, do we think the 2030s are going to be better, really? Or are we looking down the barrels of one maturing catastrophe over another?