Hacker News: tootie

New comment by tootie in "Why tech bosses keep sharing their manifestos about AI"

tootie — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 20:58:22 +0000

Zuck's was weird. Andreesen's was just awful. Basically saying that nobody had any right to restrict him and other tech bros from raking in unlimited money doing whatever they wanted and that a bit of fascism couldn't hurt. He literally didn't give a single thing to be optimistic about. Just painted him as an absolute villain.

New comment by tootie in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

tootie — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:21:07 +0000

Cap the price of Wigan kebabs at £2

New comment by tootie in "Grok 4.6"

tootie — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:25:57 +0000

These are all bots and shills

New comment by tootie in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

tootie — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 19:05:36 +0000

I've been hearing about quitting tech to open a bakery forever. I even know several people who did it long before ChatGPT. It's the nature of any corporate job. The politics and focus on shareholder value are incompatible with most human ethos.

New comment by tootie in "Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork"

tootie — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 13:59:35 +0000

I think you're right and I think it's why Google have taken their pedal off the metal for model releases to focus on integrations and tools. And why Microsoft have backed off from the OpenAI partnership to do the same. Anthropic and OpenAI are going to massively struggle to maintain their pace and reach profitability just selling commodity tokens.

Fine tunes are a possibility but I think it offers very little uplift for the vast majority of uses beyond just stuffing enough context.

New comment by tootie in "BMW Spider-Man in-car advertising"

tootie — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 04:35:20 +0000

No coincidence, BMW and Samsung did product placement in the movie too. Very conspicuously.

New comment by tootie in "Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots"

tootie — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:10:45 +0000

I think domestic robots will make a lot of incremental progress and that few, if any, will be humanoid. We'll see a laundry folder and sock picker-upper and they'll be more like roombas or just big cubes. And tethered.

New comment by tootie in "GM Backs Sodium Ion Batteries for U.S. Grid Storage"

tootie — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:24:57 +0000

> Peak Energy is buying its commercial cells via contracts with Chinese suppliers

So really just assembly and sales then. I suppose it's a good start and maybe if business takes off they can figure out their own cells.

New comment by tootie in "Does creatine make you smarter?"

tootie — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 01:45:53 +0000

Not to suggest diagnosis on the internet to people I haven't met, but for me chronic insomnia was actually narcolepsy. Ironic given that it's disease known for excess sleep, but the actual core issue is broken sleep structure. I had actually been supplementing with creatine for the past 6 months or so and recently gave it up. If it was having any effect it was marginal at best. The only thing that works is pharmaceuticals.

New comment by tootie in "No link between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and adverse birth outcomes"

tootie — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:38:55 +0000

And yet I still see MAHA defenders even on HN.

New comment by tootie in "Short sellers notch $8.7B profit as SpaceX shares dip to IPO price"

tootie — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 00:56:57 +0000

Like much new technology, it evades regulations. Hyperscalers are getting crushed by popular backlash and resource constraints. And like typically nerds they'd rather dream up a massively overengineered solution rather than face their responsibility as human beings.

New comment by tootie in "Grok Build is open source"

tootie — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 14:40:36 +0000

They've still managed to capture a slice of government business because they have explicitly aligned themselves with one of the two major American political parties.

New comment by tootie in "Weightlifting beats running for blood sugar control, researchers find"

tootie — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:18:13 +0000

It's funny you should say that because I had to stop rowing due to repetitive strain on my ankle.

New comment by tootie in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

tootie — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 02:40:09 +0000

On twitter yesterday, someone posted a question about SpaceX/xAI making a poor financial decision and Musk answered saying SpaceX will be worth more than the rest of the Earth. His megalomania is really running wild so I would not put much stock in this. They are asking the FCC for permission to launch 100k satellites which puts this very much in the "aspirational" category. They neither have plans nor approval to do it. This is a combination of ego and signalling to SPCX investors because it's down nearly 10% from IPO.

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:57vlzz2...

New comment by tootie in "Mistral's Robostral Navigate: a state of the art robotics navigation model"

tootie — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:47:48 +0000

It's potentially a great strategy. They can't keep up with Antropic and OpenAI in pure horsepower, but there's just tons of applications for which you don't need that much power and it's better to optimize for speed and energy.

New comment by tootie in "What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots""

tootie — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:41:10 +0000

I think "imposed" is a pretty fair word. LLMs already affect everyone's lives whether you use them or not and their footprint is still growing. It's like I don't have to buy a car, but cars are absolutely imposed on everyone anyway.

New comment by tootie in "Job seekers giving up: Labor force participation falls to lowest in 50 years"

tootie — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:04:14 +0000

Prime age is meant to filter college kids and retirees which makes sense but it is likely hiding the minor crisis in hiring for college grads. But I agree it's not disastrous just a yellow flag. The 20 year bull market has minted a lot of millionaires amongst the upper middle class and a lot of them are retiring early.

New comment by tootie in "Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place"

tootie — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:40:50 +0000

Every system ever has been a patchwork. Dodd-Frank and it's orderly liquidation rules are a genuine benefit. We had a commercial bank collapse a few years ago and there was no contagion.

New comment by tootie in "Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place"

tootie — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:22:26 +0000

Crypto has utterly failed as a currency. In that regard it's been dead for over a decade. If btc or eth were currency they'd be considered dead by deflationary spiral which is more or less what every economist predicted from the start. Some people got rich by investing but getting rich off of currency speculation is generally awful for people who rely on that currency to live. Crypto has been a success the same way The Room was a successful movie.

New comment by tootie in "Crypto in 2026: Oh, This Is the Bad Place"

tootie — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:18:02 +0000

Honestly as much as people complain the US Federal Reserve really just proved their enormous value and thoroughly vindicated fiat currency. The financial crisis of 2007-8 should have been a new Depression and it wasn't. Instead we've seen uninterrupted growth for close to 20 years. Markets have really internalized that the US economy is indestructible and the Fed will always protect us from disaster. Will it last forever? Of course not. But like Keynes said, "in the long run, we're all dead".