Hacker News: twoodfin

New comment by twoodfin in "GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone"

twoodfin — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 22:26:30 +0000

They’re making fun of the frustration of trying to use ChatGPT purely through text for these tasks.

Like I said, it’s too subtle a deliberate self-own.

New comment by twoodfin in "GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone"

twoodfin — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:34:09 +0000

They're making the point—apparently too subtly—that text alone is a highly limiting "UI" for many tasks. So it's great that GPT-6 can now communicate in a a richer interactive medium.

New comment by twoodfin in "The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)"

twoodfin — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 22:03:43 +0000

People naturally get hung up on the syntax and the interop story with existing popular languages, but it’s the object model differences between Smalltalk, Objective-C, Self, C++… that really matter.

ref: https://www.abebooks.com/9780201834543/Object-Model-Lippman-...

New comment by twoodfin in "Web Search API"

twoodfin — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:47:11 +0000

Not joking: They need to figure out how to sell ads for agents first.

Google Search only works as a business because human eyeballs see (and brains choose to click on) ads at rates that justify advertisers’ (massive in aggregate) dollars.

New comment by twoodfin in "Religious scholars met with Anthropic"

twoodfin — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 03:54:14 +0000

Personally, I’d like to experience a low-end tasting menu restaurant.

New comment by twoodfin in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

twoodfin — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 03:15:10 +0000

Sure, but prior to AWS introducing a notion of “project”, then they’d be at risk for those $1M bills from the data science team looking for agentic magic to reduce readmissions.

My point is this was never as simple as, “Give me a dial to set my maximum account spend.”

New comment by twoodfin in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

twoodfin — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 03:03:45 +0000

I imagine that the product folks at places like AWS are averse to introducing discontinuities in the experience based on scale. Little customers get the same experience as big customers who get the same experience as mega customers.

Obviously they’ve changed their mind about cost management in light of the scale and dynamism of agents, which isn’t too surprising.

New comment by twoodfin in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

twoodfin — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 02:53:20 +0000

This is the right perspective, but the folks who would be setting this cap for the customers that matter likely have no idea how to price that, or the price would be so absurd as to make the cap meaningless.

How much would a hospital pay to avoid unexpected downtime of their software systems?

New comment by twoodfin in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

twoodfin — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 02:51:03 +0000

For a large enterprise spending millions on AWS, 1.5X is already a budgetary disaster. Unfortunately, shutting off critical IT infra because it hit 1.4X spend this month is a business disaster.

There’s no magic wand that produces good outcomes when planning or execution goes awry at scale.

New comment by twoodfin in "We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything"

twoodfin — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 02:01:08 +0000

This is one of those features that customers think they want without having thought it through:

“Never let me spend more than $X” also means, “Shut down my business-critical app/service/solution at 2 am on a Sunday morning because Joel in IT forgot to plan for the new report runs.”

The product design work to let customers have the first thing without risk of major pain from the second thing is non-trivial.

New comment by twoodfin in "From the creator of Redis; run LLM locally with ds4"

twoodfin — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 20:41:33 +0000

https://github.com/antirez/ds4

The project GitHub page is a much better introduction for the hn crowd.

New comment by twoodfin in "Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met"

twoodfin — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 12:30:43 +0000

“In , the Feds could derive this automatically and just send me a postcard.”

“No, they can’t.”

“But they should be able to!”

Personally, I don’t want a battered wife fleeing her husband to have to file a form with the IRS for tax purposes, but mostly I’m just tired of this kind of hn thread.

New comment by twoodfin in "Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met"

twoodfin — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 01:58:01 +0000

Literally everything could be derived automatically by the government in current year…

The Earned Income Tax Credit is one of the most important transfers embedded in the tax code. It provides about $70B to low-income workers every year.

Take a look at the eligibility criteria:

https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/earned-in...

You can claim the EITC if you are married, not filing a joint return, had a qualifying child who lived with you for more than half of the tax year and either of the following apply.

- You lived apart from your spouse for the last 6 months of tax year, or

- You were legally separated according to your state law under a written separation agreement, or a decree of separate maintenance and you didn't live in the same household as your spouse at the end of the tax year.

…

You can claim the head of household filing status if you're not married, had a qualifying child living with you more than half the year, and you paid more than half the costs of keeping up your home.

No, the government can’t derive this all “automatically”.

New comment by twoodfin in "The AI Race Just Got Awkward"

twoodfin — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 16:25:36 +0000

This looks like a speed run of the history of analytics DBMS’s.

Once upon a time, everyone had a secret sauce in network or data encoding or query optimization, but in the last ~10 years computational physics and economics have basically decided the “correct” architecture and everyone (including OSS) has converged.

New comment by twoodfin in "DraftKings is using AI to behaviorally target chronic gamblers"

twoodfin — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:59:27 +0000

Education has plenty of funding. Per pupil K-12 spending has grown relentlessly higher than inflation for decades.

New comment by twoodfin in "Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election"

twoodfin — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 02:04:23 +0000

Censorship by elected governments is OK?

New comment by twoodfin in "Meta Blocks President Lula's Facebook Page, Campaign Ads 2 Weeks from Election"

twoodfin — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 11:29:27 +0000

So actual government censorship.

New comment by twoodfin in "ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026"

twoodfin — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 02:17:18 +0000

France has a PPP-adjusted GDP per capita that’s much closer to Russia than it is to the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

New comment by twoodfin in "Toyota is taking the Corolla electric"

twoodfin — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 21:01:56 +0000

Well, they just pushed it back to 2028.

New comment by twoodfin in "Toyota is taking the Corolla electric"

twoodfin — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 01:58:46 +0000

VW is planning a slightly modified 2027 model after skipping 2026.

My wife bought one of the first edition models. Other than the lousy range, it’s incredibly cool.