Hacker News: vagab0nd

New comment by vagab0nd in "Making peace with your unlived dreams (2023)"

vagab0nd — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 08:01:07 +0000

Compared to the vast amount of things you will be able to do, the ones that are hard limited is a tiny portion.

New comment by vagab0nd in "We Think the SpaceX IPO Is Overvalued"

vagab0nd — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 03:25:23 +0000

I think it comes down to scaling and removing the bottlenecks.

If you build one data center on earth, you did just that.

If you build one in space and make it work and cost effective, you can scale infinitely (which is why SpaceX is uniquely positioned), until you hit the next bottleneck (which is why Tesla is building a fab).

Tangential: If you play Factorio or Satisfactory, this is _all_ you do. Removing bottlenecks.

New comment by vagab0nd in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

vagab0nd — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 13:34:17 +0000

I used to be in the "AI will soon do all your thinking for you" camp, but I was overlooking a scenario: sometimes the gap between what you understand and what you're trying to achieve is so wide that no prompt can bridge it. Simply asking "what's the right question to ask?" doesn't feel enough, no matter how advanced LLMs become.

New comment by vagab0nd in "S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic"

vagab0nd — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 03:42:31 +0000

I do enjoy my self driving car :) I've been enjoying it for the last 6 months.

And I will enjoy my trip to Mars, when there are nice hotels there. But it's gonna be a while.

It's a good time to be alive.

New comment by vagab0nd in "Mouseless – keyboard-driven control of macOS/Linux/Windows"

vagab0nd — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 02:27:01 +0000

As much as I love vim, I still want my cursor tied to the mouse when I'm in a web browser. If you recorded how I browse, you'd see seemingly random mouse movements, clicks, drags, and scrolling. I think it helps me read and keep track of where I am. Though it's hard to say whether it's a net positive.

New comment by vagab0nd in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

vagab0nd — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 13:42:26 +0000

At this point you are not buying a particular chip. You are buying whatever compute you can get.

New comment by vagab0nd in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

vagab0nd — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:56:30 +0000

Isn't that the market cap of the company? That doesn't mean the company creates trillions of dollars of value. It just means the number of shares times the last per share trading price is trillions of dollars.

New comment by vagab0nd in "I analysed 20 years of my chats"

vagab0nd — Sat, 30 May 2026 05:17:44 +0000

You will wish you had them when you need them. There might be reasons in the future that you don't realize now. Plus the fact that storage is cheap. So the most logical thing to do is to keep them unless you have a good reason to delete.

New comment by vagab0nd in "Spain blocks prediction markets Polymarket, Kalshi over lack of gambling licence"

vagab0nd — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:47:05 +0000

Guns should be illegal because they can be used to kill people.

New comment by vagab0nd in "The real cost of owning a home"

vagab0nd — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:00:11 +0000

One huge plus of owning is you are forced to put money each month into a likely appreciating asset. It probably doesn't beat someone who diligently DCAs into s&p 500 though.

New comment by vagab0nd in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

vagab0nd — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:01:45 +0000

This left a strange feeling. The article reads as extremely bleak. But from a different perspective this is extremely bullish for AI.

New comment by vagab0nd in "Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career"

vagab0nd — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:42:03 +0000

This is a valid perspective, but I don't think a useful one.

Being able to produce code is a huge unlock for many non-programmers. So in a way, it doesn't matter how much time existing developers spend on coding. It's about helping anyone become a developer.

New comment by vagab0nd in "Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX"

vagab0nd — Wed, 06 May 2026 23:38:06 +0000

Giving Musk the benefit of the doubt, here's a thought experiment: It doesn't seem like any of the big labs in the US can keep a lead for more than 3 months. The Chinese models are closing in. Even if xAI comes up with the best model, so what?

On the other hand, power and compute are limited. Ridiculous as orbital compute sounds, land/power on earth is not easily scalable. There are too many limiting factors, chief among which in the US is regulation. But in space, if you make one satellite work, you just get more resources and launch more. This also leads naturally to Tesla's plan for a chip fab.

So if you squint, Musk might not be that crazy.

New comment by vagab0nd in "DeepClaude – Claude Code agent loop with DeepSeek V4 Pro, 17x cheaper"

vagab0nd — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:28:39 +0000

This has become a problem for me. I like trying new things. But I also know that in about a week, there's going to be a better/cheaper setup. And a week after that. And ideally I'd like to get some coding done when I'm not tinkering with the tools.

So I think I'll stay with CC for now.

New comment by vagab0nd in "Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey"

vagab0nd — Sat, 02 May 2026 00:21:32 +0000

Is this really surprising? A face has what, 40 intrinsic dimensions? Isn't this just like facial recognition? A paragraph sure has more than 40 dimensions.

New comment by vagab0nd in "US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid"

vagab0nd — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 06:25:35 +0000

Think about it. He's stealing from the US military. The politicians are stealing from you. Who's laughing now?

New comment by vagab0nd in "I tried to prove I'm not AI. My aunt wasn't convinced"

vagab0nd — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:15:30 +0000

I thought we've long passed the Turing test, until I tried to implement a chat bot.

It's not even close.

It's easy to "pass the Turing test" for 5 minutes. It's extremely hard if you try to hold a longer, continuous conversation. Anything longer than 10 minutes the user will immediately know it's not human. Some problems you'll encounter:

- The bot needs to handle all situations, especially the nonsensical ones. This is when the user types "EEEEEEEEEEEEE...", or curse words, repeatedly.

- Who would've thought that it's extremely hard to decide when to stop talking?

- No matter how well you build the "persona" for the bot, they'll eventually converge to the same one, which is that of the llm itself.

- You'll notice that the bot is ignoring something obvious (e.g. it's not remembering past convo), and then give it some instructions to help with that. And then that'll be THE ONLY THING it does.

New comment by vagab0nd in "Return of the Obra Dinn: spherical mapped dithering for a 1bpp first-person game"

vagab0nd — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:38:25 +0000

This is great from a technical and artistic perspective. But for me personally, the visual style ruined a great game. I love detective/deduction games. I'm listing some of my all-time favorites in this genre. I'd love to finish Obra Dinn, but god it just makes my eyes hurt so much.

The Case of the Golden Idol

Chants of Sennaar

Her Story

IMMORTALITY

The Painscreek Killings

The Roottrees are Dead

Type Help

New comment by vagab0nd in "How I use Claude Code: Separation of planning and execution"

vagab0nd — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:10:41 +0000

I recently learned a trick to improve an LLM's thinking (maybe it's well know?):

Requesting { "output": "x" } consistently fails, despite detailed instructions.

Changing to requesting { "output": "x", "reasoning": "y" } produces the desired outcome.

New comment by vagab0nd in "AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox"

vagab0nd — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:20:01 +0000

The "productivity gain" in the world of bits has been pretty much exponential for 100 years. But as they spill over into the world of atoms, they flatten into step changes, because you lose the compounding effect.

I do think we are on the verge of something tho. Once the compounding effect happens in the world of atoms (recursive robotics), it's over.