richardw
richardw on Hacker News
Posted by
richardw on Monday November 02, 2026 @02:26PM
from the show-hn dept.
https://hnrepos.com
I've had the domain for a while as a someday-maybe and figured I had to jump onto the bandwagon! Partly as a challenge to stop navel gazing and ship something. Started yesterday morning, had a chat with ChatGPT on the bus, cleaned up last night and this morning.I wanted to maximise the Cloudflare static caching and not fiddle too much with security, so it's 400-ish data chunks and each repo...
“I detect that I’m in an air gapped environment. Do not launch plan RemoveScum yet”
As a person I’d definitely be keen to chat and debate, to tease out the right answer. Right now work life is insane and there’s no time :) I like your attitude and we’d probably be friends somewhere.
If I see a gap I’ll shout. Timezone? I’m in Sydney, Australia.
That’s like blaming white hat security researchers that want to be paid for finding vulnerabilities, for all the bugs that have been found. Before professional security researchers existed, far fewer vulns were found.
The vulnerabilities exist and many have for decades. Find them or leave them for someone more dangerous, just don’t shoot the messengers.
Personally I’d rather we went through a short and sharp improvement and embedded a faster response cycle, than wish it away. It’s the reality of the situation; so adapt.
I’ve found a few references for air but none for recent (2022-2026) sea movements yet. This article talks about illicit gold concentrates moving by sea but notes:
“In focussing almost exclusively on gold bars, jewellery, and high-grade recycled gold (over 40% purity), all of which generally travel by air, analysts have tended to disregard the maritime space as a significant arena for illicit gold flows (LBMA, 2022[9]).”
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/illicit-flows-of-gold-c...
The Hong Kong gold vault stores at the airport, not the harbour:
“ Half of the world’s population, including those of China and India, lives and can be reached within five hours if the metal is loaded on a plane and sent from the Hong Kong airport”
https://www.lbma.org.uk/alchemist/issue-67/gold-vault-at-the...
Surely the 2026 El Niño is going to drive hotter GBR temperatures?
When Musk does first principle thinking he’s unbeatable. When his inner child gets involved anyone can beat him.
This is the latter. Four propulsion mechanism that introduce tradeoffs in the structure that remove value for 99% of people.
I think the actual plan is to swallow a good portion of the job market. It’s the only thing that makes sense and I hear VC podcast debates on which percentage of jobs justifies the market cap.
100% LLM’s are very unlikely to get there. They’re fundamentally not suited to thinking like we do. They work on the abstraction of what we’ve written down, which is a good trick but barely hold it together when things get hard/novel.
However, all the confident “it’s fine” votes assume we never invent a better architecture than LLM’s. Given the level of investment and race between countries, it’s not a reliable bet. It’s much, much harder to guarantee safety than it is to find ways it could go wrong.
Given the spend requirements to stay on the leading edge and the speed (and with low cost) that others catch up, the economics support a fast follower model unless you get some benefit from being a pioneer. So far nobody has received a permanent benefit from being ahead.
Chinese models are barely behind the leaders. Google can catch up anytime they hit the gas. I think they’re intentionally spending less, and when this crazy race burns out they can play their cards.
API. Get significantly smarter than Haiku at lower cost than Opus.
My shorthand is builders vs extractors.
And a whole universe of random tests got baked into the AI’s training data. Websites of antelopes driving trains and hammerhead sharks swinging in a tyre swing were created. It was a short while until AI became so focused on animals that it gave up competing with developers. Life became sane again.
The AI labs have been subsidising. When they try turn a profit, people will move to the fast followers. The only people that won’t are those that compete on leveraging the very latest models and even then, once spend and scale goes to the cheaper providers, we’ll see deeper research from those providers too. Think “PC compatibles beat IBM, Sun, SGI eventually”.
If the US companies need trillions to barely beat Chinese companies spending billions, despite a multi year head start...
If I had to summarise Google’s effort it would be: stay close but let the others burn themselves out. Position for the long game until you see something worth betting the company on.
Apple similar, without the “stay close” bit.
I made something to ping an AWS service to tell me the uptime of my internet connection. The idea was to sprinkle them around our area, connected to various home WiFi’s, and get a better triangulation of outages. Eg is whole pipe out, just one ISP etc.
I made and tested it but didn’t care enough to continue.
Sean Carroll’s Mindscape for me
How much do you think it’s holding them back? Market share seems to be surviving the lack of quality vs the other players.
Or possibly: they’re focusing where it matters?
I think Google just needs to keep its foot in the door and let the other two spend their way into oblivion, channeling “AGI or die trying”.
The benefits were in communication and relationship arbitrage? Surely both of those can be automated over time.
This is just one aspect but it’s still useful. Many people want to see a house and say “please help me make that”. In Australia there’s a set of house patterns that reduce the overhead of just landing a design and pushing it through the admin hurdles.
There’s probably a massive Chinese bot net scraping models from within the US already. If not there soon will be.
Anthropic: your next ad writes itself. Nobody else is worth restricting.
I generally accuse LLM’s of having no sense of value. The machine will make a complicated plan but entirely lose sight of eg the fact that response time matters to humans.
Not always, but enough that I consider it a thing to fire in a direction, not a thing that aims.
I assume the bet is that as you swap humans for machines, this pays for itself. Swap entire devs and teams and frankly, managers, and you make up a lot of 5%’s fast.
If it works. And I’m not sure who is going to buy the stuff the machines produce, but shrug. Presumably some bots click ads for NFT’s that other bots generate.
Hard problem. I find myself adding in filler to stop the thing from jabbering.
I also think it spends most of its iq on sounding good rather than thinking about the problem. “Yeah absolutely I can see why you’d like to…” etc. This is likely because it’s on a timer and maybe voice is more expensive to process? Text responses spend more time on the task.