MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2026-02-28 17:24:46+00:00
> Reserves are irrelevant, you can’t pump oil from the ground at a moment notice and building the infrastructure requires long-term stability especially for oil infrastructure which is large and hard to protect.

Who says these are rational actors. I think it is a bit much for coincidence.

> Iran does x4 times the volume of Venezuela in oil and x10 in gas.

Until yesterday. We'll see whether their infrastructure is going to survive this war.

> The issue with Iran is that it’s selling energy outside of the US system.

I'm well aware of that.

> This was less of an issue 20 years ago when the persians needed to funnel the money back to the Western system at a cost so that they can access world trade. The situation changed today as they can mostly survive on China imports and completely bypass the US financial system. Iran has half the exports (in total value!) of Tunisia at x8-9 the population. Something doesn’t add up.

What doesn't add up is that there are a lot of parties that would like to see regime change in Iran, including a lot of Iranians. The question always is whether the fire that you light remains contained or not and Iran is very much not like Venezuela in that sense.

> That’s not how the world works.

I'm well aware of that too. But that doesn't change how I feel about it.

> The relative peace of the last 20 years or so was mostly because US hegemony was uncontested. This might be no longer the case.

In no small part because of the idiot-in-charge.

> Someone in the far East will be watching for opportunities.

And that's precisely why I think there is a massive potential for escalation here.
by vehemenz | 2026-02-28 17:24:52+00:00
No one disagrees that the Gazans feel the way they do. But your position is a stronger one. You seem to be excusing or justifying the moral behavior of Gazans in a way that looks self-undermining.

It’s not morally credible to focus on the Jews’ actions alone, given the broader context of the conflict, Islamic conquest and domination. I don’t want to be patronizing and give history lessons, but antisemitism, Jihadism, and other Islamicist extremist doctrines predate the state of Israel by centuries.
by mmustapic | 2026-02-28 17:24:56+00:00
By your own data, Apollo had 65% more money than SLS/Orion.

My point is, Apollo had a clear objective: put people on the moon. When that was achieved, they shut it down.

SLS objective is: do something NASA-like with astronauts, using current suppliers as much as possible, and better/larger than Apollo. Oh, we are going to ask you to change plans all the time.

So it's not about risk averse culture, or the decline of western civilisation, or something like that. The reason is that nobody cares about going to the moon. That shows in fuzzy requirements and much less money for it.

BTW, thanks for the hard numbers, it's a nice analysis.
by voxl | 2026-02-28 17:25:02+00:00
What makes you think that trend won't continue? In the Myspace era people constantly said "oh I know some html", now we will have people saying "oh I can make LLMs generate python"

Writing software has always been a skill with no ceiling. Writing software can be literally equivalent to doing research level mathematics. It can also be changing colors on a webpage. This is why I have never been worried about LLMs taking software jobs, but it is possible they will require the level of skill to be employable to spike.
by plagiarist | 2026-02-28 17:25:05+00:00
I enjoyed this a lot.

The interpolations between butterfly and snail were pretty horrifying. But something like Z-Image you could basically concatenate the text and end up with a normal image of both. Is the latent space for "butterfly and snail" just well off the path between the two individually?

It's hard to imagine what is nearby in latent space and how text contributes, so I did really like the section adding words to the prompt 1-by-1.
by mindslight | 2026-02-28 17:25:36+00:00
I'm not the one writing ever-longer screeds. Perhaps you need to reflect on your own anger here?

Factually, you have written a lot of things I do agree with. I'm not new to this rodeo. I've been around the left-right gamut. Reading and understanding Moldbug is actually what started the end of my rightist-fundamentalist phase.

I've never been friendly to this entrenched corporate power structure that backs both major parties as if they're betting on racehorses. I had been both sidesing up until June of 2020. I'm not sitting here going "How could anyone ever vote for Trump?!?!". In 2016, I was telling my blue tribe friends that he had a good chance of winning, as they stood there aghast.

But after an abject failure of a concrete term in office, where the guy basically never stopped divisively campaigning? Effective dereliction of duty when faced with a pan-political national emergency? If he had led us during Covid, like any other President of the past thirty years (and like most state governors tried to do), I suspect he would have had a shoe-in second term.

So voting for more of that in 2020 or 2024? That is embracing the exact hot mess of crazy that you're condemning here. Obviously the people who voted for him did not feel that way. But from everything I've been able to surmise this is due to their media sources making them think the Democrats are just as crazy. And from what I've seen the Democratic party itself is nowhere near as far gone as the Republican party - the prominent members are still basically milquetoast status-quo-supporting bureaucrats rather than having been taking over by a Trumpian strongman.

For example, one concrete data point:

> We can barely tell the differences between your two political parties.

Do you think a President Harris would be threatening war with Canada?
by senko | 2026-02-28 17:25:39+00:00
Yeah I did pour a lot of sweat and thinking into that codebase all those years ago.

When I do a drive-by edit, I probably don't remember it in a week.

Which is why the "cognitive debt" from the article is relevant, IMHO. If I just thoroughly review the plan and quickly scan the resulting code, will that have a strong enough imprint on my mind over time?

I would like to think "yes", my gut is telling me "no". IMHO the LLMs are now "good enough" for coding. These are hard questions we'll have to grapple with this in the next year or two (in context of AI-assisted software development).
by gengstrand | 2026-02-28 17:25:59+00:00
Thanks for writing this blog. Others are also starting to notice these impacts and writing about them. I believe that it is important for more voices to be heard.

What resonated most for me was the "Finding Your Threshold" section. Your "Developers need the dopamine hit of creation." is memorable. I have also blogged about this phenomenon at https://www.exploravention.com/blogs/soft_arch_agentic_ai/ but I frame it more as how leaders can help the organization arrive at a healthy and sustainable balance between writing and reviewing code.
by JasonADrury | 2026-02-28 17:26:49+00:00
So, are you saying that it's not justified for Gazans to feel the way they do? Why not?

> It’s not morally credible to focus on the Jews’ actions alone, given the broader context of the conflict, Islamic conquest and domination. I don’t want to be patronizing and give history lessons, but antisemitism, Jihadism, and other Islamicist extremist doctrines predate the state of Israel by centuries.

That's just whataboutism and has approximately nothing to do with the conflict started by the creation of the modern state of Israel.

The only people who you could reasonably blame besides the zionist jews are the other Europeans.
by Ruikhu | 2026-02-28 17:27:03+00:00
Hi — author here.
One clarification:
The goal is not to let an AI freely control a computer.
I built a fixed local action skill library.
Each skill is a deterministic OS operation (open app, switch window, run command, structured input).
The model does not generate UI steps or mouse actions.
It only selects a skill.
The gateway executes it.
So the LLM is making decisions, not performing motor control.
The computer isn’t remotely driven by the model —
the model chooses from a constrained set of allowed actions.
This is mainly an experiment in making computer-using agents more predictable and auditable.
I’d especially value thoughts from people working on agent safety.
by skybrian | 2026-02-28 17:27:08+00:00
It's unclear whether the price increases we saw for ride sharing (for example) will come to AI. There's plenty of competition and not much in the way of lock-in. And by the time the bubble is over, the underlying costs may have dropped due to improved algorithms.

It might be more like personal computing in the 80's, when Moore's law resulted in both more usage and cheaper prices as the tech improved.
by ecocentrik | 2026-02-28 17:27:43+00:00
I think the problem might actually be with reenforcing the red lines. The events of the last few weeks and this new deal only make sense if Anthropic was trying to find out how Palantir and the Pentagon had circumvented their restrictions to attempt to reenforce those restrictions like company actually concerned about the misuse of their product. OpenAI most likely came in with assurances that they wouldn't attempt to reinforce their restrictions.
by bodobolero | 2026-02-28 17:27:44+00:00
I canceled my ChatGPT subscription and switched to Lumo Plus subscription https://lumo.proton.me/about
I also considered https://mistral.ai/products/le-chat

Both are based in Europe but Proton Lumo has the better privacy promises.

Would be interested in experiences of others with those alternatives for question/answering type research (not for coding for which there exist other, better alternatives like Gemini and Claude)
by shihab | 2026-02-28 17:27:50+00:00
I brought up Israeli-American donors because that’s what is relevant in the context of the story we’re discussing. We are talking about a war many right wing Israelis wanted for decades. If it were a general discussion about Citizens United and I focused on lobbying from only this group, perhaps your argument would have carried water.

Anyway, here’s Trump himself detailing the extraordinary access to White House this lobbying bought Adelsons:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-salutes-mega-donor-mi...
by torton | 2026-02-28 17:28:00+00:00
Apparently, OpenAI already folded.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/27/tech/openai-pentagon-deal-ai-...

A unified front from tech companies could have stood a chance, but there's too much money to be made and the imbalance of power is too great without departing the area of influence of the US government entirely (and then go where? China, UK, Australia, etc. are equally not shy of coercing commercial capabilities in pursuit of government goals, including military goals).
by cyrusradfar | 2026-02-28 17:28:29+00:00
There's a 3-second debounce. Don't hold me to that timeframe, that's the default now.

It doesn't read the file the instant the OS fires the event. It accumulates events and waits for 3 seconds of silence before reading. So if an editor does write-tmp → rename (atomic save), or a tool writes in chunks, we only read after the dust settles.

I accept there are cases if the editor crashes mid-state that you have a corrupted state but there was never a good state to save, so, arguably you'd just restore to what's on file and remove the corrupt partial write.

It's not bulletproof against a program that holds a file open and writes to it continuously for more than 3 seconds, but in practice that doesn't happen with text files by Agent tools or IDEs.

Feel free to follow up for clarity.
by doug-moen | 2026-02-28 17:28:31+00:00
GNOME OS and KDE Linux are both specialized distros that primarily exist to test GNOME and KDE. They aren't for general users, and both web sites warn you not to rely on them. And they impose limitations on your ability to install arbitrary 3rd party software, whereas Fedora Atomic Desktop lets you customize the system without such limitations. Fedora Atomic lets me install arbitrary RPMs into the base system.

"quite a bit easier to extend" sounds good to me, but the "easier" here refers to the internal system implementation details? I am an end user, not a Linux distro system architect, and I care more about the user experience. I will be interested in test driving a general purpose OS based on this technology, whenever that happens in the future. Since Red Hat is involved in the UAPI project, perhaps Fedora Atomic Desktop will migrate to this technology in the future?
by xvector | 2026-02-28 17:28:34+00:00
There is no satisfying some people. Anthropic took a stand that will likely be the end of them. Still, there's a whole
list of other things you want them to do before they meet your moral bar.

Realistically, they can never meet your bar no matter what because you have decided "they are scum". You hold this view despite never actually talking with anyone at Anthropic or engaging their views in good faith.

To answer your question directly: Staking your existence on your principles against a vindictive government is a much bigger deal than pirating some books.
by osigurdson | 2026-02-28 17:28:48+00:00
I think we might as well just go all in at this point: "LGTM, LLM". The industry always overshoots and then self-corrects later. Therefore, maybe the right thing to do is help it get to a more sane equilibrium is to forget about the code altogether and focus on other ways to constrain it / ensure correctness and/or determine better ways to know when comprehension is needed vs optional.

What I don't like is the impossible middle ground where people are asked to 20X their output while taking full responsibility for 100% of the code at the same time. That is the kind of magical thinking that I am certain the market will eventually delete. You have to either give up on comprehension or accept a modest, 20% productivity boost at best.
by Muromec | 2026-02-28 17:29:30+00:00
>replace it with a quasi-state, which exists mainly to interface with other the entities

I don't exactly disagree with that assessment and I think you should stay vigilant for that indeed. What I'm saying, that selling a hot potato to get cash is the opposite of what oligarchs are known to do. I could be that it's but a step to buy something else with oligarchic intentions in mind, but alternatively it could a normal westerner money-handling behavior.

>they are the company and state and the company is the service or product, so anyone interfacing with the product or service within the state is handing them their money.

That doesn't contradict what I wrote or at least meant. The asset in question is not the means of laundering, but a pretext for extracting money from everyone unfortunate enough to live in the forsaken place.

The laundering part usually comes when the oligarch wants to safeguard their own money from political risks, which they do by keeping the funds in a place that is outside of their (and their potential rivals) political influence. Otherwise, once the political balance shifts, the money is just gone, because no laws exist to guard it anymore. I'm not sure what this "outside" place could be for Americans, but could guess (with no confidence in the answer at all), it's either Swiss or Gulf banks. Maybe UK or whatnot. Some structures that have a combination of impartiality to their disputes, strong enough property and privacy regimes, but with zero to none ethical constrains to walk away from it.
by Jtsummers | 2026-02-28 17:29:54+00:00
I'm glad someone else remembers. Desert Storm was fast (kind of) because it had a limited objective: Repel an invading army from another nation. It did not lead to an invasion (long term) of Iraq. Comparing any war with the objective of regime change to Desert Storm reveals that the commenter is grossly ignorant of recent history (36 years ago, it's not that far back to be so ignorant).

Desert Storm also wasn't really fast, it led to containment operations lasting a bit over a decade in total, ending only when we decided to invade Iraq with the objective of regime change and nation building. And that one, predictably, turned into a quagmire.
by mentalgear | 2026-02-28 17:30:06+00:00
Maybe you are right. Also, turns out Altman was just doing the Altman thing all along.

"On the very same day that Altman offered public support to Amodei, he signed a deal to take away Amodei’s business, with a deal that wasn’t all that different. You can’t get more Altman than that."

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/the-whole-thing-was-scam
by bikelang | 2026-02-28 17:30:30+00:00
It’s hard to keep the minutiae in your memory over a long period of time - but I certainly remember the high level details. Patterns, types, interfaces, APIs, architectural decisions. This is why I write comments and have thorough tests - the documentation of the minutiae is critical and gives guardrails when refactoring.

I absolutely feel the cognitive debt with our codebase at work now. It’s not so much that we are churning out features faster with ai (although that is certainly happening) - but we are tackling much more complex work that previously we would have said No to.
by mrighele | 2026-02-28 17:30:37+00:00
The countries in middle east want Iran to be weak, not to fall.

I think that from the point of the neighbouring countries, Iran is fine as it is. Israel and the USA keep it in check, it is under sanctions, which are both beneficial for its adversaries.

If the regime in Iran were to fall, first of all you would have repercussions on the neighbors, (refugees and the like), and instability. But also, in the longer run, the chance of a more better government, which could make the country stronger than it is.
by cat_plus_plus | 2026-02-28 17:30:41+00:00
The problem is that Google treats its customers as college kids who can be banned from a college maker lab for using too much 3D filament rather than entrepreneurs who are trusting their livelyhood to a service provider that promises to be reliable. If War Department uses too many Gemini tokens, do they cut them off, make them go through recertification process and permaban the next time around?

Which means that anyone serious about AI and not going local route should be using a provider with better reputation. I don't know if Alibaba, Z.ai or moonshots AI are also known for hair trigger responses, could be decent options for coding AI otherwise? If not, time to look for smaller providers with good reputation?
by galangalalgol | 2026-02-28 17:31:05+00:00
Yeah after reading more on each of the Pakistani conflicts it does seem that the immediate cause in each case was Pakistan. You made me change my mind on that one. I'm sure the whole thing is far more complicated than anyone who didn't live through the split could understand, but it does seem India is not the aggressor in any of those cases. Sri lanka seems like India's equivalent to Afghanistan or at worst Gaza, so relatively speaking it isn't on par with Ukraine for instance. Sikkim I don't fully understand, but it seems analogous to conquest.
by throwaway346434 | 2026-02-28 17:31:11+00:00
So, you have a duty of care to make a safe workplace, at least in most countries.

Consider what a job with no joy means for the ongoing mental health of your staff, where the main interaction they have all day is with an AI model that the person has to boss around; with little training on norms.
Depression, frustration, nonchalance, isolation, and corner cutting are going to be the likely responses.

So at the same time as you introduce new tooling, introduce the quality controls you would expect for someone utterly checked out of the process, and the human resources policies or prevention to avoid your team speed running Godwin's law because they dont deal with people enough to remember social niceties are important.

Examples off of the top of my head of ways to do this are:
- Increased socialisation in the design processes. Mandatory fun sucks, a whiteboard party and collaboration will bring some creativity and shared ownership.
- Budget for AI minimal or free periods, where the intent is to do a chunk of work "the hard way"; and have people share what they experienced or learnt
- Make people test each other's work (manual testing) or collaborate, otherwise you will have a dysfunctional team who reaches for "yell in all caps to make sure the prompt sticks" as the way people talk to each other/deal with conflict.

The way to justify this to management above you is the cost of staff retention - advertise, interview, hire, pay market rates, equip, train, followed 6 months later by securely off boarding, hardware return, exit interview means you get maybe 4 months productivity out of each person, and pay 2 months salary in all of the early job mistakes or late job not caring, or HR debacle.
Do you or your next level up want to spend 30% more time doing this process? Or would you rather focus on generating revenue with a team that works well together and are on board for the long term?

The answer most of the time is "we want to make money, not spend it". So do the math on what staff replacement costs are and then argue for building in enough slack to the process that it costs about half of that to maintain it/train the staff/etc.

Your company is now making a "50% efficiency gain" in the HR funnel, year over year, all by simply... not turning the dial up to 10 on forced AI usage.

Framed like that, sounds a lot better doesn't it?
by politician | 2026-02-28 17:31:23+00:00
This is a decent approach. My concern with TDD is that writing tests necessarily implies designing an API upon which those tests operate. Here, the agent is instructed to "not write code, write tests", and yet, in doing so it defines an API. This will cause the AI to hallucinate the API. Layering in yet more tests on top of this will cause that API to deform in strange ways that pass tests but that the adversary will not be able to cope with because it runs too late in the VSDD process.

I've seen this exact process play out in my own work. The AI generates code and tests that pass with high code coverage and honors invariants set by spec. I look at the code and find a rats nest / ball of mud that will cost 10x more tokens to enhance should I ever need to add a feature.

So, I think you're on to something, but I think the process might be discounting extensibility and resilience under change.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-28 17:31:31+00:00
> answer my questions

Which ones?

You provided a 50:50 stats without any sort of reasoning or an argument. I asked what does it mean, and you completely ignored my question, but mentioned that Gaza is an open prison (which is not, as Palestinians can leave and come back, as many did pre-2023 war), and somehow said that if people are “oppressed”, it is okay for them to commit atrocities.

Now, I would expect that you as a Pole would be able to tell the difference between Warsaw ghetto and Gaza. I wonder why you choose this false equivalence: Jews did not attack Germany from Warsaw Ghetto, they did not launch rockets, kidnapped German civilians and kept them in captivity, jews could not leave.

> as a Pole its sad to see so many jews get behind a fascist like Bibi. living in NYC i don't feel safer today and i don't see how the whole world turning on israel is good for jews long term

And this is the fault of the jews, right? And not the people who make jews not safe?
by wrs | 2026-02-28 17:31:32+00:00
“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute." — Harold Abelson

The purpose of high level languages is to make the structure of the code and data structures more explicit so it better captures the “actual” program model, which is in the mind of the programmer. Structured programming, type systems, modules, etc. are there to provide solid abstractions in which to express that model.

None of that applies to giving an LLM a feature idea in English and letting it run. (Though all of it is helpful for keeping an LLM from going completely off the rails.)