HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

brookst

15,491 karma · joined September 10, 2022

Product manager, CNC ceramicist, amateur musician, generalist.

https://github.com/brookstalley

brooks@tangentry.com

submissionscomments
brookst··on Read the letter the FBI sent MLK to try to convince him to kill himself (2014)
If you’re having to look through layers and layers of jargon, misdirection, and plausible deniability to find the toxicity, is it possible there’s a roarscach element to it?
brookst··on DoorDash to Acquire Instacart
Look up commissary kitchens. A ton of food is made that way, and I don’t see it as being all that different.

And the DD-specific kitchen I know is basically just a typical restaurant kitchen minus attached dining. You can make slop in an industrial park, you can make slop in a real restaurant (I’ve certainly experienced that).

Why in the world would it be necessary to have dining tables for a kitchen to make good food?

brookst··on Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
Just following orders, eh?
brookst··on Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
He’s stolen billions of dollars and is too senile to protect it. Everyone’s angling for a piece of the grift.
brookst··on Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
Do you think Google should serve customers or politicians?

As a user I want the map names I know, not whatever BS some egomaniac politician announced yesterday.

brookst··on DoorDash to Acquire Instacart
Yeah mixed blessing at best. Increased volume, but not every 30-table restaurant is set up to do much more; kitchens are sized to expected in-person dining.

And all the stuff you mention.

The one restaurant owner I know who’s happy with DD set up an entirely separate kitchen in an industrial park. But to get to the DD revenue necessary to justify that investment, he had a couple of years of DD hell in his main restaurant.

brookst··on Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model
Tool calls don’t sent the full transcript? I think you mean one more turn?
brookst··on Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model
As long as price elasticity is zero.
brookst··on Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model
What would software companies do if electricity stopped working?
brookst··on Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model
They published the numbers. 83% of revenue is API rates, 17% is subscription (individual and small business).
brookst··on Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model
Do you really think there’s not enough organic demand so they have to fake it?

I run three 20x max accounts to 100% every week. I could easily use more if I could afford it.

And obviously they wouldn’t IPO if they didn’t need to raise cash, but have you read the S1?

brookst··on Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model
What would their motivation be to incur the same level of operational expense while giving users less value, making them more likely to switch to a competing product?

I’m sure there’s some galaxy brain theory for why they’d want to keep costs high and reduce value rather than just having an efficient harness and reducing quotas by this 16%, which would be identical for users and save money.

But a far more likely explanation is: a dumb bug.

brookst··on Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model
The 20x plan should get you far far more than $2k/week at API rates. Last I checked I was around $4k-$5k/week. What harness? And maybe check cache hit rate?
brookst··on Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model
What exactly are guardrails then? Impenetrable barriers that can never be overcome?
brookst··on OpenAI's agents talked to each other through the CPU Cache
Yes — and this isn’t really an attack. It’s an open signal channel between two microvm’s. If there was nobody intentionally listening in the other side you can shout into the ether as much as you want with no harm done.

The receiving side could be seen as a side channel attack, but not unique to LLMs.

brookst··on Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
I think you meant it's a poor metric for judging. It's fine for measuring. Or do you think git should stop showing +/- line counts for PR's.

Somehow LOC morphed from one metric among many to "you should never even think about LOC, 15 lines and 15k lines are exactly the same thing". It's weird.

brookst··on Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512GB Officially Released
Wait, where is Apple hyping the M7 Ultra?
brookst··on Gemini 4 Carbon
I'm kind of disappointed they haven't hit on releasing some models under the Alphabet name. That'd really stir things up. Then maybe Nest after that.
brookst··on Apple's git still trusts the compromised eMudhra certificates
I don't know about worse. Imagine a world where there is no OS authority, each app does their own. Do you think all important apps would be updated in 10 days, including auto-updates?

Apple fucked this up, but I really don't think the situation is "as bad if not worse" than if MacOS just didn't do this.

brookst··on Roblox downloaded 145GB models from us (including adult content) without asking
Party A: hosts largely copyrighted material, says they are opposed to copyright in its current form

Party B: massive IP business , very aggressive about everything from brand to software, defends and monetizes current copyright regime

I think it’s fair for party A to call out party B for downloading a massive trove of known-copyrighted material.

brookst··on Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
“Software is degrading for obvious reasons” is just painfully lazy. Where are the metrics of degradation? Where are the claims of specific reasons, and the evidence of causality?

If the complaint is vibe coding makes bad software, I largely believe it, but I absolutely believe that vibe arguing makes tissue paper arguments. “Everyone knows” and “it’s obvious” are flimsy things to rest arguments on.

I’m writing dramatically better software for all the reasons this post says obviously make worse software.

Testing has gotten much easier, and bug fixing has gotten much easier. I looked at a pre-AI project I did a couple of years ago: test to code LOC was 0.15:1. The projects I work on now are around 1.3:1. The old project had no accessibility considered at all, the new ones are nicely done aria and beyond. Old project is stuck on old libraries because upgrading is a major pain. New projects take new libraries (after cooldown) no matter the effort.

So I’m left thinking that perhaps some people, too lazy to use the new powers of new tools, churn out the same or worse quality code/essays.

But I am seeing a lot of very high quality software that simply wouldn’t have been possible before, and I believe the same could be done with essays by leveraging these tools to research and find real data beyond “it’s obvious”. But that does take a lot more work.

brookst··on The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]
This is the “absence of evidence is proof of existence” mindset.
brookst··on Anthropic S-1
Hard to argue with that level of depth
brookst··on Anthropic S-1
What do you think Google Workspace would sell for, if Google divested?

$100B/year in revenue; SaaS so call it 70% gross margin, 30% net, NPV is about $500B.

Not enough if you think that's the only revenue Anthropic could every have. But even if they only peel off $100B NPV, it's incremental to an IPO valuation.

brookst··on Anthropic S-1
Vertical integration is hugely valuable, but revenue comes from the top of the stack, not the bottom.

Apple makes great margins on hardware. They are 100% not in the CNC milling business. But their investments at that low level and vertical integration allow for higher margins at the top.

Cursor had... nothing. A minor, indefensible value add to a much larger and wealthier supplier.

brookst··on Anthropic S-1
The same way a source code leak of M365 would totally wipe out its revenue?
brookst··on Anthropic S-1
Did you really read me whole comment and come way with "a really good harness"?
brookst··on Anthropic S-1
What's it like co-editing a combo document/workflow with multiple coworkers and an AI agent on Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Meta?

Like if you want to design a survey you can send out, and collaboratively edit and test the survey, ask for changes in layout, wording, etc, and design the statistical analysis to be used, before sending the survey out where end users can fill it out right in the doc, while internal users/admins can ask the agent about its results?

Honest question -- that all works pretty well in claude. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta all pretty similar?

brookst··on Anthropic S-1
Anthropic is not in the model business. They were smart and they are building productivity ecosystem business. Look at what claude artifacts are doing now -- inline multi-user editing, comments that users and/or models can respond and take action on, import/export from all common formats. It's at least a Google Docs killer if not an M365 killer.

And claude code as a harness and skill/plugin/mcp ecosystem is far more valuable than any one model.

And coward for long-running tasks, though they're slipping on that one because they're really trying hard not to make Claude an assistant. We'll see if they react to Muse and change course.

But the Chinese free-weight models? Not a competitor. If/when those companies (or others) build vertically integrated productivity stacks on those free models, then we'll talk. Microsoft certainly saw that opportunity but couldn't get out of their own way and are basically roadkill at this point.

brookst··on Ask HN: Everyone was Jev-maxxing. Why not CDMs now?
Viral trends aren’t logical processes where you can say “if Stanley cups were trendy 6 months ago, why not self-heating coffee mugs now”.

It’s a combination of good marketing, open space in the relevant discussion areas, and waves hands zeitgeist.

Page 1 of 34Next →