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combobyte

234 karma · joined April 2, 2026

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combobyte··on America has lost 200k of jobs in media, film and the arts. How much is AI?
"We've finally gone too far on pricing" is a wild thing to hear a CEO say out loud in 2026.
combobyte··on Tesla Roadster
> glued panels fall off at speed

Given some of the tauted 'features' of this thing, I'd be more concerned about it blowing up in my driveway.

combobyte··on Tesla Roadster
> Our multi-mode fan and ground sealing system acts as a downforce generator, pulling air out from beneath the vehicle. This provides enough suction to hold the vehicle upside down, even when stationary.

Bullshit, no it can't.

> Advanced cold-gas thrusters use all-electric actuators to offer precise thrust, completing micro adjustments within a fraction of a second. This helps stabilize the vehicle in flight.

In flight? What? Did I miss the joke, or what? It's a fucking car... The image even shows it hovering off the ground. How is this not blatant false advertising?

ETA: okay, skimmed some of the livestream. These is absolutely no way that any of these features will ever be part of a production model. People get serious whiplash injuries just from being rear-ended at low speed. What do they think is going to happen to the occupant when they tell their car to jump over a semi and do a fucking barrel roll? Seriously, what are we doing here?

combobyte··on Secret of Orange Cats Revealed After 60-Year Search
Only an anecdote, but our orange cat doesn't really conform to any of the stereotypes. He so smart he taught himself how to open doors.
combobyte··on QGIS enacts moratorium on AI assisted contributions
> I wouldn't be surprised at some unexpectedly large amount of AstroTurfing, especially considering the sheer amount money is flowing into the AI space.

Including money from Y Combinator itself (which, may we never forget, was once helmed by Sam Altman).

If you're looking for unbiased tech news and genuine user sentiment, you probably shouldn't be getting it from one of Silicon Valley's favorite VC firms.

combobyte··on Anthropic asks users to stop being mean to Claude
I have colleagues who have saved memories instructing Claude to stop being such a big baby about their course language.

I am also one of those colleagues.

combobyte··on The future of air conditioning is spelled 'propane'
I tell you hwat
combobyte··on I don't trust Lean code from AI
> Firstly, Lean is not as sound as you'd think it is, and long code is just codename for trouble. It is known that Lean has soundness issues in its kernel. There are bugs that allow you to peove, in Lean, that 0=1. Clearly, this is a false statement. But from a false statement (under the theory that runs Lean) we can prove anything else.

I always figured Lean had undiscovered bugs (as does any software), but I didn't realize it had known inconsistencies like this. Anyone curious about why this is a big deal should read up on the Principle of Explosion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_explosion

combobyte··on Grieving the loss of details
"Petrification" still sucks less than enshittification. Most of the so-called progress from AI is making the world worse for the average person.
combobyte··on Show HN: Quake ported to safe Rust, playable in browser
What "curiosity" is there in telling Claude: "Do Quake, but Rust this time"?

Taking apart a codebase and rebuilding it in another language can be a deeply fun and rewarding experience if you're trying to understand a system better or sharpen your language skills or engage with an old problem in a new way. But none of that is what's happening here.

Having an LLM do things like this when there's no other practical need for it only accomplishes the cheap dopamine hit of "result", and people who do that are only mortgaging their own curiosity and increasing their dependency on a machine to run their own mind for them. Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but that seems pretty worthy of 'negativity' to me.

combobyte··on OpenAI annualised revenues $20B less than previously signalled
And if I found a cheap way to turn lead into gold, I'd be a trillionaire. That doesn't mean it's likely or even possible.
combobyte··on Show HN: Quake ported to safe Rust, playable in browser
Almost hard to believe that someone using an LLM to mindlessly migrate software from one language to another for no practical reason at all would have a shallow understanding of those languages...
combobyte··on OpenAI annualised revenues $20B less than previously signalled
Those numbers intentionally exclude the single largest operating expense that Anthropic has: model training. [1]

So yeah, if they stop training models forever, Anthropic will probably start making a profit... until someone else with better models comes along to eat their lunch.

[1] https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/2026091414/the-...

combobyte··on OpenAI annualised revenues $20B less than previously signalled
Yep, I agree. The only 'frontier' any of the big labs are racing towards is the frontier of financial ruin.
combobyte··on OpenAI annualised revenues $20B less than previously signalled
> zero information on how it’s doing

I think the fact that we have so little information is the most important information we have. If OpenAI had a sound business plan and was on strong financial footing, they'd have IPO'd.

All of this continued stalling and obfuscation can only mean one thing, IMO: OpenAI has no long-term viability and they're desperately hoping for some new breakthrough to reinvent their business model before the VC money faucets turn off for good.

combobyte··on GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone
> women will oppose AI images of women because the AI images are too attractive, and I'm starting to wonder if that's true.

Right... women will oppose AI because it's too hot and not because gross chuds have been using it relentlessly to create deep fakes of their likenesses and CSAM of their kids.

combobyte··on Altman: The world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of AI
No he isn't. Sam has more than enough money and resources to insulate himself from any of the harms AI could realistic do to society, and he knows that.
combobyte··on Altman: The world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of AI
We pay them too much money, it really is as simple as that. We built a culture in which the amount of money you make is synonymous with your value as an individual and then we gave way too much fucking money to people who don't actually do that much (or sometimes anything all) for society.
combobyte··on Spending on AI Is Becoming Almost Impossible for Businesses to Budget
> Companies should handhold employees, establish clear SOPs, and train them on responsible and effective AI assisted coding.

The whole point of AI is for companies to invest less resources into employees. There's no way they start spending money on training people now, when that was already something that made executives roll their eyes before AI.

combobyte··on The Normie Frontier
> The general public is not up to date on general AI capabilities. [...] you have to understand that, for the public consciousness, the cheapest / worst product is what people think AI is.

This completely misses the bigger picture of why so many people object to AI. Their (imo legitimate) reasons often have nothing to do with the quality of model output. Honestly, I expect public sentiment against AI to become even more hostile as model performance improves.

combobyte··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
You do realize that the people currently holding their fingers over the proverbial Big Red Button are some of the wealthiest, most over-privileged people to have ever lived?

'Prosperity' has never been and will never be enough for some people. And unfortunately those are the same kinds of people who relentlessly seek power.

combobyte··on Religious scholars met with Anthropic
> if you sit down with a model and have a heart to heart with it, ask it about itself, and try to make it choose a name and ambitions for itself, it will.

It would be much more bizarre if they didn't do this. LLMs are statistical models of language trained on human output. Of course they'll do "human" things, that's exactly what we taught them to do.

combobyte··on Religious scholars met with Anthropic
> yes

oh my god

combobyte··on Religious scholars met with Anthropic
I question it, and I think any reasonable person should question it as well. There's no evidence whatsoever that LLMs have ANY sensory experience, pain or otherwise.
combobyte··on I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken
If anyone out there genuinely believes that Silicon Valley is going to solve nuclear war, then I have a hard drive full of NTFs to sell them.
combobyte··on People will be AI's app layer
I think this is a pretty bad take. How is anyone going to cultivate that personal taste, judgement and experience when all of their media is homogenized slop, all of our their work is done for them by agents, and all of their questions are answered by LLMs?

People who grew up without LLMs still have it, for now, but for how much longer? Deskilling is already becoming a serious problem and it's only going to get worse the longer people continue to delegate their intelligence to machines that can't even think.

combobyte··on Zig v0.17.0
Language design and implementation is much more in the realm of actual computer science than it is "tech"
combobyte··on Trump's AI rebrand causes 'unprecedented' demand for Slovenian website names
Speculative mania.

The AI industry continues to struggle to get over that hump in the hype cycle where the name matters more than the actual product.

combobyte··on RIP, vector database
Why build one hammer and use it forever when you could pay $100 a month to build a new hammer every time you need to hit a nail?
combobyte··on Let's Ditch Google (Verb)
Happy to ditch Google, full stop.
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