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fontain

309 karma · joined March 31, 2026

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fontain··on The dangerous delusion of modern warfare
Trump explicitly stated that was his aim, for the people to rise up after Trump did a little long distance assassination. The plan is far more stupid than subduing Iran by invasion.

"At 2:30 a.m. EST on 28 February, Donald Trump released an eight-minute video statement on Truth Social, saying that the purpose of the US strikes in Iran was effectively[vague] regime change."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Iran_war#Hostilities

fontain··on OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
Out of interest, why OpenRouter over a free option like Cloudflare’s AI gateway or another paid option like Vercel’s — any specific benefit to OpenRouter you’ve found, or just first you used that’s good enough?
fontain··on Accenture to acquire Ookla
Ookla has huge amounts of data, speedtest’s software is integrated into networks and used by hundreds of millions of users, they have the most comprehensive information about internet connections. You can recreate the software but you can’t recreate the data without decades of integration into what seems like every network.

https://www.ookla.com/ You can see an overview of the data they collect and sell on the corporate website

fontain··on I am retiring from tech to live offline
You initially suggested that there was something suspicious about this being posted on HN. If you want to walk that back, okay, but doesn't that poorly judged initial sentiment undermine your cynicism?

Yes, of course this is "performative". Publishing is performance. Chad is, obviously, performing for his audience in sharing this, he wants to get his perspective out into the world.

Given Chad's decade plus of leading by example, embracing his ideals, it is important to know that he is a person of integrity when reading his words. Could this be a grand lie to some strange end? Sure, I guess, but everyone who knows Chad knows that he is exactly the type of person to mean everything in this letter in earnest.

His blog was part of his job. His job was an open source advocate, he was responsible for talking about open source. He posted on BlueSky in his role as an advocate for open source. Adding in a GoFundMe link that someone emailed to him on a post that got a bunch of attention doesn't undermine his point, at all.

A "hypocritical way to make this particular transition"? He's not advocating for you to make the same transition. He's not espousing moral superiority because he made this transition and you didn't. Life is messy, complicated, difficult, it's not "hypocritical" to... have a BlueSky account as part of your job while announcing you're stepping away from technology.

https://openpath.quest/2024/welcome-to-open-path/

"I work for Sentry, and my job requires me to be a “thought leader,” so I need a platform."

fontain··on I am retiring from tech to live offline
Your cynicism is misplaced, Chad has been a fixture on HN for well over a decade. He said he has been offline in his personal life since February, not his professional life. His BlueSky is professional. He quit his job and will be offline completely following the handover.
fontain··on I am retiring from tech to live offline
Yep. Chad is great. Although, if anyone were to lead a cult, I figure it would be Chad, hopefully he doesn’t accidentally charisma himself into a cult leader situation.
fontain··on Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation
I think removing limits is fine. There’ll be overspend and at some point adjustments in expectations as we learn more about the value that can be delivered which will likely result in a reduction in spend, but even now, during this period of relative immaturity about measuring the value of output, so long as more tokens = more output, I don’t think the introduction of limits represents much of a risk to Anthropic and OpenAI. Tokenmaxxing is uniquely bad because it is not tied to any additional value (more tokens for the same output).

And I could be wrong about tokenmaxxing being a Claude specific problem but as far as I can tell, all of the major companies encouraging employees to maximize their token usage are Claude Code users. And the music has to stop on that at some point, whether because the companies run out of money or because they learn better ways of measuring productivity in the AI age. And if tokenmaxxing is what is driving Anthropic’s lead in revenue, it could be catastrophic to lose that, because Anthropic are spending billions of dollars per month on the infrastructure to support it.

If tokenmaxxing is evenly distributed between Anthropic and OpenAI then they’ll both hurt but equal hurt shouldn’t disadvantage either much.

fontain··on Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation
Tokenmaxxing is the practice of measuring employees by how many tokens they use, encouraging employees to burn tokens needlessly, it is unrelated to what agents can do.

If a task can be completed with 100k tokens but employees are considered better performers if they complete it with 500k tokens instead… that’s unsustainable and cannot possibly benefit Anthropic in the long term.

At some point, Amazon and Uber and so on and so forth are going to realize that actually, employees using 100k tokens or even 50k tokens is better than 500k and Anthropic’s revenue will fall off a cliff.

fontain··on Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation
I mean Anthropic’s customers are spending too much on Claude. Anthropic’s customers are encouraging tokenmaxxing amongst their employees; measuring employees by token usage. That’s great for Anthropic’s short term revenue numbers but terrible long term because at some point companies will realize tokenmaxxing is not good. OpenAI is much less exposed to tokenmaxxing, which is a good thing.
fontain··on Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation
I’m not so sure. We only need to look at Uber’s example of companies realizing they’re spending way too much and trying to rein it in. Claude has excellent revenue but it is highly dependent on very rich technology companies continuing to spend lavishly without seeing returns. The music will stop at some point and Anthropic will be hit the hardest. OpenAI may have less revenue but it is distributed across many, many more customers and use cases, it’s resilient. And even if Anthropic do, somehow, manage to keep their customers spending huge amounts on Claude, they’re very vulnerable to being undercut by OpenAI given codex is pretty much at parity. Anthropic seems more vulnerable to me.
fontain··on We replaced Zendesk
or, as you have been able to do for decades, use an existing open source solution? Zendesk’s value isn’t in the CRUD operations. If a company doesn’t want to pay for Zendesk, don’t ask Claude to build a replacement… use a good free solution, that has years of domain expertise built into it.
fontain··on Last.fm is now independent
U.K. company accounts are public.

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

Click “view PDF” for “Full accounts made up to 31 December 2024”.

fontain··on The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
That's been YC's modus operandi since long before 2014. Reddit, from the first YC batch, came about because Paul said (paraphrasing) "I like you kids but your idea sucks, forget about it and you can join YC". Nothing to do with ZIRP.
fontain··on Last.fm is now independent
"The company has generated an operating loss for the year to 31 December 2024 of £690,252 (2023: profit of £1,509,544) and revenue of £2,215,381 (2023: £1,960,340). As at 31 December 2024, net liabilities were £45,506,488 (2023: £44,855,202)."

"The financial statements have been prepared on a going concern basis on the grounds that Paramount Global has confirmed that it will continue to provide financial and other support to Last. FM Limited at least for the next twelve months and thereafter for the foreseeable future to enable Last.FM Limited to continue to meet all its liabilities as they fall due."

I wonder what their financing plan is, and what shape this independence will take, whether Paramount is retaining a minority ownership take? Seems like they might just be able to scrape break even based on current revenue.

fontain··on The Structural Barriers to AI Lawyers
“most countries now have pretty strict sentencing guidelines”

That’s a vast, vast overstatement.

“You should be able to predict the outcome of a court case if you have all the facts available. That's what fairness means.”

Too much of a simplification. The role of a jury is to interpret the evidence, every jury is unique. Evidence is not an absolute, there are no “facts”. A judge can include/exclude evidence that would sway a jury one way or the other. Sentencing, even without guidelines, is the least variable part of the criminal justice system in the western world.

fontain··on The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
The current market absolutely is much more like 2011 than 2021. If you were working in tech back then, it was easy to raise money for specific types of startup (social was the thing back then like AI is today) but it was nothing like 2021. You could raise money for a ham sandwich in 2021.

The ZIRPmania of 2021 was certainly dependent upon what came before it but it wasn’t a natural outcome, it needed the economic chaos of the pandemic, it would not have happened without the pandemic.

fontain··on The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
ZIRP was 2008 to 2022? The 2010s were calm and collected, zirp-mania gripped us through the pandemic. You cannot compare 2011 and 2021. Totally different environments.
fontain··on Ferrari Luce
Ferrari juice their sales by making access to good cars contingent on buying bad cars first. Nerds are the only people who could like this, Ferrari owners hate it — it’s a complete departure from Ferrari’s design. The car itself is good spec wise but looks matter a lot more. Remember the cybertruck? People said the same, “you might think it’s ugly but it’s going to sell like crazy amongst Tesla fans” and instead it has been a flop. The reaction to this car is a lot worse amongst Ferrari owners.
fontain··on The Eternal Sloptember
That's the fallacy. You think technology usefulness dictates the outcomes. There are billions of people living in poverty the world over, starving every day, we have the technology and resources to solve that right now, we have for decades, but we don't because we don't want to.

Could AI technology change the world? Sure. Will it? That depends on so much more than what the technology can do. Why are we all still working 40 hours a week? Why are people still hungry? We could have radically changed our world with the technology we have had for decades. Yet, we have not, we have continued, nothing has really changed.

The internet is a great example. What is the most impactful part of the internet today? Social media. Social media has radically changed our culture. What is social media? A database, a few endpoints and an app? The technology is the least consequential part, the consequence comes from how we use it.

Nerds focus on what is possible with the technology, not what society is likely to do with it. What evidence is there that AI is going to change the world? What change is going to come from... being able to generate plausible sounding text? From being able to instruct agents? How many companies are using garbage software from 20 years ago despite dozens of revolutionarily better equivalents being available out there today that could have drastically reshaped their workforce? What are agents if not better macros? How many businesses have hundreds of employees doing the same tasks over and over again that could have been replaced by a few macros? How much of the code that you and I have written in our careers has already been written before?

The fundamental usefulness is the least important part of a technology when discussing how that technology will impact the world.

fontain··on The Eternal Sloptember
We all remember cryptocurrency. Everyone in tech proclaimed fiat was dead, every office buzzed with talk of every possible way that cryptocurrency could be used, billions of dollars flooded in to projects losing money hand over fist. The cynics reacted to the froth with outright rejection of the idea. And today… cryptocurrency exists, it has some use, but it didn’t take over the world, it didn’t kill fiat, it was useful in some areas and worthless in others. AI will be the same. The noisiest proponents will be over exaggerating. The most cynical cynics will be underestimating. The result will be somewhere in the middle. Success will not be predicated on adoption of the technology. We, nerds, are bad at predicting the impact of technology.
fontain··on Artificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens
Scientific consensus is that dodos cannot open doors so it’ll be very safe as long as visitors stay in their cars.
fontain··on Artificial egg hatched 26 healthy chickens
A velociraptor skeleton is worth around $10 million. Hatch a few dozen per year and you’re making great money.
fontain··on JWT is a scam and your app doesn't need it
I don’t recall ever in my life using that feature on the small number of services that offer it.
fontain··on JWT is a scam and your app doesn't need it
How often do we need to revoke individual JWTs anyway? You solve for cookie theft with short expiry and key compromise by rotating keys. I don’t find the revocation issue very compelling as a reason to ditch JWTs.
fontain··on Who wins and who loses in prediction markets? Evidence from Polymarket
There’s a lot of talk about corruption in UMA but I think it is oversold as a problem. UMA is just a scapegoat for Polymarket’s desired outcome.

Polymarket implemented the “independent” truth process with UMS following regulatory scrutiny but they still decide the outcome.

https://reticulating.substack.com/p/polymarket-isnt-a-predic...

fontain··on Get your passwords out of Bitwarden while you still can
Passwords are critical, losing them because you forget to pay or run out of money would be a disaster. I suspect they would still provide access in read only mode to non-paying users so it wouldn’t be a disaster if they didn’t offer a free version but I think it’s pretty easy to see why someone thinks it should always have a free offering.
fontain··on Shunning AI is the human choice
That’s a miserable attitude. We are active participants in the world, not passive recipients. You can fight for the world you want.
fontain··on No Slop Grenade
I like the naming. I tackled this same pitch with https://writelesswithai.com but a "slop grenade" is better, more memorable, a nice brand. Good work.

ps. register slopgrenade.com too

fontain··on An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry
There is little evidence that Mythos is any better at finding bugs than any other system. Mythos appears to be impactful because people are, for the first time, using lots of resources (for free from Anthropic) to try and find security issues. The actual bugs found are mostly inconsequential, any chart showing a giant leap in fixes that doesn’t consider whether they were even using any tooling before and whether these are serious issues is junk. If you read the partner’s summaries of Mythos so far, it is a damp squib. Maybe that’ll change but at least for now there is no evidence Mythos is anything but marketing hype.

https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos...

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-v...

fontain··on The famous O3 "GeoGuessr" prompt did not work
“It’s also interesting to me that nobody checked this at the time. It took me about six hours of fairly-distracted work and about $15 to construct and run this benchmark. Why didn’t anyone do this when they were writing articles about how good the o3 prompt was?”

Because the meta around AI is not rigorous reporting on the nuance of capabilities but bold claims that are easy to retweet. There is no incentive to say “actually, AI is not good at this”. Nobody checked it because nobody cares.

There are lots of tasks that AI can be useful for but almost all of the headline claims (including Mythos) are exaggerated at best and bunk at worst.

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