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hdndjsbbson I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers

> People I look up to include Frank Zappa, Richard Feynman, J.K. Rowling, Peter Norvig, and Geoffrey Hinton.

TFW you want to seem intellectual

hdndjsbbson 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

10+ years ago companies were hoovering up data for ML - trying to find correlations in high-dimensionality data. Mostly the results were garbage but occasionally you hit on a real, unexpected phenomenon.

Nowadays you just throw all the data into a black box and believe whatever it says blindly.

hdndjsbbson An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below

taps the "don't anthropomorphize the LLM" sign

They don't have time preference because they don't have intent or reasoning. They can't be "reincarnated" because they're not sentient, they're a series of weights for probable next tokens.

hdndjsbbson Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

Pacing is a big part of endurance sport. If you're in the lead you know intellectually you want to pace for sub-2 hours, but if you're watching someone beat you maybe it gives you the extra edge?

It does sound like the course and the weather made it more likely to happen. And technical advances in shoe composition.

hdndjsbbson Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

Could you tell that the original model was "right"?

hdndjsbbson Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

Oh the "micro services" are all coupled. To test anything you have to deploy a constellation of interdependent services with redundant DBs, each generating new IDs for the same underlying resource.

hdndjsbbson Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

My team has also adopted this - it's much easier to add another layer than to refine or simplify what exists. We have AI skills to help us debug microservices that call microservices that have circular dependencies.

This was possible before but someone would maybe notice the insane spaghetti. Now it's just "we'll fix it with another layer of noodles".

hdndjsbbson Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

> Any data/sources on which this might be based? The pandemic was 6 years ago; do these "Agile" (the tech term) companies really carry many unproductive lines-of-business for so long?

Do big tech companies like FB and Google even pretend to be "agile" anymore? I think they mostly sell themselves on institutional stability and monopolist market positions rather than speed of execution

hdndjsbbson I Made the "Next-Level" Camera and I love it

Technically the images look great, very impressive. Production-wise I can also see how this could be useful for low-budget interior dialogue scenes where you don't want the set dressing to distract. It really draws focus to the actors and lets the director paint a more impressionistic backdrop.

The exterior shots I've got more mixed feelings about. I think these shallow lenses work best when you have a very controlled backdrop that can be deliberately staged. Using it in a wide outdoor shot feels like a real risk unless you're doing some Kubrickian blocking to make sure everyone is arranged just-so. Or you're making them stand stock-still.

hdndjsbbson I Made the "Next-Level" Camera and I love it

Worth pointing out that there's a 2x crop factor on M43, so the 50mm M43 is effectively a 100mm. I agree that 35mm on M43 is a nice walk around length, it's a little longer than a full frame 50mm already.

hdndjsbbson Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)

I mean, you probably can just turn off defective parts of the network. You better believe if this becomes popular they would salvage yields by selling "dumber" chips at a discount.

hdndjsbbson NASA Force

When you frame it like that it sounds like some kind of vanguard of class-conscious people should try to rebel and establish a, I don't know, dictatorship of the proletariat? Maybe they could give themselves some kind of Russian name to sound cool.

hdndjsbbson The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

> So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.

This is some weird manosphere bullshit. Pre-industrial societies invented philosophy and writing. People across the world know the name of Socrates from 2500 years ago. They know stories from Homer 2800 years ago.

It's a mistake (a) to think pre-industrial people were grug-brained cavemen (b) that we're going to revert into the same cavemen because a computer can do your pointless six-figure office job.

hdndjsbbson AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?

The irony of quoting this particular story without providing any of the necessary context for readers. Truly an aid to reminiscence and not memory.

hdndjsbbson Ask HN: How to be happy in a corporate environment?

This is a good point - I don't dislike my boss or my team but I'm frustrated by them at times.

I'm not running at full speed by any means, my main goal is to have _something_ to report at stand-ups. And ideally something bigger to put in a year end review.

hdndjsbbson Ask HN: How to be happy in a corporate environment?

I have jumped on a few unglamorous tasks to make life better for my team but it's very much "glue work" that doesn't seem to lead to more opportunities.

hdndjsbbson Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage

Why isn't there a premium, ad-free Google Search (or Facebook, or Instagram)? Because the most valuable customers (with the most money) self-select out of seeing ads. It would collapse the 2-sided market and create a race to the bottom. There is a dollar amount of advertising revenue per customer, but as John Wannamaker said - "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don't know which half".

If the AI companies made their pricing "pay as you go" without quotas, a few insane zealots (power users) would occupy all the capacity and choke everyone else out. Regardless of the cost, the AI providers would lose the ubiquity they currently enjoy, and become a niche tool for rich tech people. They would rather be a mile wide and an inch deep, doing a worse job serving millions of users, because there's a better scaling narrative for legislating and fundraising that way. Like the advertisers there are intolerable indirect effects of letting valuable "power users" spend more money to get a better experience.

hdndjsbbson Pro Max 5x quota exhausted in 1.5 hours despite moderate usage

"enshittification" gets thrown around a lot, but this is the exact playbook. Look at the previous bubble's cash cow: advertising.

Online advertising is now ubiquitous, terrible, and mandatory for anyone who wants to do e-commerce. You can't run a mass-market online business without buying Adwords, Instagram Ads, etc.

AI will be ubiquitous, and then it will get worse and more expensive. But we will be unable to return to the prior status quo.