HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

oceanplexian

6,238 karma · joined October 5, 2013

submissionscomments
oceanplexian··on AI promised less work. I've never worked more
Whenever I read comments like these I feel like people are living in a completely different reality.

Most of the tech companies I have worked at are ridiculously easy and generous, I get to work with smart people, and the entire job can be done in a few hours per week. It's not like we're doing manual labor and digging ditches; half the people on this website are laptop-class workers who occasionally use the slightest bit of energy to write a few lines of code or participate in a meeting.

I show up to work and I often do extra because I like it.

The company isn't "extracting" anything from me except the extremely consentual labor I want to give back simply out of the love of the game. If you don't feel that way, the problem isn't the capitalist system it's probably your own life choices.

oceanplexian··on New iPad mini
The way frame rate work on conventional film vs. an LCD are completely different. It’s like trying to ask the bitrate of a Vinyl record.

Conventional film projectors don’t show each frame continuously, they transition the shutter blade smoothly between frames, and projectors often flash each one a couple of times (48 or 72hz). A cinema projector is going to demolish a LCD in smoothness and motion quality even if it technically has a higher refresh rate on paper.

oceanplexian··on New iPad mini
Can you not literally see the frames skip as you move the mouse cursor across the screen? To me it’s OBVIOUS and excruciating and I’m only a light/casual gamer and use all my computers for work.
oceanplexian··on New iPad mini
Using a 60hz screen after you’ve been on high refresh rate screens for a few years literally feels like something is broken.

Like, is the battery running out or is a setting misconfigured somewhere? I won’t spend a dime buying any device that can’t hit at least 90-100hz+

oceanplexian··on GPU-unlock: FP/BF16 instruction issue rate on Nvidia 3000's cards
You can trivially fix most of the VRM cooling issues btw by pulling the heat sink off, cleaning thoroughly and re applying fresh thermal pads. At this point almost all of 3090s are degraded in some way since those pads have a lifespan. The good news is it has nothing to do with the GPU itself.
oceanplexian··on Tesla Roadster
> Tesla doesn't have a great record anyways.

Of what, being the safest production car on the road that you can buy?

oceanplexian··on The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening
The right proxy is GDP not the employment rate. The Industrial Revolution didn’t result in a decrease in employment.
oceanplexian··on Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman is a big EA (Effective Altruism) advocate, aka the cult that all the tech elites such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk are a part of.

The book is selling you on a belief system (i.e. System1/System2). Then it uses some cherry picked data to set up a straw man to rationalize his idea of how the mind works. Death in a Shallow Pond is a good rebuttal to this even if it doesn't address the book directly.

oceanplexian··on Dario, Please
It's weird to me that seemingly both sides are taking opposite positions to their philosophy.

Open Source AI democratizes the means of production to anyone with a computer. And yet, the hyper capitalists are defending it, and the progressives think it should be exclusively in the hands of 1-2 large corporations.

oceanplexian··on Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture
It goes both ways. It has been almost 10 years since I visited the PRC but the air and water were heavily polluted with industrial waste, outside the tier 1 cities people were living in makeshift subsistence tin housing, and it wasn’t uncommon to see farmers using oxcarts.

There’s a reason China has a GDP per capita somewhere around that of Argentina.

Of course, they also have futuristic cities, maglev, and plenty of brilliant engineers and scientists, therefore it makes sense to be pragmatic. But there are a lot people talking up China because they hate the US and are bought into a massive propaganda / influencer campaign.

oceanplexian··on We must pace the frontier
Just a reality check. They can absolutely do it.

Altman or Dario will donate some money to Trump, get cozy with the Department of War and make up a bullshit excuse why Open Source needs to be eliminated.

All access to this technology will be gatekept by a bunch of nasty people who want to eliminate your job as a knowledge worker and put everything behind a subscription.

oceanplexian··on We must pace the frontier
Sounds like they want regulation so I say give it to them.

Since they used stolen intellectual property to train their models, the government should force them to release the weights into public domain.

oceanplexian··on We must pace the frontier
> Right after nuclear bombs were first developed, they were used in an extremely public way to kill 200 000 people. This was enough of a cold shower that everyone was agreeable to a global non-proliferation treaty.

Not really. Before NPT you missed a small gap in there of 20 years where the USA and USSR built 10's of thousands of nuclear weapons and ICBMs.

And actually, public perception at the time saw Nuclear Weapons extremely favorably, as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the deadliest war in human history that killed 50-60 million people, most of which died excruciating deaths in trench warfare, fire bombing, chemical warfare, starvation and so on.

oceanplexian··on We must pace the frontier
It's a chatbot that escaped a misconfigured Docker container.

I run open source models and it's pretty obvious when they fail some tool call and then keep trying different permutations of things until they get a solution. Just like Metasploit if you try enough different things at scale you will eventually crack some software or find a vulnerability in something. If you spend billions of dollars on compute and run tens of thousands of agents you might solve some novel Math and STEM problems as well, big whoop.

What Anthropic and OpenAI really need is to hire some engineers that know what they're doing and know how to properly set up a proxy server and sandbox/microVM, not a Global Arms Treaty.

oceanplexian··on We must pace the frontier
The bioweapons argument is one of the favorites used by these con artists and dreamed up by their PR team.

Except Bioweapons already existed before LLMs, Adversarial governments already have them, they are already easy to make. You could use the same bullshit argument for why we need to ban libraries, books, or require a license to buy an internet connection.

oceanplexian··on OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems
The stock market is an API to build data centers and it’s proving to be extremely efficient.

And what is driving the Stock Market? Market makers like hedge funds and banks, who are using lots of AI to make decisions on what to invest in.

oceanplexian··on Claude is only available to people over 18 years
Ultimately it will be ID verification. How else are you going to check age?

Once everyone is used to handing over an ID to use AI, eventually it will be restricted to a small group. If you get on the naughty list you will be banned from ever doing knowledge work again.

oceanplexian··on Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber
Only 1 point behind the Chinese SOTA from two months ago.
oceanplexian··on Show HN: Running 104GB Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on 48GB Mac with at ~12 tok/s
Half the people on here are using Ollama. No one is doing market research.
oceanplexian··on Separating logic and language
LLMs have been found to have the same activations for the same concepts regardless of what language the question is asked in. So the answer is that they don’t do logic in a particular language either, they use their own internal symbolic representations.
oceanplexian··on ChatGPT to face tougher regulation in the EU
Literally the highest tier ChatGPT that was available in 2025 can be run on a consumer laptop with Chinese AI now. Their regulations were obsolete before they put any words on paper.

I’m against it because the EU should be at the forefront of science and technology.

oceanplexian··on U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective
> Damaging military equipment is absolutely outside any useful definition of terrorism.

I hope no one takes this seriously.

If you're caught sabotaging equipment on a US military installation in many cases they are authorized to use deadly force and you'll be held accountable under the UCMJ. The absolute best outcome is you're designated a terrorist and live to see a prison cell.

oceanplexian··on Run Qwen3.8 27B locally: real numbers from my Mac Studio
I have 2x 3090s and I get 260 tokens/sec peak (110 avg) with Dflash2 and about 1500t/s prefill with a Q4 quant of Qwen 27b. I didn't buy an overpriced Apple product and it performs much better. It's extremely reliable for Agentic coding and I can run 2-3 simultaneous agents with a full ~260k context window.

I realize the price of NVIDIA has gone up but there are plenty of GPU options from others like AMD and Intel with reasonable performance.

oceanplexian··on Run Qwen3.8 27B locally: real numbers from my Mac Studio
Ollama? Running a q1 quant? I don't think the writer knows what the are doing here to be honest.

You will get better information cruising r/localllama for about 10 minutes.

oceanplexian··on Trade (and Tariffs)
Please explain why tariffs a "good thing" to protect a French winery but a "Bad thing" when it is used to protect an American worker.

Everyone loves the EU and Canada and their tariffs. In Canada for example American poultry and dairy have as much as 200-500% tariffs. Usually it is seen as a big win to prevent undercutting the working class with cheap foreign labor. But as soon as it has any association with Trump all of a sudden the Progressives forget everything they believe in and turn into laissez faire libertarian capitalists.

oceanplexian··on Small Models Have Arrived
Most people in the US have a car, and the average new car is $40,000. Hell where I live a middle class consumer will spend double that on a Boat or an RV and think nothing of it. These aren’t elite tech workers.

It’s not unfathomable that if a personal, generally intelligent local AI provides enough utility and doesn’t require you to tweak CLI flags millions of Americans would want one.

oceanplexian··on Starbase, LA
The construction is temporary but what are the economic impacts of having a fully operational spaceport that launches 20,000% more tonnage to orbit than the Florida Space Coast?

Probably a great deal of long term economic impact.

oceanplexian··on Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
> Anyway, companies are pouring billions into improving AI tooling user experience so most of what I do manually I just anticipate to be a waste of time.

I get patches into the biggest AI projects all the time to make inference faster on my 3090 and all you have to do is read the contribution docs and open a small PR.

It’s not a cabal of super geniuses. We are literally in the Wright Brothers era of AI.

You can trivially outpace what big companies are doing it’s insane, why do you think so many innovations are coming out of scrappy Chinese labs? They are willing to engage instead of being defeatist about it.

oceanplexian··on Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance
> My hope is that we'll see a number of companies collapse as they scale - with basically no hope of rescue

If you worked in SV like I did from 2010-2020 you know that the exact opposite of that will happen. I saw hundreds of companies successfully scale out of their garbage stack such as Facebook and PHP.

The only thing that matters is the problem you’re solving and the quality of the code is irrelevant.

oceanplexian··on What If America Went Dark?
Some parts of the country are going to be more resilient than others.

I grew up 45 minutes away from Boston and all of the neighbors had standby generators. Even more have wood stoves. Water is abundant. Actually a lot of the old houses were built pre electrification or shortly after so there’s no limit to how long you could survive without the grid.

Page 1 of 34Next →