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pizzly

189 karma · joined February 26, 2025

co-creator of https://agentredactor.negativestarinnovators.com
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pizzly··on What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)
Cognitive Debt has existed much earlier before LLMs became mainstream. Technical people got good at their jobs and then was promoted to management. After time they lost their technical abilities but if they are a good manager they kept up to date with the technological landscape and used their engineering thinking to ensure that the people below them worked to their optimum efficiency to achieve the companies goals.

Now we all know horrible mangers who didn't keep up to date nor used their thinking. This will happen with AI useage too. What is more we are expecting people who are engineers to have a manager's mindset (by managing AI agents, products requirements, etc). Many engineers are horrible at this and have no desires or ability to become a manager. This is why they went to engineering in the first place.

pizzly··on California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws
If we consider fairness/retribution/justice then we won't get this future of less road deaths.

1. There will always be a probability of death from a vehicle. This can never go to 0%.

2. If the probability of a AV causing death is many magnitudes lower than human driving then that is the future we must choose.

If 1 and 2 holds and we hold AV manufactures accountable in the sense that Executives go to jail or are personal liable financially for deaths/injuries then AV will never get released or become mainstream even if this results in less total deaths. The sense of fairness/justice/retribution may make us feel better but result in more overall deaths. Logically this means that there must be a standard. Something like x deaths per y cars manufactured. If above the threshold you get big fines as a company. As technology gets better you can lower the threshold. Anything apart from causing deaths either purposefully or negligently would have be ignored.

Can we as a species accept this? That is another question.

pizzly··on Do_not_track
Also every time you install a program Microsoft, Apple and Google knows depending on the device. For your safety of course. The tracking is so pervasive and the majority of people do not care.
pizzly··on A report on burnout in open source software communities (2025) [pdf]
It does lead to the question will opensource self developing code bases become a thing. I.e. agents that get bug reports, features change requests, etc and then implement them all open to the public. Perhaps with some human guidance. What would this do to OSS?
pizzly··on LinkedIn is scanning browser extensions
Also a lack of LinkedIn account makes you more suspicious and less likely to get hired. So this is additional value in having an account. For appearances.
pizzly··on Your phone is about to stop being yours
If an update could silently block any app from working then your phone was never yours to begin with. Even if they never implement the update, the potential power means they own your phone.

We lost control of our hardware a long long time ago.

pizzly··on Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
For myself, its a massive boost when solo developing. Perhaps this is a different use case than most. It can work across multiple programming languages and frameworks that I had zero experience in. I use my existing knowledge of programming to ensure the new code written is correct. Also it really excels at translating from one language/framework to another. I can spend time getting it working well in a platform I know then just ask it to convert to another platform. It gets it 90% right in the first prompt, then its just a matter of fine-tuning, reviewing etc. This last 10% is where I supercharge my learning on those languages/framework. To lean all the new languages and frameworks would have taken me months before I would be productive. Now with a single prompt, we get 90% of the way there. That is incredible value for us.
pizzly··on People Do Not Yearn for Automation
I want to automate scientific research. There are too many problems, too much data and not enough scientists. We could find cures to cancer, rare genetic diseases, new forms of energy, better batteries, better every thing.

Take finding cures for cancer. You could automate finding the drug candidates, automate the manufacture of the experiment and preparing the drug candidates, automate the testing and automate the analysis on a massive scale. The limit won't be the number of scientists but physical barriers like energy and materials.

Automation has the potential to make us lead wonderful lives and we should not deny that from happening. The implementation matters though. There is going to be massive disruption to society and that needs to be handled carefully.

pizzly··on Surveillance Pricing: Exploiting Information Asymmetries
Perhaps in some places but if you live in a country without much competition and very high cost of living its much more than an extra 2 dollars to shop locally. Prices are routinely 1.5 - 2x more if you buy locally than online here. Also if money is tight then even if its just an extra 2 dollars then you should make the purchasing decision that benefits you. That extra money is health (both physical and mental (R&R))
pizzly··on Surveillance Pricing: Exploiting Information Asymmetries
You will find many companies don't allow prepaid debit cards. OpenAI months ago refused to accept prepaid debit card but allowed personal debit card. Not sure how they know its a prepaid card though (Visa prepaid). I think many companies are using credit cards as a form of ID.
pizzly··on We accepted surveillance as default
I tend to agree but fear that people will value 'safety' over personal freedom. If these acts prevent x crimes, allow people to walk the streets, etc then people will think 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear'. We as a society will have to accept more deaths and crimes by not implementing total surveillance. Its going to be hard to convince people of that if governments can demonstrate the benefits.
pizzly··on We accepted surveillance as default
I found it delightful at first then afterwards slightly distracting. The current state of websites on average is very boring even if practical.
pizzly··on We accepted surveillance as default
The law had good intention but bad implementation. Also the law takes so long to change. Once it became obvious that companies would bypass it by having clicking gymnastics they needed to quickly update the law saying that it should only take one click to opt out.
pizzly··on We accepted surveillance as default
I know its won't solve everything but couldn't we teach digital hygiene at school and its importance. For myself I remember in English at high school being taught how different methods of advertising worked and that stuck with me.
pizzly··on Cloudflare's AI Platform: an inference layer designed for agents
Yes with less models to choose from unless you bring your own model.
pizzly··on Codex for almost everything
This is the benefits of competition in action
pizzly··on If you started a company two years ago, many assumptions are no longer true
Interfaces will definitely evolve. Visual graphs and representations are useful but speaking to an agent will become mainstream as its faster than typing. Also the ability for agents to code on the fly will open up different interfaces. For instance you could say "show me the impact that our marketing campaign x over this time period" and out comes graphs that were coded. Drawing might even make a comeback for instance when designing a website you just cross out things you don't want, draw boxes of where you want things, talk at the same time saying what you want in that box. Then some people are using virtual relativity. Not everything will become a chatbot but its definitely going to evolve with chatting being an integral part of the user interface.
pizzly··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
Will check out. I made a custom made dirty solution working for the coding agent we use. Speaking is much faster than typing but it takes mental effort to lay out your thoughts before speaking unlike typing.
pizzly··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)
A browser extension & windows app that automatically redacts the text you paste to prevent your private data from leaking to the third parties. Its an AI model that runs 100% locally on your own device so that your clipboard contents do not leave your device. http://redactor.negativestarinnovators.com
pizzly··on The Closing of the Frontier
Maybe not. You stated "Every country will pursue it as far as it can, and given the multipolar world we are back in, and our recent record with treaties and commitments, I do not believe there will be global alignment on risk reduction" and that is true. While Anthropic may hold of releasing Mythos I don't think they will for long. As long as there is someone somewhere in the world that releases a competing model then Anthropic will be forced to release Mythos. This also assumes that its not a marketing tactic from Anthropic in the first place, build suspense before releasing it.

I would like to see more countries capable of producing frontier models. At the moment we have two in the world but many countries are building their own national models and AI infrastructure and may join the race.

Having a multipolar world may actually result in more freedom in gaining access to frontier models.

pizzly··on Ask HN: How do you handle marketing as a solo technical founder?
Perhaps in the past. I think the approach now will be to vibe code multiple projects very quickly and see which one has traction even with a low quality product. You will get much better feedback than a discussion with a potential customer who may not even know what they want or have a false idea of what they want. You can always improve a product that has demand and abandon the ones that no one even downloads. Usage and payment are the real test if a product is worth doubling down on.
pizzly··on The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
In the end what really matters to most people is does it work. How it is built or works means nothing to them nor should it.
pizzly··on Slop is not necessarily the future
The current iteration of models don't write clean code by itself but future ones will. The problem in my view is extremely similar to agentic/vibe coding. Instead of optimizing for results you can optimize for clean code. The demand is there, clean code will lead to less bugs, faster running code and less tokens used (thus less cost) when understanding the code from a fresh session. It makes sense that the first generation of vibe coding focused on the results first and not clean code. Am I missing something?
pizzly··on I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era
AI for editing is good and have many useful cases. The part where it fails is that the tone/style of the writing gets overtaken and reads like all other AI edited writing. But the quality of the edit is good, its just not in your style. When everyone sounds the same then there is no uniqueness. But using it edit legal letters, software documentation etc are very good use cases, using it to explain your ideas in a blog not so much.
pizzly··on How will OpenAI compete?
I never considered that. When I change LLM models its usually due to two reasons.

1. the current AI model is producing answers that do not met my needs so I try multiple others at the same time and the one that produces the best answer I stick with until I have this problem again.

2. there is a new model released and advertises a new capability that I want to try out.

I can imagine that for many people the answer that ChatGPT generates is adequate enough that they never need to try another model even if better answers exists from another model. For people with less complex needs this is a very real stickiness. Why make the effort to try something new if the answer is adequate.

In this case, OpenAI would only f*k up if they change the pricing significantly, add intrusive ads or their answers become significantly worse.

pizzly··on A16z partner says that the theory that we’ll vibe code everything is wrong
one thing annoying with premade solutions is that it only does 90% of what you want, its livable but still doesn't quite meet your needs.

Its not just adding features that Linear already provides but adding features and integrations that mets 100% your needs.

The full decision making equation is (cost of implementing it yourself + cost of maintenance + 10% additional benefit for a solution that fully meets your needs) versus (cost of preexisting solution that meets 90% of your needs). Cost of implementing it and cost of maintenance has just gone down. Surely that will mean on a whole more people as a whole will choose to make inhouse rather than outsource.

Thus demand for premade solutions will go down, Saas providers won't be able to increase their prices as this will make even more people choose to implement it themselves. The cost of producing software will continue to drop due to agentic coding and maintenance cost will drop as well due to maintenance coding agents. More people will choose their own custom solutions and so on. Its very possible we are in the beginning of the end for Saas companies.

pizzly··on Rats filmed snatching bats from air
Because the person filming it brought the camera with approved government ID. Got their camera serial number recorded in the government database. The camera then embeds its serial number into the video using hidden watermarks. Just Joking .... for now.
pizzly··on After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
What about the 'openness' of AI development. When I say 'openness' of AI I mean in research papers, spying, former employees, etc. Wouldn't that mean that after a few months to years after AGI is discovered that the other country would also discover AGI due to benefiting from the obtaining the knowledge from the other side? Similar to how the Soviets did their first nuclear test less than 5 years after US did theirs due to a large part in spying. The point here is wouldn't the country that spends less in AI development actually have an advantage over the country that does as they will obtain that knowledge quickly for less money? Also the time of discovery of AGI may be less important than the country that first implements the benefit of AGI.
pizzly··on After the AI boom: what might we be left with?
If there is a downturn in AI use due to a bubble then the countries that have built up their energy infrastructure using renewal energy and nuclear (both have decade long returns after the initial investment) will have cheaper electricity which will lead to a future competitive advantage. Gas powered power plants on the other hand require constant gas to convert to electricity. The price of gas would become the price of electricity regardless and thus very little advantage.
pizzly··on Will AI be the basis of many future industrial fortunes, or a net loser?
I think OP's thesis should be expanded.

-AI is leading to cost optimizations for running existing companies, this will lead to less employment and potentially cheaper products. Less people employed temporary will change demand side economics, cheaper operating costs will reduce supply/cost side

-The focus should not just be on LLM's (like in the article). I think LLMs have shown what artificial neural networks are capable of, from material discovery, biological simulation, protein discovery, video generation, image generation, etc. This isn't just creating a cheaper, more efficient way of shipping goods around the world, its creating new classifications of products like the microcontroller invention did.

-The barrier to start businesses is less. A programmer not good at making art can use genAI to make a game. More temporary unemployment from existing companies reducing cost by automating existing work flows may mean that more people will start their own businesses. There will be more diverse products available but will demand be able to sustain the cost of living of these new founders? Human attention, time etc is limited and their may be less money around with less employment but the products themselves should cost cheaper.

-I think people still underestimate what last year/s LLMs and AI models are capable of and what opportunities they open up, Open source models (even if not as good as the latest gen), hardware able to run these open source models becoming cheaper and more capable means many opportunities to tinker with models to create new products in new categories independent of being reliant on the latest gen model providers. Much like people tinkering with microcontrollers in the garage in the early days as the article mentioned.

Based on the points above alone while certain industries (think phone call centers) will be in the red queen race scenario like the OP stated there will new industries unthought of open up creating new wealth for many people.

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