Hacker News Reader

base698on AI needs $6T in annual revenue to justify data centre boom

What does this mean? I've been using AI as a replacement for both of those for longer than a year. If I need a PowerPoint file I have it generated off my tooling. Instead of fiddling to align text you say update slide 6 to look like this, strike this sentence. And you can add even more dynamic content. Like live application dashboards connected to real sources.

base698on Fed hikes rates as inflation worries push up bond yields

Covid? Half the money printed happened under his watch the first admin. Biden continued the other half. Now we have yet another war to make matters worse. What are you proposing be done to fix it?

base698on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations

You should partner with Cornell Ornithology.

base698on Data collected by cars and sold to third parties

You learn animal husbandry and join the Amish.

base698on What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

I saw this: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

here on HN in 2013. I'd read "Amusing Ourselves to Death" so it particularly resonated with me at the time. I've watched the world get even more sucked in each passing year.

base698on Taste Is All That's Left

When I use it for writing I usually have an idea or thesis to explore already. I typically write it out stream of consciousness. The core idea is mine.

I'm not using LLMs to think for me, instead just edit the writing so it has proper grammar and the run ons are reduced.

Even better for something that has data. You can pull PDFs with encoded tables and extract the data into consistent units to compare. You can have it write code to do it and cross check the outputs. You can do that in a minute. Would take hours without an LLM.

base698on Taste Is All That's Left

Seriously. Whatever slop is going to be an improvement for 99% of enterprise products. 99.9% of internal tools at large companies.

base698on Seedance 2.5

Yeah wondering that. I ended up almost paying for one when 2.0 came out. Still not sure I've found something official.

base698on Fable is not a useful model

There is a bacterial outbreak and I asked if it was possible that's what made my wife sick and it downgraded.

base698on I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

My step mom was having debilitating pain. A year of going to doctors and no one was able to find a cause. I scanned her discharge paper work which had her prescriptions on it and gave it to Claude. It identified a prescription that had that exact side effect. They later confronted her primary care that concurred and took her off it.

A friend of mine's wife recently passed. They were chasing a suspected heart defect for over a year. She had been intermittently fainting. At about the year mark they decided to scope her digestive track. They found bleeding ulcers from cancer that was all over her body. I input her fainting symptoms into Claude and gastro impact was number two suspected after heart issues.

I have a few of other cases it's helped with. I'm not sure it could do worse than my own experience with the medical system. This is doubly true in places that lack any sort of medical care.

base698on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

I was going to upgrade my M3 Max to an M5 Max with more RAM. The machine I priced out was $5400 yesterday and costs $7500 today.

base698on Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash

That's better than the loop grok got stuck in trying to use git and push the work it did leading to a $15 api credit deduction.

base698on Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC

My father in law owns a small manufacturing business and is not technical at all. His computer skills stop with some CAD and basic excel. He pays for ChatGPT as does his wife and her kids. The internet and dot com bubble didn't have millions and millions of non technical users paying cash for a product. Almost every coffee shop I go to has people talking about AI and ChatGPT even in areas with no tech populations.

I still think it could crash, but it's got real users and a mind share like nothing I've ever seen.

base698on Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?

I asked the OpenAI playground to compare and contrast the themes of Point Break and Fight Club. It did a bang up job and blew my mind. I then realized it basically worked for any of the scripts I had for my dev environment too. Fixing and expanding capabilities I'd wanted to had but never had the time to implement.

base698on US healthcare still stupidly expensive, with pathetic outcomes, study finds

I just moved from a medium sized US city and any specialist provider I contacted for myself or my parents was 5 months or more. It's not good everywhere.

base698on I'm Tired of Talking to AI

This was the main thing I took from the movie Her. Wild to see it materialize so quickly.

base698on Grok 4.3

Starting to like the lack of memory. Claude remembers I have a grill and will interject in conversations about how maybe this thing would go well with BBQ when it's unrelated or just also about food.

base698on AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it

It's the opening page of the book Technopoly.

base698on Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story

It's yet another Goodhart's law effect: > Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.

base698on Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all

Which grammar tools?

base698on Testing Ads in ChatGPT

BETRAYAL

base698on Man who videotaped himself BASE jumping in Yosemite arrested, says it was AI

Would you say the same for 191 people rescued hiking in Yosemite a year?

base698on Man who videotaped himself BASE jumping in Yosemite arrested, says it was AI

The legal history is a bit more complex. TLDR: assholes that were BASE jumping in Yosemite in the early 1980s did things like throw burning barrels off the top of El Capitan and take trucks on trails not designed for vehicle traffic.

Comparing the number of BASE jumpers (small thousands) and the number of hikers and climbers (millions) BASE jumpers just can't have the political influence for access.

Random note, Brendan Weinstein who posted here on occasion recently died BASE jumping: https://www.reddit.com/r/SkyDiving/comments/1q6n7v2/brendan_...

base698on Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing

> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Gall’s law wins again.

base698on The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem (2022)

I started a project this year similar to this with rats. It’s now two axis with tracking and a stereo camera with depth detection. The amount of hours I’ve spent on it is astounding but I’ve learned a lot!

Also, ended up swapping the Pi I started with to a jetson.

base698on AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS

Until you factor in the legions of devops writing terraform, iam, and cicd scripts.

base698on Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients

https://news.yale.edu/2025/02/19/immune-markers-post-vaccina...

They are looking into that.

base698on Claude Sonnet 4.5

Perceptual Hash. I have a Python script that does just this I did a million years ago: https://gist.github.com/base698/42d24be9309520fe8ad768844868...

I used it to match frames between different quality video streams. Operates on gray scale.

base698on A case study in bad hiring practice and how to fix it

Exceptionally, I had both the highest and lowest grade in linear algebra. Probably not what they mean though.

base698on GPT-5

Weight of the air deflecting downward. Plain ole Newtonian equal and opposite reaction.