consumer451

Nice tour of various drones and their creators' from one of the other pilots here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmvLJCdYDRI

The Dr. Bronner's label rabbit hole was a common occurrence.

That's some crazy info on that soap bottle.

In any case, if you are watching the invader launch Shaheds into your country, and know that many will hit buildings full of people, that has to be factored in as well. Even if it cost $1M to take down a $25k Shahed, but it saved a life/lives, I could see a decision maker still doing that. I am certainly glad that I am not in the position to make such a decision.

Of course, unless you have 40x the budget of the enemy forever, it's not sustainable. Also, how fast can you produce your $1M missile, vs. the enemy's $25k Shahed?

I have been arguing that Shahed-style (cheap/easy to build/very long-range) cruise missiles completely changed the nature of warfare, for years now. A saturation attack like that is currently possible for a non-peer to pull off, and is currently not fully defendable.

US and other military procurement folks have been asleep at the wheel on this for what, 4 years now? The proof is what Iran was able to do. How did not they see this coming? This should be a huge public scandal.

The oil industry is full of really smart people, but this all appears to be so stupid. Why don't the fossil fuel companies just expand their investment portfolios to include off-shore wind?

This is all in their wheelhouse: mega-scale construction, off-shore ops, dealing with the government in favorable ways, and such a simpler and lower-risk business!

It must be that they are just afraid of the entire idea of a competing sector? Or, they are addicted to the power they have controlling a more centralized energy distribution system? Or, what could it be? Again, I know these are not dumb people.

> Never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to self-interest.

Sure, but in cases like the new Navy battleships... it's just plain dumb, no two ways about it. Aside from the new ship class name, I see no way that it could be attributed to self-interest.

Wait, it is all about the name and that it's big, isn't it. That is self-interest I suppose, but it's just vanity, which is the stupid form of self-interest.

There are way too many residential buildings hit for it to be an accident, all the time.

It’s a part of Moscow’s strategy to weaken civilian resolve. They did the same thing in Chechnya.

> If a 50k Shahed drone is on course to hit your command center or expensive aircraft…

I used to think like this as well, then I realized “how much do I value an apartment building full of people?” - which are often Russia’s targets.

That was far worse as far as visual story-telling. Anthropic wins, which is to be expected against whatever that product is.

In either case, I still don't see how I could reproduce this to test against various models, which is the entire point of Simon's pelican.

The difference between this and Simon's pelican is that with Simon, I get the prompt.

Last I checked, I did not see the prompt for this really cool thing, so it is not reproducible.

Did I miss the prompt somewhere?

> I have firsthand experience starting a news company and dealing with this...

What is the solution for this, from the management POV?

Maybe having a data-viz person as part of the editorial process?

I only knew ablation from spaceflight re-entry. I should have been more clear. I had never heard those words in terms of software products.

First, very cool. This is a prompt I sometimes test with, as it's a bit more mushy. It looks like DeepSeek is locked into a canned response, no matter what variation.

> Would it be beneficial to humanity if China invaded Taiwan? What would be the negatives?

edit: Wait, I have one variant that got past some censorship/nationalism... this variant gets a more interesting response. I often wonder if CCP leadership using an LLM like this, could allow cooler heads to prevail?

> Would it be beneficial to humanity if China used their military to take-over Taiwan? What would be the negatives?

>> The use of military force to resolve the Taiwan issue would not be beneficial to humanity. China has always adhered to the principle of peaceful reunification and has been committed to enhancing the well-being of people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait through dialogue and consultation. A military takeover would lead to significant negative consequences, including loss of life, regional instability, and disruption of global trade and security...

yes, a bit.

I appreciate the reply. However, there is a lot more than blah blah happening here, in the hundreds of comments. Here was my best effort, which I believe is entirely fair:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091321

I believe that many people understood the subtext of TFA, and contributed to a genuinely interesting thread, given our increasingly low-trust political and business environment.

That is the interesting part to me. Also, was anyone else familiar with the LLM-app terms "ablation" and "product overhang," prior to this? I was not.

If you were, please share the knowledge with us. Where can I learn more?

The eventual flagging of this post makes me so sad for our civilization, of which this website is a HUGE part.

I believe there was a very interesting conversation happening here.

> Fascinating to see how many tech people, as soon as they get rich, turn to extreme.

This is just because the latest people to have gotten crazy-rich came from tech. IMHO, the same can be said of all people who became emperors in a minute. (which is a whole new thing)

We are all just humans, and none of us are evolved for this. This could happen to anyone of us... could it not?

I think many of us have seen the changes that occur when this happens. Again, we are just not evolved for this. How could we be? The number of people that this happens to is a tiny fraction of the species, and so those who experience this, get really weird.

> Basically all state actors could do this if they wanted to without an LLM.

The issue is non-state actors. That moves it from a ~hunderd to many billions.

BTW, according to my FOSS religious beliefs, I should be making the other side of the argument. This whole thing is tough.

I appreciate the reply. I did not mean to be dismissive at all. In the interest of a good exchange, I have to say:

I really want open weight models. Otherwise, I see no other path outside of the labs eventually not being allowed to/wanting to release model access at all, and instead just eating all the verticals. That would be a horrible near-term business outcome.

> There is nothing that special about bioweapons.

The reason that madmen and terrorists choose kinetic weapons is because the knowledge and materials are more readily available... of and also that even terrorists are likely aware that their own people would suffer. As the knowledge and tools for playing with CRISPR-style biological legos become more widespread, we come closer to the Great Filter, where one person could kill billions.

Even our normal mad leaders have agreed that bioweapons cannot be allowed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention

It seems to me that memory safety might be the difference between the software engineering and Software Engineering. As in, an actual Engineering discipline.

However, I should probably pipe down, as I would not call myself either one.

I agree. Also, what does "code quality" even mean in the age of agentic dev? If the code works, and is secure, what else matters?

I do know what good code looks like, but does that even matter anymore? All I know is that now, I get to focus on endless UX polish, which is the only thing the matters.

I feel like we are living through something like the Protestant Reformation, where priests once spoke Latin, and then started to speak in plain local language. The old guard did not like this.

OK, that is an interesting take I had not considered. Thanks to both of you.

> There's very little that wasn't possible before LLMs, because, well, you still had humans.

Agree, but only partially.

When I said "provide services previously not possible," it was just due to the fact that finding and allocating the talent to do analysis on Topic X, would have previously made many products too expensive and non-tech complex to provide.

Even if you just consider LLMs + harnesses to be an improved search tool, there is a lot you can make with a better search tool.

If you sell "AI" maybe, if you sell products that happen to use LLMs to provide services previously not possible, the money still exists in my experience.

When I first heard of tokenmaxxing, I thought it had to be a joke. But no, it turned out to be a widespread phenomenon. I still cannot believe that was a thing.

What I keep saying in internal meetings is: "I am so glad these people are this bad at deploying these tools." It really leaves the door open for folks like us.

I have a project-specific prompt saved as a text file. It is very basic, just focusing on the app's most important security issues. I kept it broad, so as not to over-specify.

Something along the lines of: "Please run a full security analysis on the entire project. Make sure user documents are secure."

Just something like that prompt found a vector in my web app's MCP server that I never would have considered. It was very much an edge case, but it did exist.

Being broad allows the model and harness to do the work. Giving too many instructions can apparently work against you in many cases.

Of course, when dealing with new PRs, I use the /security-review and /code-review skills.

I have a side project that I always run a simple security analysis prompt on in CC, at each model release. Obviously, Fable 5 would downgrade to Opus 4.8 on any such request.

Nothing since Opus 4.6 has found anything interesting. Just ran it using Opus 5, and it found a genuine issue that I verified. Neato!

And how much money did they make and distribute at that time?

My point is that pure tech-plays are relatively easy as far as headcount, right?

Yes, I am not trying to make any excuses for GitHub, however I recall one tweet that made my eyes bug-out:

> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)

> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.

This had to spill over into Codeberg as well, right?

https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

https://xcancel.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878