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echelon

21,973 karma · joined September 4, 2011

HN contrarian.
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echelon··on Gemini 4 Argon
Nobody is going to make money for anything, perhaps.

Or maybe everyone makes money for everything.

The world could turn into a world of plenty. Or it could become a YouTube popularity contest where the MrBeasts get to eat and nobody else is interesting enough to sell themselves.

This is an absolutely crazy time to be alive and most people still don't see it.

echelon··on Let's Ditch Google (Verb)
I really like this one. Unfortunately it doesn't quite make the jump to English, but I love the concept of it.
echelon··on Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics
> You can't buy fluency.

Just wait until BCI and/or fast Pavlovian conditioning force fed by agents into human learners.

I've been vibe coding my own SRS software that is vastly superior to my learning style than Anki, and I know I'm just scratching the surface of accelerated learning. Who knows where this goes.

MRI and glucose injections with agent-tutor steering and millisecond feedback to learning?

We might be able to Matrix "I Know Kung-Fu" things into brains one day.

echelon··on PSSA: A non-transformer language model written from scratch in Rust
Counterpoint: I only clicked on it because it said "in Rust".
echelon··on How our vibe coded website looks like a designer made it
I'm sure this is all in the training data.

I like hearing it articulated for me.

echelon··on America.gov
You can use all the flagship models on Amazon Bedrock and have a contractually obligated air gap between your data and the model providers.
echelon··on World Labs Is Joining AMD
Other embodied labs are less gamer-y/consumer-y. WorldLabs didn't know whether to be a consumer tool, a creative tooling company, a robotics research lab.

Investors who have seen their materials told me this was their direct feeling.

echelon··on Joseph Szabo’s pictures of American adolescents
Not to mention it looks timeless.

These people don't look ancient to me. They look like you could reach out and touch them, converse with them, share the story of their lives.

echelon··on Coding is not solved
> Your debit card transactions for example worked.

I've built payment rails. Six nines SLA, high capacity, resilient distributed systems.

I haven't written a single line of code since February, and I don't think I ever will again. These systems are incredibly good at replacing much of our work. They're only going to get better.

Rather than debating if these models are good (they are), we should be trying to figure out if most of us will still be around in three years. You don't need a two pizza team anymore.

"Look to the person to your left and to your right. Only one of you will remain by graduation" kind of energy. I'm not sure all of us is going to be in this career much longer. We'll have to see what the demand side looks like.

echelon··on Goodbye to the Hard Parts That Never Mattered
The future is exciting and breathtaking, not lamentable.

Fond feelings for punch cards and hanging chads are the result of thick rose-tinted glasses.

echelon··on In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life
We'll likely have robots sampling all over the world's diverse biomes in some short years.
echelon··on When did Google get so weird?
We don't need Google's data. Once we instrument the world, we'll get a Google's worth of data in short order.

It's easier than ever to ingest and label data.

This is happening with or without Google. The recursive improvement does not require them at all.

echelon··on When did Google get so weird?
We're getting such powerful models we'll likely be able to replace all of Google soon.

- Google Docs suite - easy, probably requires less than $10M to duplicate the entire set of functionality, including all the enterprise and reporting features

- Gmail - same

- Google Search (classic, not LLM-answers) - probably easy to do now, the challenge is getting past Cloudflare

- Android - vibe coded hardware is coming, but we're probably 5ish years out.

- YouTube - probably one of the hardest, due to network effects / distribution

- GCP - hardest, due to the infra build out. But neoclouds are rapidly growing.

I can't think of anything most big tech companies do that won't be put under threat in the era of personal software and rapid development.

It's ironic that Google invented the transformer and it seems likely that it will undo the empire they've built as well as all of the moats in the world that aren't distribution / community based.

echelon··on Automattic has a new board after failed attempt to put CEO on leave
He's indignant that WP Engine is eating his market share and not giving anything back in terms of OSS contributions.

It's not at the same scale that AWS and GCP suffocate database vendors, but it rhymes. And it's easy to see why he's mad.

If a very vocal part of the OSS community wasn't so averse to letting small amounts of monopolization happen, we might see open source products that reach significant commercial scale. Where a single vendor or entity can profit and grow big without irrelevant competitors abusing the license to latch onto the product. An open source monopoly could collect good margin and build ambitiously.

It's hard to build a defensible open source business without using fair source licenses, having source available enterprise offerings, or even using an open core design that keeps important parts hidden and out of the commons. That's the only way to defend the magic bits and grow big.

If OSS folks were more tolerant of this, we'd probably see more funding for OSS and extremely viable and defensible open source businesses.

echelon··on Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free
"Representation" means ability to hire an alternative should the original relationship sour.

We don't need better support. We need a way to fire Google via a robust market full of alternatives.

echelon··on Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell
I guess that means none of what a professional software engineer does is from scratch either, given that they're also trained on existing code.

Kind of hard to write code when you haven't seen a lot of it.

echelon··on We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians
The desire for novelty and to be first is demand. The publishing and grant writing. The whole funding and tenure apparatus. It's nothing but demand gradients.
echelon··on What even is an OS now?
Then nothing has changed. You're free to continue doing things as you like.

Unless you're complaining you can't be paid to do it the old way. But none of us were paid to have fun, we were paid to deliver results.

echelon··on We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians
> You don't study mathematics or computer science and information theory to produce commodities. You study them to transform your mind.

That's nonsense. Of course you study them to meet demand.

echelon··on What even is an OS now?
You're welcome to not make things.

Are you telling us the only reason why making things was fun is because it made you "special"? And now that anyone can do it it isn't worth it for you anymore?

That's the wrong reason to do something.

echelon··on What even is an OS now?
Holdouts feel everything is doomed.

Adopters feel the future is brighter than ever.

Article author is excited. I am too.

echelon··on Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell
> Unfortunately, Excel on Mac is not nearly as good. It has all the features, but it’s missing a lot of the UI needed to use them effectively.

Someone could just vibe code that. I'm not even kidding.

echelon··on F-Droid 2.0
Because nobody uses it except a handful of uber-nerds who can put up with wasting hours of time for "altruism".

The answer to freedom isn't another marketplace. It's legislation that requires Google and Apple to allow web installs without scare walls or deeply hidden permission toggles.

You should be able to just download an app. And Grandma should be able to do it.

There's nothing insecure about it in a world of sandboxing, permissions, scanning, blacklisting, etc. When the tech giants are more than happy to sell ads to malware, you know their "safety" stance is just economic moat protectionism.

---

Edit because of rate limits:

This is not derogatory. This is making the point that the wrong battle is being fought. F-droid fans are cheering a small victory, yet losing the entire war.

F-droid does not matter in the grand scheme of things. It's not the point. The point is the app store monopoly. That there are only two platforms and that both are almost completely locked down.

F-droid users don't even see that Google is purposefully allowing this as an antitrust sponge in their calculus. Google doesn't mind because 0.0001% of their users will install this. If they had a sense that the regulators wouldn't bother them, they'd just as well close this loophole. And they probably will eventually.

This isn't beachhead, and even if it was, it isn't sound footing or a stable foundation. It can easily go away.

echelon··on Oracle cites 'force majeure' to shield itself on controversial data center
AI sucks or it's an "extinction level event".

Crazy times.

echelon··on Unknown number of Texas voter registrations went unprocessed due to DPS error
https://trends.google.com/explore?q=how%2520to%2520emigrate%...

Yeah

echelon··on Unknown number of Texas voter registrations went unprocessed due to DPS error
> A de-facto dictatorship.

It's a spectrum, not a binary. We're really far from the "packing bags and leaving the country" end where you're a slave to the state. America is nothing like an Iran or China where we have no power and no rights to overturn the state.

Let's see if any of these petty games helps Trump with midterms. I highly doubt it. Kalshi is already calling it a double win for Democrats.

The economic impact of the Iran War looks like it really cost Trump everything. And it's funny because he always campaigned on not getting into wars.

echelon··on Oracle cites 'force majeure' to shield itself on controversial data center
When our spot instances go away and don't come back, that's a sign that there's not enough capacity.

There is more demand for compute than there is supply, and that demand is going up.

Look at all of the things that have been and are being automated and realize that we're year 6 into a hundred year journey.

Look around you at all the things that aren't automated. They will be.

The world you grew up in won't be here for much longer. We're going through a transformation even more dramatic than the industrial revolution. There were no airplanes and then we landed on the moon.

Edit: downvotes as expected, but I'm shocked that a bunch of smart people at HN aren't taking the bet where this leads to a complete upending of the status quo. The holdout crowd needs to dream bigger.

The models are solving Millennium Prize problems, finding novel biological pathways our scientists can't see, putting every single software engineer out of the job of "coding by hand", and doing the same to designers, marketers, filmmakers, and 3D artists who used to have to operate pixel by pixel / photon by photon.

Everything is going to be AI soon.

echelon··on Stripe's Knowledge AI Platform
If you don't win at AI, you will die.

That is the reality for most (software) businesses.

echelon··on Transformers Explained Visually
Spymarking for your health.
echelon··on Claude Opus 5.5 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis (Max)
These tests need to be sampled continuously.

Moreover, the tests should be randomized somehow to ensure the models don't memorize the answer.

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