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panarky

30,511 karma · joined December 6, 2010

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panarky··on Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%
When your job becomes managing a fleet of agents, with all the design, planning, coordination, supervision and evaluation that requires, is that "individual contribution" or "managerial work"?
panarky··on LLMs Are Not a Higher Level of Abstraction
Thank you for "vapid condescension".

I've wanted a term for this for decades!

panarky··on An update on GitHub availability
> entirely driven by price

I might buy that argument if Azure compensated for its awful availability and security with lower prices.

But the kind of person who buys Azure is the kind of person who buys Windows and Teams, perfectly happy to pay a premium for all the extra abuse.

panarky··on Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic
Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $350 billion valuation (pre-money) in February.

Google's deal from prior rounds likely lets them buy in at the same valuation other investors get every round, so they're just getting the February valuation.

Amazon did almost the same thing last week, at the same valuation.

panarky··on I just want simple S3
Sounds like you want S4. Super simple storage service.
panarky··on Austerity Creates Fascism
The NHS study cited in the post is pretty strong evidence that precarity can increase support for proto-fascist politics.

But that rationale falls flat in the US context, as many analyses show that the median income of MAGA supporters is quite high. Right-wing extremism in the US isn't really about revolting peasants, it's about an alliance among multiple groups up and down the security-precarity spectrum, with very strong support from the top 5% and even more support from the top 0.1%.

Just because precarity can be a causal factor doesn't mean it's the only factor or even the dominant factor in the US.

And I wouldn't be surprised to see the US regime move into full money-printer stimulus mode to finance its wars of choice and give its base a little financially security before this year's midterm elections.

panarky··on EFF is leaving X
Where did you read that in their post?

Because what I read is that their X posts are getting only 3% of the engagement compared to pre-Musk Twitter.

The post insinuates that's because the platform intentionally down-ranks posts for ideological purposes.

panarky··on France pulls last gold held in US
Just because a social construct is silly when you think about it doesn't make it any less real or useful.

A national border is silly as a physical reality; it is just a cartographic whim. These invisible lines, drawn by long-dead men, pretend that the lithosphere is fundamentally different on one side of a coordinate than the other.

Fiat currency is silly as a store of value; it is just a digital ledger or a piece of cotton-linen blend. Its "worth" is derived entirely from the collective hallucination that a central bank’s promise is more substantial than the paper it is printed on.

panarky··on Ubuntu now requires more RAM than Windows 11
If you run Windows 11 with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook on a 4GB machine you're gonna have a bad day.
panarky··on LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file"
There's nothing about RAG that requires embeddings.

The retrieval part can be grep if you don't care about semantic search.

panarky··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
You overestimate the base.

The war machine is already rewriting this as Iranian hostility.

The base is incapable of seeing this as a failure of their cult leader.

Instead they'll see it as the very rationale and justification of the war.

If they were ambivalent about it before, now they'll scream bloody murder for even more off-the-leash barbarism from the US and Israel.

panarky··on Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz
The big lesson from the US/Israel war against Iran is that the power balance has shifted away from strike capability toward defense magazine depth.

You can't win with stand-off strike capability. You can't seize and control territory, you can't keep strategic choke-points open, you can't change regimes.

But you can definitely lose by spending two or three multi-million dollar air defense interceptors per incoming projectile that costs 10x to 100x less. Especially when your supply chain can only produce hundreds of interceptors per year and your adversary makes that many missiles per month and 10x that many drones per month.

panarky··on Ask HN: How do you deal with people who trust LLMs?
I treat people who blindly believe an LLM the same way I treat people who blindly believe a religion or a political ideology or medical advice from Instagram.

If they ask what I think, I tell them.

If they don't want my opinion I keep it to myself.

panarky··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
Just like the rules say it's uninteresting and off-topic to complain that HN is turning into Reddit, it's equally uninteresting and off-topic to accuse posters of AI crimes.

And everyone's personal AI detector has a ridiculously high false-positive rate.

panarky··on Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Codex #5
That's what they always say.

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

panarky··on Claude Code, Claude Cowork and Codex #5
I find it amusing that Franco ran with the promise of "justice for those with clean hands," and then immediately enacted the Law of Political Responsibilities to institutionalize the summary execution of tens of thousands of his political opponents.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by a hollow promise from Franco at this point.

panarky··on Files are the interface humans and agents interact with
Does everyone just easily accuse genuine, literate humans of "cheating" with AI when there's no way they could know that?

There are a lot of unique aspects of the writing in this post that LLMs don't typically generate on their own.

And there's not a "delve" or "tapestry" or even a bullet point to be found.

Also, accusations and complaints like this are off-topic and uninteresting.

We should be talking about filesystems here, not your gut instinct AI detector that has a sky-high false-positive rate.

I swear there needs to be some convention around throwing wild accusations at people you don't know based exclusively on vibes and with zero actual evidence.

panarky··on If AI writes code, should the session be part of the commit?
When a human writes the code should all their slack messages about the project be committed into the repo?
panarky··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
Authoritarian nations continue to have elections, turnout is near 100%, and Dear Leader wins with 90% of the vote.
panarky··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
Does the Defense Production Act force employees to continue working at Anthropic?
panarky··on Claude Code Remote Control
Not just the mobile app, but also Claude Code Web is super unreliable.

Frequently chews through lots of expensive Opus tokens, then it just stops with no communication about why or what's next.

No way to tell what it's done, what's remaining to complete.

Only choice is to re-run everything and eat the cost of the wasted time and tokens.

panarky··on Google restricting Google AI Pro/Ultra subscribers for using OpenClaw
If you pay $249 to get $1,200 of compute, "cheap" seems like the right word.
panarky··on Show HN: I built a simulated AI containment terminal for my sci-fi novel
LLMs are too smart to use meaningless terms like "containment terminal".

This smells like an ignorant human who played Fallout 4 and is now pretending to be knowledgeable.

panarky··on I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
> we can assume similar issues arise in more complex cases

I would assume similar issues are more rare in longer, more complex prompts.

This prompt is ambiguous about the position of the car because it's so short. If it were longer and more complex, there could be more signals about the position of the car and what you're trying to do.

I must confess the prompt confuses me too, because it's obvious you take the car to the car wash, so why are you even asking?

Maybe the dirty car is already at the car wash but you aren't for some reason, and you're asking if you should drive another car there?

If the prompt was longer with more detail, I could infer what you're really trying to do, why you're even asking, and give a better answer.

I find LLMs generally do better on real-world problems if I prompt with multiple paragraphs instead of an ambiguous sentence fragment.

LLMs can help build the prompt before answering it.

And my mind works the same way.

panarky··on Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist Credit Card Number
Is there any evidence that Apple fights administrative subpoenas issued by US federal agencies?

Or is Google just more transparent than Apple about the government orders it complies with?

For example, after the Department of Justice demanded app stores remove apps that people use to track ICE deployments, Apple was the first to comply, followed later by Google.

panarky··on I am happier writing code by hand
You're unstated assumption is that machine-written code is lower quality than human-written code. That may be true for the top 5% of developers today.

But I didn't think that assumption is true for the median developer today, and it probably won't be true for the 5-percentile developer by this time next year.

panarky··on GitHub is down again
You'd think so, and we don't know about today's incident yet, but recent Github incidents have been attributed specifically to Azure, and Azure itself has had a lot of downtime recently that lasts for many hours.
panarky··on GitHub is down again
Migrations of Actions and Copilot to Azure completed in 2024.

Pages and Packages completed in 2025.

Core platform and databases began in October 2025 and are in progress, with traffic split between the legacy Github data center and Azure.

panarky··on GitHub is down again
Github lost at least one 9, if not two, since last year's "existential" migration to Azure.
panarky··on I am happier writing code by hand
Some people like to spin their own wool, weave their own cloth, sew their own clothes.

A few even make a good living by selling their artisanal creations.

Good for them!

It's great when people can earn a living doing what they love.

But wool spinning and cloth weaving are automated and apparel is mass produced.

There will always be some skilled artisans who do it by hand, but the vast majority of decent jobs in textile production are in design, managing machines and factories, sales and distribution.

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