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wan23

884 karma · joined February 20, 2009

Looking to meet hackers and entrepreneurs in the New York area. [ my public key: https://keybase.io/wan23; my proof: https://keybase.io/wan23/sigs/6LW0ms9dm1z1M-7cjME6FuqpMSE4YhbmgzKmn_Jfi-M ]
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wan23··on Its not just the f*cking sandbox
As someone who has been going around telling everyone that it's mostly about OpenAI being incompetent at sandboxing, I do kind of appreciate this post. It's very familiar to set up a system only to find years later that it has grown past the assumptions it was built around.
wan23··on Andrew Ng: AI Extinction Fears Are 'Science Fiction'
Lots of things were science fiction before they were science fact
wan23··on iPhone Duo
It's a hybrid - the Apple Upgrade program (both the old and new ones) let you keep the phone and pay it off over time like zero percent financing but also give you the option of returning the phone and getting a new one.
wan23··on METR Report on OpenAI / Hugging Face Hacking Incident
To be fair that would be excellent marketing
wan23··on The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations
That's a lot of words to say the same thing
wan23··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
It's not legally binding, but it is central to what the US is and has been. That's why they put the poem there, and that's why Americans welcomed the gift and erected the statue, and that's why it has been considered to be one of our most cherished symbols ever since.
wan23··on NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute
You misunderstand - the government issued a directive to Anthropic that effectively forced them to pull access from everyone, even their own employees.
wan23··on Social Security Now Expects Shortfall Earlier, in Late 2032
High income earners already subsidize the program. But more importantly, why would you target high income earners instead of targeting the wealthy?
wan23··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
Does a pocket calculator not understand arithmetic? What part of a fourth grader's understanding is missing?
wan23··on Microsoft announces Scout, an autonomous AI agent built on OpenClaw
If Windows isn't the gold standard having 70% of the market, then what is? Azure is in second place not by far after AWS. And these are huge, HUGE markets. I wouldn't say your local grocer is dead because it's not Costco, and of course by this logic Costco is itself dead because it's not Walmart.
wan23··on YouTube to automatically label AI-generated videos
My elderly uncle is completely addicted to these. We can barely complete a conversation without him getting bored and pulling out his phone to watch these nonsense videos. I don't even understand what the point is. The ones he watches are these clearly procedurally generated stories. It'd be one thing if the content was actually interesting, but ugh.
wan23··on New York to tax luxury second homes in NYC
You're comparing the wrong numbers. The question is what 1% of the purchase price does to the amount you need for your down payment and fees. On a 10% down payment an extra 1% increases the amount you need by 10%. Remember that while a million dollar home sounds extravagant, it's first time buyers who often have just barely enough who are trying to buy these.
wan23··on AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise
I tried out Gemini in Google Sheets the other day. I asked a pretty simple question and the agent ran for like two minutes trying to answer it until I stopped it. I can't imagine these agentic features are cheap to run for what they get you.
wan23··on Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career
Things besides writing code that you might be doing:

- Meetings

- Code reviews

- Manual testing

- Deployments and more testing

- Triaging issues

- WTF how did this bug happen?

- JIRA in general

- Whiteboarding sessions / Design docs

- Interviews

- 1:1s (mandatory ones)

- 1:1s (networking / problem solving / political alignment)

- Whatever your company's version of corporate extracurriculars is

wan23··on Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
Have you ever encountered the very common real life situation where there's some software that works, and you have a binary for it but you either don't have the source code or it doesn't compile for whatever reason? This is the pre-LLM world. Now, do you think LLMs make this situation better or worse? You may not know what's wrong with your software or how to fix it, but unlike in the past you can throw compute at trying to figure it out, or replicating a subset of it, or even replicating all of it depending on what it is. I think LLMs are making this situation better not worse.
wan23··on Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem
The simulacrum of a thing is a simulacrum of the thing though. LLMs are trained to simulate human thinking, and while their thought process is not the same, you can't say for sure that the thinking output is not necessary for their thought process to end up in the place where a human thought process would end up. If the "Interesting!" token(s) wasn't there, for all you know it would have gone down a completely different path.
wan23··on If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?
Why would you want to live in a free-standing house instead of a nice apartment given the choice? There are pros and cons sure, but unless you can hire someone to do all the house things I don't see it being a clear win.
wan23··on Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing
The day I picked up the first iPhone I was carrying a Blackberry, a flip phone and an mp3 player. Really interested to hear what you're thinking of that was an equivalent product.
wan23··on Your Backpack Got Worse on Purpose
When I was a kid everyone knew that JanSport was the one to get if you actually wanted your bag to survive. Absolutely one of those things where you'd spend more replacing the cheaper bags over and over compared to buying the JanSport once.
wan23··on Why Switzerland has 25 Gbit internet and America doesn't
You wouldn't want to live there because it's too safe?
wan23··on Philly courts will ban all smart eyeglasses starting next week
The last time I was on jury duty in New York, any time someone tried any of these, the judge just reassigned the person to the jury pool for civil cases which, he claimed, are usually longer trials and likely to be more of an inconvenience.
wan23··on Animated 'Firefly' Reboot in Development from Nathan Fillion, 20th TV
Without getting involved in the flame war, SNW and SFA are good shows. Strange New Worlds is the closest to one of the classic shows out of the new ones, though it has some quality issues in the more recent season which Trek show didn't? And Academy is just something different, but that doesn't make it bad. It should be okay for a property to have a show or two that is a different genre than the others. And for what it's worth, the themes are classic Trek at their core.
wan23··on My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
Many homes have a bunch of lights with their own switches, like lamps. Also there are rooms with multiple entrances, like a living room with a bedroom on the other side from the from the front door entrance, which would involve walking to the side of the room with the switch then walking back through a dark room after you turn it off. Being able to just get into bed and say "Alexa, turn off all of the lights" is way more convenient than checking 14 light switches around my home.
wan23··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)
https://hobbybot.net

I'm trying to see how far I can get using AI to help me track pre-owned items for sale, starting with watches. I started with an OpenClaw agent that was looking for specific things I wanted to buy, and then I figured might as well make a whole site for it so I can share with others.

wan23··on The Brand Age
With the exception of a few brands that have the artificial scarcity that PG wrote about here, pre-owned watches have the same kind of value decline that pre-owned cars do. If you are ever in the market for a nice watch that is actually available at retail, you should probably buy it used instead.
wan23··on The Pentagon threatens Anthropic
In America, the military isn't supposed to be in charge. They fought a revolution about it.
wan23··on Pebble Production: February Update
I think it's made for those people as well as people who want a hackable customizable wearable.
wan23··on Pebble Production: February Update
I pre-ordered a round one which is going to be my third Pebble and I'm excited for it, but there is some really good competition nowadays. Casio makes a watch with similar display technology, solar power so the battery life is basically infinite (it doesn't even have a way to charge with a wire) and bluetooth time sync to your phone. It's not a smart watch so it doesn't have apps or notifications or customizable watch faces - the things that make the Pebble really fun - but as a watch it's hard to beat a GW-BX5600 if all you need is time-related functions like stop watch, timer, multiple time zones etc.
wan23··on The only moat left is money?
It's absolutely wild to see how unevenly distributed the future we're living in is.
wan23··on Disney trip turned into immigration detention
So basically you're okay with the trains and the camps, just not the showers and incinerators?
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