ethbr1

11 ms·

181.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
Agents themselves are inherently probabilistically correct. Often correct more often than humans at this point! But that doesn't mean they don't have >0% failure modes, often in very non-human, unexpected, even dangerous ways.
182.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
They can't run it on the laptop they already own, unless they happen to already have a decently-spec'd M-series MBP, which most of the non-hipster-coder world didn't. And because it lets them create code without knowing how t
183.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
The difference is in enforceability. Open weight models are less like Napster and more like DeCSS -- once you have the digital artifact, there's little external evidence you're using them. Napster was easy to target because it was
184.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
Given this is HuggingFace, I'd expect that's less about thought leadership and more using what they know well, in a critical situation.
185.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
Correct. I just wanted to clarify the statement that parent made, as it seems like lots of people have a misassumption about the copyrightability of autonomous in the United States. Expect it will be clarified and/or changed by law giv
186.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
> There are lots of famous artists that are older than copyright. There are lots of famous artists that made art before color image capture and reproduction (1930s-60s) and digital image capture and reproduction (90s-00s). Copyrightles
187.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
I'll link to a previous comment of mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48968156 > You need to have a very specific and 'creative' / 'substantial' expression of an idea for copyright
188.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
Because guaranteed to never fail requires some UX inconveniences, and the industry (and the market) doesn't seem in a mood to tolerate inconvenience for the sake of security.
189.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
Mac Minis are out of stock because they're the cheapest entry point to reasonably capable local agents (read: 64+GB of GPU accessible RAM), which TikTok is all about. They're being bought as a hardware solution, not a sandbox solu
190.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
They are, unless governments actually crack down. A lack of enforcement actions has caused situations like this. Why would LG do better when it's cheaper to not?
191.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
"Our ranking on some metric wasn't as high as we would have liked" seems like a bad reason to self-exclude.
192.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
I'd offer that the AI harness ecosystem is discovering the same thing any rapidly-growing software space did before it -- lines of code are a maintenance burden. That's not something a team sees when they're doing greenfield,
193.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
Maybe the important take-away would be to recognize that this was a rant. Ownership and honesty about things is healthy, as is letting out strong opinions sometimes. Nothing wrong with saying "I wanted to write a (technically-informed)
194.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
Poorly socialized people tend to have poorly developed social mores. And a lot of developers, especially on the internet, tend to be poorly socialized. Salt that with the fact that they often are more fact-intelligent than the people around
195.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
I think you're vastly overestimating the technical competence and background of most people using agentic coding harnesses today. The downside to democratizing code creation is... it puts it in the hands of non-developers. F.ex. a team
196.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
Going from "build and running executables" to that needing to be done on the same system and under control of the LLM is a large leap. Separation of duties and ephemerality are well-known security mechanisms that many harnesses ju
197.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
Skepticism is the flipside of knowledge. If an LLM has knowledge encoded inside it (and it's hard to argue it doesn't), then cognitive dissonance can be experienced. And once experienced, must be dealt with, especially in longer-r
198.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
I feel like that's a lot of LLM use in a nutshell: sure, there's a more surgical scalpel available, but isn't it so much easier just to fling prompts at a magic box?
199.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
> And as Hillary showed with her email server, digital records are more ephemeral these days, so there will be a lot of things we simply never know. Ironically, part of the story behind the email server was that State Dept IT was so ba
200.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
More to the point, because you've been chasing them around goalposts, you've both accepted that the question at hand is unknowable precisely because the source isn't available. > Do you believe in "guilty until prove
201.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
And as the TCO enterprise adage goes: the cost of continued support. It's one thing to value ones own time spent supporting something at $0, but most people probably shouldn't. And it's incredibly inefficient to debug and mai
202.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
This. The biggest value proposition of a console that plays Steam games is the ability to acquire Steam games during Steam sales. The closed console ecosystems seemingly have far less incentive to ever discount games, even old ones.
203.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
Radiolab did a great episode that covered the history of Chinese character computing: https://radiolab.org/podcast/wubi-effect To summarize, in the 70s and 80s, China was facing an existential threat with their inabili
204.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
It seems like there are four things being conflated (for simplicity's sake, no malice) here: - Actual day-to-day acquaintances' responses to someone's perceived ideological heresies (read: your friends having a problem with y
205.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
> How do you know it's vibe coded slop? Have you seen the source code? I believe you've just made your opponent's point for them.
206.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
Afaik, under current US law (Thaler v. Perlmutter 2025^), "the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being". With regards to AI-generated code, this means the copyrightabi
207.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
To the end that they exist at all . One of the biggest organizational anti-patterns of the modern SaaS world is the move away from release notes. It's a question of whether a company has a competent enough change control process to be
208.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
I'd vote fire, but people say Grug brain ethr1 know too much about old technology.
209.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
It's definitely a factor. In the same way that the US going to war with an important Chinese oil supplier: 85% of Iranian oil going to China and comprising ~14% of China's oil imports. There's always geopolitical reason beh
210.
by ethbr1 3mo ago
I think the market for Oracle Cloud is the same for early GCP: companies with large enough needs and strong enough engineering teams that they can leverage "X runs on Oracle Cloud" into deep discounts. And then cover the gaps with

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