I believe Nat Friedman said "pessimists sound smart, optimists make money." It's certainly much easier to give a snarky/negative take and shoot an idea down than think creatively about how to make it work. Also, negative people are perceived as smarter!
It is important to filter ideas, but being reflexively negative like a large portion of HN is just isn't productive. To quote my manager from years ago back when I was still an IC - "I know there are problems - tell me solutions". The whole point of constructive criticism is to start a dialogue in good faith.
To be frank, a large portion of HNers just aren't qualified for that and never will be, and a growing proportion exhibit bot-like behavior. The fact that a bot account for "The Register" operated undetected on HN for 3 years and accumulated 66k karma until I and one other commenter decided to call it out highlights issues with this community.
I personally think stricter moderation of tone (maybe in an automated manner), a stricter delineation on the kinds of topics being posted to HN, and a complete overhaul of the now 17 year old HN guidelines is now in order.
HN used to be a platform where ICs and decisionmakers could anonymously have a water cooler conversation or a discussion but leave with changed impression. Over the past few years, it has exhibited hallmarks of becoming a more combative forum with users exhibiting Reddit-like behavior and oftentimes sharing articles from a handful of Reddit subs. Without a significant revamp, HN will lose it's signal-to-noise ratio which differentiated it.
Already, most YC founders prefer to use BookFace over HN and more experienced technical ICs are looking to lobsters.
You disparage the negativity as "reflexive", but isn't whether the negativity is warranted more important than the pace at which it is delivered, or some oblique critique of its motivation? This looks like an attempt to smear the negativity. Your critique as HNers as not being qualified also looks like an ad hominem argument.
Pace could be driven by the rapidity with which posts fall off the front page or with which comments expand so new comments are far down the list.
I'd turn that around and say the observation that negative comments are upvoted shows that HN readers value them.
I'll admit we could use more steelmanning when critiquing.
No doubt he was making this claim in a business context, but I wish it wasn't framed in financial terms. Our culture is already too obsessed with money, falsely framing it as the measure of the good life and of human worth. What an impoverished, boring, and frankly nihilistic and horrifying worldview.
That being said, pessimism/optimism is a false dichotomy. The reason is that both are willful attitudes of expectation on an emotional spectrum rather than rationally grounded and sober assessments of reality. The wise path is prudent (I don't mean "cautious"; I mean the classic virtue [0]). Prudence is rational. You can't be better than rational (genuinely rational; believing you are rational is not the same as being rational).
As a counter point - every couple I ever ran across in divorce court getting raked over the coals seemed to have at least one delusional optimist in the mix.
Both to have gotten in there, and to keep going.
Like anything, it's a balancing act. Being optimistic the IRS isn't going to throw you in jail for not paying your taxes, after all, has a so-so track record. But not zero!
I have to imagine governments are closely monitoring prediction markets as part of their intelligence apparatus. But then you just add another layer of subterfuge. Imagine a D-Day prediction market... "Will the Allies Land in Normandy, Pas-de-Calais, or somewhere else?" The US might buy a major position on Pas-de-Calais the night before as a decoy!
I really wish these models were available via AWS or Azure. I understand strategically that this might not make sense for Google, but at a non-software-focused F500 company it would sure make it a lot easier to use Gemini.
I feel like that is part of their cloud strategy. If your company wants to pump a huge amount of data through one of these you will pay a premium in network costs. Their sales people will use that as a lever for why you should migrate some or all of your fleet to their cloud.
A few gigabytes of text is practically free to transfer even over the most exorbitant egress fee networks, but would cost “get finance approval” amounts of money to process even through a cheaper model.
It sounds like you already know what sales peoples incentives are. They don't care about the tiny players who wanna use tiny slices. I was referring to people who are trying to push PB through these. GCPs policies make a lot of sense if they are trying to get major players to switch their compute/data host to reduce overall costs.
You're off by orders of magnitude. A million tokens is about 5 MB of text and costs $0.20 to process in something like Gemini 3 Flash.
Hence, a terabyte of text would cost about $42,000 to run through a pareto-frontier "cheap" model.
The most expensive cloud egress fee I could quickly find is $185 per terabyte (Azure South America Internet egress).
Hence, AI processing is 200x as expensive as bandwidth, or put another way, even a long-distance international egress at "exorbitant cloud retail pricing" is a mere 0.5% of the cost.
Petabytes, exabytes, etc... just adds digits to both the token cost and bandwidth cost in sync and won't significantly shift the ratio. If anything, bandwidth costs will go down and AI costs go up because: output tokens, smarter models, retries, multiple questions for the same data, etc...
This is the biggest news of the announcement. Prior Opus models were strong, but the cost was a big limiter of usage. This price point still makes it a "premium" option, but isn't prohibitive.
Also increasingly it's becoming important to look at token usage rather than just token cost. They say Opus 4.5 (with high reasoning) used 50% fewer tokens than Sonnet 4.5. So you get a higher score on SWE-bench verified, you pay more per token, but you use fewer tokens and overall pay less!
I run lmstudio for ease of use on several mac studios that are fronted by a small token aware router that estimates resource usage on the mac studios.
Lots of optimization left there, but the systems are pinned most of the time so not focused on that at the moment as the gpus are the issue not the queuing.
I would like to hear more about your set up if you’re willing. Is the token aware router you’re using publicly available or something you’ve written yourself?
It isn't open... but drop me an email and I can send you it. Basically just tracks a list of known lmstudios on the network, queries their models every 15 seconds and routes to the ones who have the requested models loaded in a FIFO queue tracking the number of tokens/model (my servers are uniform... m4 max 128gb studios but could also track the server) and routes to the one that has just finished. I used to have it queue one just as it was expected to finish but was facing timeout issues due to an edgecase.
This is a really impressive release. It's probably the biggest lead we've seen from a model since the release of GPT-4. Seems likely that OpenAI rushed out GPT-5.1 to beat the Gemini 3 release, knowing that their model would underperform it.
Categorically different? Sure. A valid excuse to ban certain forms of linear algebra? No.
And before someone says it's reductive to say it's just numbers, you could make the same argument in favor of cryptographic export controls, that the harm it does is larger than the benefit. Yet the benefit we can see in hindsight was clearly worth it.
This is almost certainly the issue. It's very unintuitive for users, but LLMs behave much better when you clear the context often. I run /clear every third message or so with Claude Code to avoid context rot. Anthropic describes this a bit with their best practices guide [0].
This'd be a valid analogy if all compiled / interpreted languages were like INTERCAL and eg. refused to compile / execute programs that were insufficiently polite, or if the runtime wouldn't print out strings that it "felt" were too silly.
It depends from which vantage point you look at it. The person directing the company, let's imagine it was Bill Gates instructing that the code should be bug free, but its very opinionated about what a bug is at Microsoft.
> I don't know what it is, but trying to coax my goddamn tooling into doing what I want is not why I got into this field.
I can understand that, but as long as the tooling is still faster than doing it manually, that's the world we live in. Slower ways to 'craft' software are a hobby, not a profession.
(I'm glad I'm in it for building stuff, not for coding - I love the productivity gains).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/002210...
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