pchristensen (u/pchristensen)

pchristensen commented on Amazon plunge continues $1T wipeout as AI bubble fears ignite sell-off cnbc.com/2026/02/06/ai-se... · Posted by u/truegoric

symfrog · 2 days ago

In what way is the long term impact of LLMs being underestimated? If anything, it seems that it has been overestimated in the past years and that something other than LLMs will be needed to reach the original scaled LLM hope of AGI.

pchristensen · 2 days ago

Back when the Internet was America online and some CGI bin perl scripts, there were a lot of very lofty things said about the potential of the Internet in the future. I don’t remember any of them predicting the power of the tech would have over business, politics, media, and hours of every single day for billions of people. Even without AGI, it’s quite possible that were still underestimating. The effects of predictive, probabilistic computing 20 or 50 years from now.

pchristensen commented on Opus 4.6 uncovers 500 zero-day flaws in open-source code axios.com/2026/02/05/anth... · Posted by u/speckx

malfist · 3 days ago

[flagged]

pchristensen · 3 days ago

Nobody is right about everything, but tptacek's takes on software security are a good place to start.

pchristensen commented on Anthropic is Down updog.ai/status/anthropic... · Posted by u/ersiees

skydhash · 5 days ago

> It's pretty rare that switching costs are THAT low in technology!

Look harder. Swapping usb devices (mouse,…) takes even less time. Switching wifi is also easy. Switching browser works the same. I can equally use vim/emacs/vscode/sublime/… for programming.

pchristensen · 5 days ago

Switching between vim <-> emacs <-> IDEs is way harder than swapping a USB (unless you already know how to use them).

pchristensen commented on The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network subseacables.blogspot.com... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

pchristensen · a month ago

I always have to recommend Mother Earth, Mother Board by Neal Stephenson[1] if the thought of undersea cables sounds at all interesting. I'll also second andyjohnson0's recommendation of The Victorian Internet[2] - it blew my mind how much of modern digital culture existed on telegraphs prior to voice.

[1] https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46433901

pchristensen commented on Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake? · Posted by u/hussein-khalil

pchristensen · 2 months ago

Gamification helps with growth and engagement but not necessarily learning. I have a feeling that a "calm" app would grow more slowly but if the experience and results are good, you could have more durable and satisfied customers, less churn, etc.

pchristensen commented on Google boss says AI investment boom has 'elements of irrationality' bbc.com/news/articles/cwy... · Posted by u/jillesvangurp

jaredklewis · 3 months ago

> That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it.

I'm skeptical of this explanation for falling birthrates just because birthrates are falling across the world and there seems to be no correlation between fertility and financial security. America has low birthrates. Scandinavia (usually considered to have generous welfare states) has low birthrates. Hungary, where the government gives massive tax breaks (IIRC they spend around ~6% of their GDP on child incentives), has low birthrates. Europe, East Asia, India, the Middle East, the Americas, basically the whole world except for central Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (which are catching up) has low birth rates. Obviously the economic conditions between basically all the countries in the world varies wildly, but there isn't a consistent relationship between those conditions and fertility.

Also within countries, the number of children people have is not always correlated with wealth (and at times in the past 60 years it has been negatively correlated).

Anyway, I find your argument intuitive, but it doesn't seem to align with the data we have.

pchristensen · 3 months ago

This documentary goes into a lot of detail on the causes worldwide: The Birth Gap - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2GeVG0XYTc

pchristensen commented on How America got hooked on ultraprocessed foods nytimes.com/interactive/2... · Posted by u/mykowebhn

dfxm12 · 4 months ago

They're cheap, easy to find and easy to prepare.

With grocery prices going up, what little progress has been made might get reversed, unfortunately. Making America healthy again means making non-ultraprocessed groceries available to everyone & cheaper, and ensuring that working families have time to cook. Pressuring Coke to create a new product with sugar is not going to move the needle.

pchristensen · 4 months ago

Don't forget non-perishable. If you're already having a hard time affording groceries, it really hurts to throw away wilted veggies or moldy fruit.

pchristensen commented on Don't Be a Sucker (1943) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqY... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

zahlman · 4 months ago

How does that demonstrate targeting people whose presence is legal?

pchristensen · 4 months ago

It demonstrates carelessness in only targeting people whose presence is illegal, with legal residents being collateral damage.

pchristensen commented on Don't Be a Sucker (1943) [video] youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqY... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

zahlman · 4 months ago

What exactly is your evidence for this claim?

What do you consider to be their basis for such targeting, and what is your evidence for that claim?

pchristensen · 4 months ago

Off the top of my head, Kilmar Abrego Garcia had a judicial stay against exportation and the administration said his deportation was an error, but he spent weeks in an El Salvadoran prison. And there was the Korean battery factory workers in Georgia.

There were also more cases in the district court record that led to the Kavanaugh Stops decision: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/10/scotus-analysis-...

There have been so many cases documented so thoroughly. All you have to do is believe that it's not impossible and the reporting does the rest.