Hacker News commenters dispute McCanna's technical claims and scope
1 Sep 14 11:07 AM · 13d ago · 1 article · 2 posts · 5 comments · 3 sources · development 1 of 3
Readers pushed back on McCanna's article for lacking substance and technical depth. DiabloD3 argued that 35KB prompts indicate confused, unfocused system design and that practical context window limits are far lower than advertised. SyneRyder summarized the article as a straightforward context-window incompatibility (local models have smaller windows than cloud services) rather than the novel privacy insight McCanna implied. Other commenters noted missing practical solutions for the technical problems described.
“It's become evident that the frontier providers are not only untrustworthy- but actively devious. If you want to protect your ideas, you cannot run inference on someone else's hardware.”
Patrick McCanna, Developer, author · hn ↗Patrick McCanna Developer, authorOpenAI Frontier AI providerAnthropic Frontier AI provider
The whole story articlespostscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
Reported in the same hours no headline names this development itself — these 1 claim were published in its stretch
-
first by HN Frontpage, 13d ago
What people said 5 voices · verbatim
-
The article doesn't really describe the problem: if your prompt is 35kb, your prompt is confusing, unfocused, and doesn't work right on any LLM, and is needlessly bloating your context.At this point in time, due to how most people and companies run their inference engine, regardless of the model (yes, this includes the newest from OpenAI and…
-
> Everyone who begins learning exploitation hits a phase of exploitability grief about 3 month into dedicated, practiced study. They hack something they didn’t think they had the skill to break into and it terrifies them. They’re smart enough to know that, relatively speaking, they are an idiot, and if an idiot can do this then nothing is safe…
-
TLDR: Local models have a smaller context window, so your 35kB prompts that worked fine against a hosted 1 Million token window, crash out when you only have a 65K (!) token window locally.I dislike being negative, but I was really hoping for more substance when reading this. It would have been an interesting topic.
-
I had hoped to get some new information out of this topic, but unfortunately found the same local "dead-ends" that I explored myself.It unfortunately feels like we will be stuck waiting for a burst bubble before local hardware can be reasonably acquired for personal LLM usage.
-
The Claude Code system prompt was >50KB, though I think they trimmed it down heavily recently. (The newer models don't need as much hand-holding.)
All 3 developments of Developer warns frontier AI providers are "pirates" after… →
Hacker NewsMastodonNewswires