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Comment by FrankWilhoit | Hacker News Reader

De mortuis and all that, but someone has pointed out the poor track record of his later initiatives and I think the reasons for those failures are an important part of the picture. Look at his last few blog posts, outlining a radical alternative to LLMs. Read closely, and at the heart of that idea we find "assume enterprise search". But the willingness to consider radical alternatives is part of the right way to think.

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I don't really understand what your comment is trying to say, but I read through the last few pages of his blog and all the posts after the first one from 2026 announcing his return seem AI generated. I think it's a shame, as I loved his writing style in "Accidental Empires" and in his earlier blog posts and columns. It's strange to me that someone who had spent most of his life writing either didn't notice or didn't care about the drop in quality from using LLMs to write.

> Look at his last few blog posts, outlining a radical alternative to LLMs. Read closely, and at the heart of that idea we find "assume enterprise search".

I found the patent for his company's technology (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250259069A1). I always have trouble reading patents, but as far as I can tell it's basically a wrapper around commodity LLMs. The reliability improvements come from prompting the LLM to only source its data from an external database that you provide rather than from whatever it was trained on, and from prompting multiple LLMs simultaneously then doing semantic analysis on the responses to make sure they all agree. I imagine that doing this would probably reduce hallucinations, but there's no hard constraint to prevent them entirely and I'm not sure what the moat is.

The nonexistence of that external database is the crucial bit. The enterprise ontology has been the holy grail for decades. That is why I say that he was assuming the hard bit.

>But the willingness to consider radical alternatives is part of the right way to think.

That sounds liked LinkedIn speak.

While that's true, a stopped clock is right twice a day. It can simultaneously sound like LinkedIn speak and be correct.

Don't know, sounds like a total plattitude.

There's no singular "right way to think" that applies in all cases. In many cases thinking of "radical alternatives" can be a bad idea (think people falling for "alternative medicine" stuff). Or some idiot coming up with shitty "radical alternatives" because they can't accept some specific setup or status quo is better - also related to the N.I.H. mindset in software.

Thanks for expanding. That second paragraph is the "meat and potatoes" I was wishing for, while only cautioning that style doesn't necessarily falsify.

Yes I agree. My mind goes back to the Bob Cringely plane documentary recently posted upon the occasion of his sad passing,[0] as a prime example of how someone can elevate radical thinking too far. The Contrarianism Is The Product, essentially, which can be great as a tech writer, but it's lousy for an airplane PM.

You brought the meat! Thanks

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49950029 (missed opportunity for an Ozzy reference, but I didn't watch it all so maybe there's a "Crazy Plane" song later)

This thread is dead, but my point was about radical alternatives to academic fads. These are stickier than most fads -- they typically last a generation to a lifespan, because the only thing that kills them is the death of their believers. And they are always wrong, and absurdly wrong, and destructively wrong. Any alternatives to them are either light paraphrases of them, or else radical; and the radical ones are mostly crank. But the only way to make actual progress is to find the rare radical hypothesis that is not crank, and the only practicable way to do that is to generate more radical hypotheses. (The impracticable approach is to wait for a genius. People have starved to death doing that.)

The rest of the right way to think is the obligation to discard radical hypotheses that don't work out. Visionaries see things that other people don't. Mostly that is because they are not there. Every so seldom, they are.

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