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Semkas

187 karma · joined January 7, 2018

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Semkas··on Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard
We will all become, or temporarily be, fundamentally limited at times in our life.

It's trivial to build something that accommodates an ideal user, the challenge in software engineering is creating a solution that suits many kinds of people, at different points in their life. Refusing to engage with that challenge is a kind of proud mediocrity.

Semkas··on Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard
Why should that be true?
Semkas··on More than 100k people in Japan are now aged 100 or older
These kinds of arguments are obviously vacuous: The US could also "win" any war with a non-nuclear opponent by nuking every major city. But the fact that they don't is not something worth calling restraint.
Semkas··on Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely
Is the term "One-shotting" here even appropriate? In the context of AI one-shotting means giving your llm a single prompt and having it return a surprisingly good result (usually code related) without requiring further input, but the llm (probably) still iterates heavily before showing the results. When Codex "one-shots" something it depends a ton on the fact that code is easily testable.
Semkas··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
"using the same approach that Buckmaster and Alpoge had been exploring" is imo mealy wording: it seems fairly likely that OA heard Buckmaster and Alpoge were close to a breakthrough, and decided to use their unlimited compute to quickly prompt based on their assumptions about B&As work.
Semkas··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
By default OA trains their models on codex-sessions. If I understand him correctly this is something Tristan explicitly mentions in his post as a possible reason for the fast results obtained by the internal OA team. Anthropic obviously doesn't want to challenge the idea that training is transformative, even if it means agreeing with their competitor.
Semkas··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
But there's a bunch of people already in this thread calling that stuff unfounded speculation (which I disagree with), and my point is that even if that specific thing isn't true, OA's behavior here is obviously awful.

If they're going to try to beat researchers to discoveries like this it disincentives researchers to talk about their progress publicly, and basically breaks the ecosystem of scientific cooperation / discovery. It's also immoral.

Semkas··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
So, leaving aside the idea that OA might've used data from the researchers Codex sessions: Do I understand correctly that the internal OpenAI work on the problems was probably started after they heard Alpoge and Buckmaster had made process by using their models? And they used the publicly available info about the researchers past work to prompt their models?

If compute is cheap, and the difficult thing with scientific discovery is now mostly in steering agents into promising areas, there's an obvious incentive for OA mathematicians to simply monitor closely which researchers are close to releasing exciting results, make some assumptions about their prompts based on their past work, and quickly prompt their own (stronger) model to look into the same areas.

Semkas··on Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics
Won't deny that this is an interesting idea, but I feel like waiting on the output of an LLM for 40 hours feels like it is completely antithetical to what makes classic Hackathons appealing / educative.

More generally, I don't think the shape of a hackathon (intensely working for a short timespan) maps at all onto the way LLM Math progress has seemingly been made so far; AFAIK it mostly involves picking out something for the Model, then having it run for a week with sporadic correction / encouragement.

Semkas··on Fastpotify
I'm not sure what decision you're talking about. My comment just mentions that it would be convenient if disclosure of vibe-coding was more common.

I can look for myself and see that the repo was started a week ago and has had hundreds of commits since, and that the author exclusively talks about ai on twitter. I'd just like it if I could save myself some time, and it would prevent useless discussions in this thread were people argue whether the commit-messages look like ai.

Semkas··on Fastpotify
Lots of people seem to care about whether a project was built by hand over time by a few committed developers, or if it was vibe-coded in the past week by a single person.

Whether the distinction matters or not, it would be nice for everyone involved if projects falling into the second category were more upfront about that.

Semkas··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
K-Pop did not reach people through "Hollywood, and associated media industry", unless you define that category to be meaninglessly broad.
Semkas··on AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+books+are+published... https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+megabytes+average+b... https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+3+megabytes+times+2....
Semkas··on Defending my own brain against enshittification
It's interesting that this article is mostly focused on the merits of living a simple / predictable life, whereas I get the impression that the main improvement here might be just not working from home anymore (I guess the author agrees since they link to this older post: https://mrmarket.bearblog.dev/remote-work-is-bad-for-you/).
Semkas··on Defending my own brain against enshittification
Couldn't it just be a moral thing? Ie "This thing was trained on the work of people it's now replacing and I think that sucks". (NB I'm not looking to get into an argument about the actual impact of these kinds of small moral stances)
Semkas··on Defending my own brain against enshittification
I think the quality of a commute is very different depending on whether it's by car or by train, since you can actually read / write / program / draw on a train. Obviously I'm still pretty glad when I get to work from home and sleep in a little and make some good coffee though.
Semkas··on Pebble Mega Update – July 2026
You are not restraining yourself from mocking, you are somehow doing something even less conducive and more annoying
Semkas··on Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE
This looks cool! I'll check it out. Out of curiosity: I assume you've also used agents to help build this, and on the site you mention working on this for ~6 months. Most one-man projects I see that use ai seem to focus on creating and presenting a concept as soon as possible (to a lot of people I think the main benefit of stuff like vibing is that you really quickly get something that you can have others test out).

On the site you also mention being pretty opinionated about the tools you use / build, which I imagine is part of the reason why you spend more time on this before releasing it. What was your experience using ai to build a larger project with a very specific idea / taste in mind?

Semkas··on My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite
Anthropic's niche is that they're the preferred model for software development currently. So, the reason for them to care about the rewrite is obviously not because they care about Bun's stability, but because it is the largest real-world demonstration of Claude's capabilities.

Every part of this saga has gotten an exceptional amount of attention on HN. HN is ostensibly filled with many people starting software-related companies, ie potential Anthropic customers.

Semkas··on Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions
I'm getting the feeling that many people here are mostly reacting to the title instead of reading the actual policy: they state that an important part of the reason is that they use PR review to train new contributors and find possible future maintainers.

Irrespective of the quality of ai-contributions, that seems hard to argue with.

(unless you believe ai will make the whole concept of OS contributions / maintenance redundant. If that's your belief I don't think it makes much sense to submit PR's to Godot though, instead of just forking the engine and having your agents work on it)

Semkas··on Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics
4. then you write empty cliches
Semkas··on Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics
Arguably the most beautiful town in the Netherlands
Semkas··on Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability
I'm disinclined to be overly generous to Antrophic, but I have to say that regardless of whether the talk of Mythos being uniquely dangerous was mostly cynical: It would be great if this starts a trend of giving security-critical software a few months head start with any new significantly improved model.
Semkas··on Wikipedia isn’t officially a social network, but the harassment can get ugly
The barrier to entry is the effort required to create a good and truthfull page.
Semkas··on Wikipedia isn’t officially a social network, but the harassment can get ugly
If a non-programmer critisised some part of Blender or some other large scale open source software project it would be weird to call them hypocritical for not just enacting the change themselves wouldnt it? Seems strange to pretend that there is no barrier to entry to contributing a page to an encyclopedia.
Semkas··on Seven Puzzles You Think You Must Not Have Heard Correctly (2006) [pdf]
Assume that the range of integers is limited by the largest positive or negative number that can be written on the limited space of the paper. Whenever the largest positive or negative number comes up your answer will be certain. Turn a profit over a few billion years.
Semkas··on Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?
I do some illustration and have noticed on twitter how much every illustrator who gets some experience with 3d-tools likes to use 3d modelling to create block-outs for scenes they want to draw. By creating a simple scene out of blocks and shapes you can make your perspective work while drawing a lot easier. A tool that could be really populair would be something that makes making 3d mock-ups easier for 2d artstists without 3d experience.
Semkas··on The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer
I see the value in charisma, but it seems uncontroversial to me that what most people consider "fair" is hiring people for their skill at a job, not their ability to make the interviewer like them.
Semkas··on The Empathy Gap in Tech: Interview with a Software Engineer
I have aspergers, and empathize with the feeling that society doesn't much care about our struggle (or, for that matter, knows how to deal with anyone who isn't neurotypical).

One thing I have come to realize though (and I know this will be controversial on here) is that SV and tech in general is this special place where people with limited social skills can go to work for really high salaries to create things of often dubious societal value.

I remember reading in a similar article that many "classical-liberal" types think that the wage-gap between man and woman may be caused by the fact that woman are naturally less competitive. Meaning that they are less careerist. This is of course a failure of meritocracy, in the same way that charisma often trumps skill at a job (which is the big problem for anti social men).

Here is my point: we have these different failures of meritocracy affecting different people, but for people (mostly men) with aspergers there is this special, well paying, industry. So I don't know that we have it that bad, or that efforts to attract more woman (even if you consider the given reasons to be bogus) are really misguided.