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VladimirGolovinon Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?

Did you encounter any issues related to the fact that Unreal Engine uses a specific / custom flavor of C++?

VladimirGolovinon Reflections on AI at the End of 2025

This has been well discussed before, for example in this book: https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/

VladimirGolovinon Nikolai Fyodorov wanted to resurrect the dead to live among the stars

Russian here. Speaking of Dugin, I'm not a fan of his ideas about archaic way of living, and I don't personally know anyone who likes them. I consider him to be a hypocrite who talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk – unlike German Sterligov, who actually lives in a village without modern technology that he founded and built.

However, there's a sad fact about Dugin. He experienced a personal tragedy – his adult daughter was murdered, likely for political reasons. So, while I'm not a supporter of his ideas, I can never judge him for these ideas considering what he went through. Maybe advocating for these ideas is his way of surviving his tragedy.

VladimirGolovinon Tubeworms live around deep-sea vents

I wonder, is an electronic system capable of doing anti-entropy work on itself (the way life does) necessarily AGI-complete? It turns out that there are many complex behaviors (like drawing or generating sensible text) that don't require AGI-completeness.

(Stumbled upon the answer while formulating the question – no, being capable of doing anti-entropy self-maintenance work isn't AGI-complete because there's plenty of life that's perfectly capable of that without being generally intelligent.)

VladimirGolovinon 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth chromosomes reconstructed from 'jerky-like' skin

Unlike the elephant / mammoth pairing, there aren't any marsupials similar to Thylacine (as far as I know). What surrogate options did you have in mind?

VladimirGolovinon Ask HN: How has AI changed your learning methods?

Thanks to ChatGPT, I'm much less hesitant to delve (haha) into unfamiliar topics. "Hi! I'm a beginner programmer. I'm interested in learning Idris but I know next to nothing about dependent types. Could you explain them in a couple of sentences?"

Then, after the answer, I ask follow-up questions. I also try to check the answers against other sources, e.g. docs or Wikipedia in order to spot hallucinations.

VladimirGolovinon Helldivers 2 has caused over 20k Steam accounts to be banned

Steam works in Russia, but it doesn't accept payments. Free and previously owned games can be played, but new ones cannot be bought. The usual way to circumvent this is via gifting from another account that has working a payment method, e.g. a Georgian or Armenian bank card, or simply playing bought games on the new account.

VladimirGolovinon Proof of geometric Langlands conjecture so complex almost no one can explain it

I feel that long, unexplainable, hard-to-comprehend proofs may become commonplace when we get to AIs that are capable of discovering new proofs on their own.

VladimirGolovinon Sam and Greg's response to OpenAI Safety researcher claims

Text continuation doesn't. AGI does.

VladimirGolovinon Riven

To me, both Outer Wilds and The Witness were absolutlely savourable, and I made a point of never looking up anything on the Internet while playing these games. That would rob me of the feelings these games were designed to impart.

VladimirGolovinon I should have loved biology (2020)

>> People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.

That's exactly what I did, for a year, after reading The Selfish Gene.

VladimirGolovinon Emad Mostaque resigned as CEO of Stability AI

OP likely meant that a Midjourney-level AI can easily generate all the card art.

Obviously, current AIs cannot generate game rulesets because the game feel is an internal phenomenon that cannot be represented in the material domain and therefore AIs cannot train on it.

VladimirGolovinon Ask HN: How to onboard yourself to a new product/industry in a new job?

Take my advice with a grain of salt, but:

Get a ChatGPT4 subscription and ask away. It may hallucinate, but it lets you ask questions and immediately clarify points you don't understand. When you get the basic understanding, check it against a more reputable source (e.g. Investopedia?)

Here's an example question (which I obviously made up):

"Hi! I'm about to get a job in finance but I feel that I don't fully understand some of the important concepts, such as compound interest. Can you explain compound interest to me?"

VladimirGolovinon Nvidia Unveils Blackwell, Its Next GPU

Does a bunch of atoms arranged into proteins have a soul?

VladimirGolovinon Ente: Open-Source, E2E Encrypted, Google Photos Alternative

I'd guess that the emphasis in OP's reply was on 'actually work'.

VladimirGolovinon Ask HN: How do you learn and research every day?

I tried many of them, even wrote my own app (failed), but today I just use Obsidian with separate workspaces for each major project / area.

(Can't say that it works well for recurring tasks, but that's not Obsidian's fault – that's entirely on me.)

VladimirGolovinon Raising Children on the Eve of AI

My problem with children and AI is much more practical. My daughter (17) is an artist, and she wanted to begin a career in animation. However, the progress in generative AI (namely Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and now Sora) makes this a dubious idea.

Frankly, as a parent, I have no idea what to advise her.

VladimirGolovinon Sora: Creating video from text

I did not expect this level of quality in the beginning of 2024. Makes me think that we may see AGI by the end of this decade.

VladimirGolovinon Show HN: Improve cognitive focus in 1 minute

Very timely and helpful, thank you!

A suggestion: the pulse animation would look much better with ease-in / ease-out animation curves instead of the harsh linear curve it's currently using. EaseInOutSine from this cheat sheet would do fine: https://easings.net/

VladimirGolovinon Somewhere along the way we forgot about software craftsmanship

On a wider scale, this is Scott Alexander's Moloch -- people who ship an Electron app now would outcompete people who would spend and 3x more on writing native clients for each platform in 3 different languages, and 3x as long to polish the codebase.

VladimirGolovinon Google search is losing the fight with SEO spam, study says

https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/

However, the Reddit search is atrocious, so you'll either have to try your luck googling, or spend some time in the subreddit.

VladimirGolovinon Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search [pdf]

ChatGPT 4 is fantastic for this kind of questions. No Google spam to filter out, and you can ask follow-up questions on topics such as configuration.

VladimirGolovinon Think more about what to focus on

This is exactly what I’m thinking. These cycles must be converted into action or dropped entirely as useless waste of energy.

VladimirGolovinon Think more about what to focus on

I used to have the ability to facilitate and maintain the unconscious processing loops the author talks about. It was fantastic to wake up in the morning with a solution for a problem my brain was subconsciously working on during the night.

Alas, I can’t seem to do that anymore — the fucking war is sucking up all my unconscious processing resources (I live in Russia). My idle processing inevitably defaults to fruitless thinking about the war.

It’s blocking me, hindering me, draining me — and I have no idea what to do about it.

VladimirGolovinon Google is apparently struggling to contain an ongoing spam attack

Whatever. Not my problem anymore. I switched to Kagi + ChatGPT 4 and couldn't be happier -- though it costs me about $30 per month.

I haven't tried Kagi's FastGPT yet. How does it compare with ChatGPT 4? Is it updated regularly? What is its knowledge cutoff date?

VladimirGolovinon James Webb Space Telescope captures high-resolution image of Uranus

Absolutely. If all these galaxies are not just a wallpaper on the walls of humanity's bedroom, there must be life, at least microbial -- especially so given that water and organic compounds seem to be abundant in space.

VladimirGolovinon James Webb Space Telescope captures high-resolution image of Uranus

What amazes me about this photo is how many galaxies are visible in it, just casually laying around. Probably hundreds in this particular photo, and likely thousands in each of the "Hubble Deep Fields" between the visible galaxies.

For some reason, the original Hubble Deep Field image didn't viscerally affect me much -- but this one did. Maybe because it helped me to imagine just how much Hubble Deep Fields are there in our night sky.

VladimirGolovinon Why banks are suddenly closing down customer accounts

>> I think the government should provide a basic bank account to anyone who wants one though.

Absolutely agree. Holding and transferring money should be a basic human right.

VladimirGolovinon Google Brain founder says big tech is lying about AI danger

You see it every day -- in the mirror. It shows that a kilogram of matter can be arranged into a generally intelligent configuration. Assuming that there's nothing fundamentally special about the physics of the human brain, I see no reason why a functionally similar arrangement cannot be made out of silicon and software.

VladimirGolovinon Software disenchantment

>> It's the disease that has consumed software

This is another example of Scott Alexander's Moloch: https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch

"companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing- for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price."