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anxoo

74 karma · joined February 27, 2021

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anxoo··on Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture
you can believe a small, irrelevant lie and still go on happy. a very big lie sucks in more and more of your reality until you have to disbelieve your own eyes and ears.
anxoo··on Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture
if you ask the chatbots for "list of top unsolved math problems", the JC comes in at a ranking of around #10 - #20. what, a problem that's been unsolved since 1939 was cracked because anthropic has an underground sweatshop of math Phds cranking out research, just so that they can slap "made by AI" on it? hell, maybe lizard people did it.
anxoo··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
no matter how good AI gets, i think it will never reach human-level in our ability to move goalposts
anxoo··on Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler
this is that xkcd "regular people can only name a few common feldspars" meme. over 90% of consumers have no knowledge at all of tech corps' philosophy on user freedom, they just buy cheap phones that have good cameras and run instagram and tiktok well.
anxoo··on Show HN: Gemini can now natively embed video, so I built sub-second video search
https://pauseai.info/
anxoo··on Two kinds of AI users are emerging
yes, the third kind of AI user. kind of similar to the three kinds of soccer players: offence, defence, and people who don't play soccer. thanks for the comment!
anxoo··on Emoji Use in the Electronic Health Record is Increasing
lots of normal people like emoji. the kind of normal people who have never heard of hacker news
anxoo··on Toucan Wireless Split Keyboard with Touchpad
yeah, i type on a corne everyday: https://mark.stosberg.com/markstos-corne-3x5-1-keyboard-layo...

having gotten over the learning curve, i definitely prefer it over conventional keyboards, but would i recommend it to 99.9% of people? no. people who use these kinds of keyboards have either 1. extremely niche problems, or 2. find intrinsic value in novelty, aesthetics, or diy/experimentation

anxoo··on A new poverty line shifted the World Bank's poverty data
>Thanks to social services, the number of Americans who are in extreme poverty is approximately zero.

or 4.19 million, if you wanted to spend 2 minutes and look up [the source](https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/poverty-explorer?tab=li...) actually listed in the main article

anxoo··on Ask HN: Is Linux for laptop worth the trouble?
what is your goal? what do you expect would be the pros and cons of linux or mac?

personally, i tried macOS 2 years ago and got frustrated by all the restrictions and differences from linux. i remember wanting to uninstall the default "chess" program, searching around and learning that i literally couldn't without turning off the default security mode, just because there was an off chance that the chess program contained essential code.

anxoo··on I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
1% of people post/comment, 99% like/retweet or just read. everyone you read on the internet is weird by default
anxoo··on Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)
[flagged]
anxoo··on I want an iPhone Mini-sized Android phone (2022)
it's about twice as thick as any other typical phone
anxoo··on Ask HN: How can we keep (part of) the web human?
if you can't think of a way to reliably distinguish AIs from humans, that observation alone should raise great concerns which eclipse "spam comments on forums" or "bad results on google"
anxoo··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
name 5 tasks which you think current AIs can't do. then go and spend 30 minutes seeing how current AIs can do on them. write it on a sticky note and put it somewhere that you'll see it.

otherwise, yes, you'll continue to be irritated by AI hype, maybe up until the point where our civilization starts going off the rails

anxoo··on Programming on 34 Keys (2022)
of course not. it's fun to mod and geek out about random topics.

i also assume that if you have RSI/carpal tunnel/etc then experimenting with your keyboards switches from negative switching costs to greatly positive

anxoo··on Visual Reasoning Is Coming Soon
"I set a plate on a table, and glass next to it. I set a marble on the plate. Then I pick up the marble, drop it in the glass. Then I turn the glass upside down and set it on the plate. Then, I pick up the glass and put it in the microwave. Where is the marble?"

the author claims that visual reasoning will help the model solve this problem, noting that gpt-4o got the question right after making a mistake in the beginning of the response. i asked gpt-4o, claude 3.7, and gemini 2.5 pro experimental, who all answered 100% correctly.

the author also demonstrates trying to do "visual reasoning" with gpt-4o, notes that the model got it wrong, then handwaves it away by saying the model wasn't trained for visual reasoning.

"visual reasoning" is a tweet-worthy thought that the author completely fails to justify

anxoo··on Waltz's team set up at least 20 Signal group chats for crises across the world
i mean... you're saying if signal weren't secure, trump's clown cabinet would stop using it? the guy who kept boxes of top secret documents in a bathroom at mar-a-lago? you don't think they'd just use SMS or facebook messenger or anything if using signal was a slight inconvenience?
anxoo··on I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs
would you rather the LLM make up something that sounds right when it doesn't know, or would you like it to claim "i don't know" for tasks it actually can figure out? because presumably both happen at some rate, and if it hallucinates an answer i can at least check what that answer is or accept it with a grain of salt.

nobody freaks out when humans make mistakes, but we assume our nascent AIs, being machines, should always function correctly all the time

anxoo··on Time for a Change: The long, contentious history of time shifts
it is not written in the constitution, the bible, or the laws of physics that people have to wake at the time called 6am and have to leave work at a time called 5pm. people can choose to do activites at the time and level of daylight they choose. societies and groups can decide to change their schedules as the seasons change, as they see fit, without the government mandating that our clocks change, which is confusing as hell
anxoo··on GPT-4.5
AI skeptics have predicted 10 of the last 0 bursts of the AI bubble. any day now...
anxoo··on Bypass DeepSeek censorship by speaking in hex
sure, i can explain it. it's called "general intelligence"
anxoo··on Philosophy Eats AI
> In all these hyped-products, you are actually being given the "and then Mr. Robot said" lines from a kind of theater-script. This document grows as your contribution is inserted as "Mr. User says", plus whatever the LLM author calculates "fits next."

and we are creating such a document now, where "Terr_" plays a fictional character who is skeptical of LLM hype, and "anxoo" roleplays a character who is concerned about the level of AI capabilities.

you protest, "no, i'm a real person with real thoughts! the character is me! the AI 'character' is a a fiction created by an ungodly pile of data and linear algebra!" and i reply, "you are a fiction created by an ungodly mass of neuron activations and hormones and neurotransmitters".

i agree that we cannot know what an LLM is "really thinking", and when people say that the AIs have "learned how to [X]" or have "demonstrated deception" or whatever, there's an inevitable anthropomorphization. i agree that when people talk to chatGPT and it acts "friendly and helpful", that we don't really know whether the AI is friendly and helpful, or whether the "mind" inside is some utterly alien thing.

the point is, none of that matters. if it writes code, it writes code. if it's able to discover new scientific insights, or if it's able to replace the workforce, or if it's able to control and manipulate resources, those are all concrete things it will do in the real world. to assume that it will never get there because it's just playing a fancy language game is completely unwarranted overconfidence.

anxoo··on I deleted my social media accounts
also in the old days, your friend bob would have told cory, "hey, did you hear alice's dad died? we should all go out for drinks". but we live in the bowling alone era, where we're increasingly isolated.

quitting social media is not, on its own, going to fix your social life. and being on social media can make you more connected, or more miserable. the responsibility is yours

anxoo··on Sora is here
>who in the hell asked for AI art?

everyone who has ever used stock photography, custom illustrators, and image editing. as AI improves, it will come after all of those industries.

that said, it is not OpenAI's goal to beat shutterstock, nor is it the goal of anthropic or google or meta. their goal is to make god: https://ia.samaltman.com/ . visual perception (and generation) is the near-term step on that path. every discussion of AI that doesn't acknowlege this goal, what all of these billions of dollars are aiming for, is myopic and naive.