HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

bwfan123

1,295 karma · joined December 10, 2024

submissionscomments
bwfan123··on Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics
> Or the big labs trying to use professional mathematitians as (cheap?) Labour for validating LLM outputs?

I am told AGI has been achieved. If so, shouldnt these systems be out and about on their own ? Looking at 1st proof submissions in batch 2 it is clear that fully autonomous AI systems have a long way to go.

AI harnessing human labor with the incentive of 2M in free tokens is the way my skeptic eye sees it, or humans being duped as reverse-centaurs.

bwfan123··on GPU World
> It just requires instructions to continue working until the spec is complete

Try putting an LLM agent in a deterministic workflow without humans in the loop. My experience with this is not encouraging. Getting it to work requires sprinkling some context magic and hoping and praying the LLM does the right thing. More astrology or religion and less science. Great for use cases with humans-in-the-loop, but less than impressive when you need determinism and reliable operation.

bwfan123··on What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s
> I feel one need to also have developed the intuition by writing lots of code for reading to be really effective.

This is one of the problems young engineers are going to face who rely excessively on AI to generate code. Their intuitions on what constitutes good code will not sharpen, since they are not exercising the tool that sharpens it which is writing code. Intuitions start fuzzy, and incorrect, and gradually sharpen with precise communication of said intuition in the form of writing code or proofs. Reading alone may delude one into a sense of false mastery where intuitions are actually fuzzy, but one thinks otherwise.

bwfan123··on What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s
> See how ridiculous that sounds?

For most of us, writing code is the way to carve out intuition into an artifact. But, I have noticed some people are able to read deeply - and by that I mean, reverse the code to understand the intuition that brought it to life. This is a rare skill and I dont have it, but some do. Not just for code, but also for any book - fiction or non-fiction - some are able to deconstruct the scenarios much better than others, and in that sense understand what they read.

bwfan123··on Warp builds self-improving agents on Claude
> Agents need to handle recurring tasks reliably and effectively

This core problem remains unsolved. The solution presented in the article with Human In The Loop and some skill-magic such as "Write principles, not rules etc." is unsatisfactory because it offers no guarantees whatsoever. I find it difficult to harness agents into deterministic workflows which need to produce reliable outcomes.

bwfan123··on Bhartrhari's Paradox
> Isn't this just a proof that there are many unnamed things, but no unnameable ones?

Where is it a proof that there are many unnamed things ? I could only see it as an argument that there are no "unnameable" things.

bwfan123··on Bhartrhari's Paradox
Names are like variables in a function. you can name variables anything you want from a human understanding point of view (final cause), but the compiler doesnt care about that. The compiler only cares about the efficient cause of that variable in the sense of what it represents (stack/heap etc).
bwfan123··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
> some of the statements seem like just straight up lies

Why the angst ? I suspect this announcement punctured a lot of people's bubbles, and many are in disbelief and denial and hence the emotional reaction seen here. That a company which never designed chips could suddenly leapfrog the best in the industry. What many forget is that openAI and anthropic are in a unique position to own the end-user experience, and that provides them a distinct advantage. But, making announcements and actually delivering are two different things, and it remains to be seen if these are actually viable. In any case, it gives openai leverage over their vendors.

bwfan123··on The state of AI in 2026: On the road to ROI
> Please hire more McKinsey consultants who say they’re AI experts

You have to recognize that a vast majority of enterprises fall in the category of "Dumb IT". To them, IT is a cost-center and overhead as their main line of business is something else. And, they look up to the likes of McKinsey for wisdom.

bwfan123··on Could AIs Become Conscious?
> At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.

You can have a long conversation with AI about pain and suffering, but you have felt it and AI hasnt. The difference is that, for us humans, words are grounded by something other than other-words, words are grounded by experience. Meaning for us is operational in the real world in the form of perception, feeling and emotions, and movement, and words symbolize said meaning. Meaning for LLMs is something in the concept-space that is detached from any worlds. I suspect there should be a test which can tease apart the ungroundedness of the LLMs just from having a conversation with it.

bwfan123··on The Mojo language (by Modular, now Qualcomm) is now open-source
> expert C++ programmers as what they imagine a good C++ will look like

Mojo looks nice but with coding agents the landscape has shifted at least in my view. There is no need for DSLs and abstractions that reduce human cognitive load. So, I still struggle with the usecase for Mojo. If you want close to metal performance, code in something that touches metal (c,c++), and doesnt abstract you away from it or require unsafe primitives. As a programmer who cares for performance, you want the least separation between your tools and the hw in the sense that you can visualize precisely what the hw is doing with no abstractions to hide it.

bwfan123··on GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%
> The AI bubble is just waiting for the first player to scream mercy and cut capex as they simply can’t afford to throw more cash on the burning pile. That will be the trigger that implodes this bubble

Deepseek v4 and Kimi k3 have tightened the screws on the frontier models. With open-weights, anyone can host these for cost of compute. So, there is zero leverage left for the frontier labs.

What implodes it in my view is that enterprise adoption will stall. Enterprises are struggling to actually use these things in real workflows outside of coding and support.

bwfan123··on The AI Credit Resale Economy
> Cyberpunk dystopia vibes

right. Abstractions taken to the max. When tech solves problems that only 0.001% care about. NFT smelt similar.

bwfan123··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
> CLAUDE.md is mostly powerless against the reinforcement learned crap.

When you dont know the cause, you dont have a fix. Thats the biggest issue i have with all of AI is that we dont know how it works, and yet we think it will be great ! This is more like a religious belief than a scientific one. There is no causal model of how it works, there is no theory. And the temerity to call it intelligence is annoying.

bwfan123··on When Genius Fails: The Intellectual Arrogance of the AI Labs
AI is just another tool in the arsenal of tools for both developers (Linus [1]) and movie makers (Ben Affleck [2]). These are expert practitioners in their fields intelligently opining on AI, and they are promoting it not as a magic machine, but as another tool in the toolbox.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NSSGt9bZag

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s

bwfan123··on Retire the Abstractions
"The question is whether letting it sit higher is a difference in degree or in kind, and we don't think it's in kind"

I was scratching my head reading it. The cognitive load was high with cryptic sentences like the above. AI-slop or not, there is no excuse for dense prose particularly if it is intended for a human reader.

bwfan123··on What sort of maths are LLMs good at?
From the tweet:

> Still not sure what that means, but some analytic number theorists seem excited

ie, I prompted AI and it put out a giant pile of tokens. I dont know what it means, but I hope someone gets excited. Mathematicians are now the priests and shamans chanting incantations and taking the holy blessings from the AI gods.

bwfan123··on Nvidia's Risky Business
> overzealous peddlers and hacks

They are the marketing wing of the AI ecosystem. Their recent article on how SpaceX would drive 500B in data-center revenue was ludicrous-mode. Lets revisit this in a few years.

bwfan123··on Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities
> Jarred prompted Claude to try again, and it spent a day and a half coordinating about 60 Claude subagents, which this time went much deeper: between them, they ran 2,400 shell commands and wrote hundreds of Python scripts.1

If there is anything to learn from the history of science, it is that breakthroughs happen via better or new theory and not by brute-force compute [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.27794

bwfan123··on Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows
Next step: Burn the weights of these local models into an asic that ships cheap on a laptop (AMD/taalas looking at you), and I will be a happy camper. Make it pluggable so I can select a model I want. I use qwen3.5-coder currently on my laptop, and while it works well enough for me, it is somewhat slow processing tokens.

I would hazard a guess that fast small models with a smart agent harness can do quite well compared to large models which cant be run locally.

bwfan123··on Meta Muse Glimmer – open weights 30B local coding model
> It even comes pre-quantized and with a MTP/drafter model

Glad to see the extra engineering effort that went into creating this local model and making it run well on a consumer device. I use qwen3.5-coder, and am waiting to kick the tires on this one. I hate to say this, but kudos to Meta ! I hope apple and others follow suit and create similar local models for other use cases like audio, images and video that can run on a laptop.

bwfan123··on Meta Muse Glimmer – Open weights 30B local coding model
Just tested muse-glimmer:30b-mlx on my laptop. Works great although a bit slow.
bwfan123··on Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
> no matter how “intelligent” AI becomes, intelligence is often not the main bottleneck to things changing in the real world

A mathematician Terrence Tao said something similar in a recent talk [1]. That, intelligence is bottlenecked by human understanding. Say there is an alien that brings an alien book containing math humans havent seen before. Using said math is bottlenecked by humans comprehending it first.

[1] https://teorth.github.io/tao-web/slides/age-of-ai-icm-2026.p...

bwfan123··on Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness
> entertain a thought without accepting it

Entertaining an idea is understanding it. And, there is some research to show that understanding an idea is believing it. Hence, understanding an idea and not believing it is very effortful.

[1] https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/gilbe...

bwfan123··on After Losses, Retail Investors Flock to 3x Leverage as 2x Product Are Restricted
If you are in a hole, dig deeper.
bwfan123··on DeepSeek V4 Flash on a Single AMD MI300X
I am curious if there has been work to remove experts from an open-weights model. The goal would be to reduce the size to be able to run on desktop GPUs without compromising quality. For a focused usecase - say coding, you dont need a model that knows world history. And, I am not talking about quantization. If it is possible to determine which experts are active for some usecases, and surgically remove the others.
bwfan123··on Why we write our own C and C++ inference engines
Take a look at the code. It is a conglomeration of python, rust, go, cpp etc. I was expecting lean C or C++ but all I see is a kitchen sink of code, the AI generated kind. No problem with that, but it is inconsistent with the messaging. I appreciate the intention behind this, but dont like the execution. My prediction is that this will enter the graveyard of ai generated git repos.

For open-source code to get adoption and support, the theory of its construction needs to be understood by humans because at the end of the day, some human will be responsible for its operation. I would call this the Terrence Tao principle: Output of AI is only as useful as how well it can be digested by humans.

bwfan123··on SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?
> Now, we all pay the consequence, to the tune of hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars of wasted productivity from teams that have to deal with the resulting fall-out of this usage of “AI”.

Brandolini's principle in action. It takes 10 times more energy to refute BS than to generate it. A related analogy to computing: it is easy to generate propositions, but hard to test if a given proposition is satisfiable or not, which curiously ties to P vs NP.

bwfan123··on Cancelling Cursor
> how annoying it was to try to cancel Cursor

Add it to the enshittified software list.

bwfan123··on Cancelling Cursor
> After almost every update, Cursor decides it now boots into the "Agent" view by default. You switch back to the IDE, restart the app - and you're back in the Agent view again. And the setting that controls this is moved and renamed every time

This got to me as well and I am off cursor. They kept changing the UI/UX with each release which was frustrating. But, kudos to them for pioneering this space.

← PreviousPage 2 of 18Next →