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dpforesi

5 karma · joined November 29, 2025

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dpforesi··on Stop Feeding the Machine: Time to Go Closed Source
That's fair. My point is that most of what coding models need to learn to write code proficiently is largely baked in. things like syntax, useful code idioms, data structures and algorithms, important engineering concepts and design patterns etc... are already learned. Code, generally is easier to "bake in" in some ways than creative work because it is highly structured with known and absolute rules, whereas creative work thrives on the surfaces where rules and conventions are violated in some way. I work a lot with Claude Code, not just building, but analyzing how it builds and it is at the point where its failures largely arise from a misunderstanding of my instructions or implied goals, and in some cases a failure to understand basic reality, not on syntax or logic. In other words, it implemented the wrong idea really well (some clean up by humans required assuming any of it is useful). That said, the creative concept needs to come from the human. Case in point. I have a simple python based synthetic data generator. Claude uses it inefficiently because it is a new-ish repo it has not seen so it reads the lengthy README and ~60-70% of the code in the repo to learn it before using it. I had 2 solutions to this. One, create a CLI or MCP interface for models, or two, just create a skill file. I presented only the first idea and it returned only that it was possible if difficult given the complexity of how one creates influences on certain classes in the data. It COULD HAVE just said "It would be a lot easier to make a skill" but it lacked the creative capacity for this leap i guess. I jumped right to the skill idea two paragraphs into the explanation of the core challenges of creating an MCP and did not bother to read on before I suggested a skill. That is the current code barrier, not necessarily understanding syntax etc...
dpforesi··on Stop Feeding the Machine: Time to Go Closed Source
I'm not sure the author understands how AI learns. At this point, the fundamental "coding" knowledge is baked in, leaving little to "learn" from more code examples. The real power that coding models have comes from reasoning, testing code, and having broader integration into hardware to develop it. In other words, we've already zipped past the transfer learning phase of learning how to code.
dpforesi··on Ask HN: What are some good unintuitive statistics problems?
This isn't a "statistics" problem exactly, but rather a data science problem, but... Personality tests are usually framed as psychological instruments, but the core problem is statistical. They assume responses are noisy observations of a stable latent variable, when in practice they’re samples from a context-dependent decision process. Respondents condition on incentives, infer what’s being rewarded, and optimize accordingly, so the data-generating process shifts with each setting. From a statistical perspective this breaks identifiability: multiple latent personalities can produce the same observed responses, and the same personality can produce different responses under different incentive structures. Because those incentives are unobserved or only weakly observed, the model is fundamentally misspecified. More samples don’t converge on truth; they converge on a biased estimate of a strategic equilibrium rather than the latent trait itself.

On paper, I'm a real collaborator, because that is what I think the test should reveal about me. In reality, I just don't wanna deal with collaboration and I'd rather work alone. Can this be measured? Probably not, but it does present an odd paradox for data scientists to solve.

dpforesi··on AI's Phase Transition Noise
I call this the eom expression... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CBW42YZ6
dpforesi··on Surviving AI
Agreed. I don't think AI adoption should be strictly driven by people (executives) that are too far removed from the development process to not have clear understanding of how effective the tools are or an understanding of their failure modes. Some of the consternation might be coming from the people working on the code directly, which is probably a healthy feedback loop that should not be ignored.
dpforesi··on Ask HN: How worried should I be about running LLM code on my machine?
I am a professional LLM code tester. I cannot say much more due to my NDA, but if you are very concerned I would run it in a docker container at the very least. That being said, I highly suggest reviewing the code carefully before running it. Even a look at say python imports might tell you what the code can potentially do if you see it importing the os module. I've run advanced code agents in vs code using their unrestricted access settings while in a docker container. At first it was scary, then I started using that time to refill my coffee. My computer is still running fine.
dpforesi··on Ask HN: Did we over-engineer the web, should we relearn jQuery?
Most web apps would be just as good, if not better, if run on my machine like a native app. I use several different browsers for several different purposes and they are almost always near the top of the list in terms of memory use. I constantly clear my cache but doing that a lot is a chore and sometimes I lose useful webapp state.

With AI agents, I do think these apps that manipulate the DOM so much that they obscure access to useful data will hinder AI agent discovery of their useful data. If an agent is looking at your website, it cannot see what you do not show it. This makes your site less visible to them and therefore reduces its likelihood of referencing it in its responses. Pure HTML sites are very kind to agents and allow them to generate better answers with attribution. Think of this as AI optimization for your website. Some regression to pure HTML will be the norm in the near future. Bottom line, build apps that run on machines, and use APIs to feed them, but build pages for the web with the intent of having AI agents discover them and have a good shot at using the data.

dpforesi··on Ask HN: What's a book that fundamentally altered your mental models
The eom Expression: Beautiful Chaos