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lich_king

676 karma · joined February 13, 2026

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lich_king··on A Survival Guide to a PhD (2016)
Eh. It's different, but framing it as uniquely challenging seems silly. There are very few other jobs where you don't need to deliver any specific, measurable results for months or years. And your "career-ending" outcome is that you go and get a cozy industry job in the same field because you already have a degree. Now, you might have a difficulty adjusting to that because they will want you to get stuff done.
lich_king··on Montana passes Right to Compute act (2025)
You can read the actual bill here: https://legiscan.com/MT/text/SB212/id/3212152/Montana-2025-S...

In essence, it doesn't really mandate anything; it says you should have a plan, and only for "critical infrastructure facilities":

"Section 4. Infrastructure controlled by critical artificial intelligence system. (1) When critical infrastructure facilities are controlled in whole or in part by a critical artificial intelligence system, the deployer shall develop a risk management policy after deploying the system that is reasonable and considers guidance and standards in the latest version of the artificial intelligence risk management framework from the national institute of standards and technology, the ISO/IEC 4200 artificial intelligence standard from the international organization for standardization, or another nationally or internationally recognized risk management framework for artificial intelligence systems. A plan prepared under federal requirements constitutes compliance with this section."

So it's essentially lip service to AI safety, probably to quell some objections to a bill that otherwise limits regulation of tech platforms.

lich_king··on I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me
If you're running your open source project or other hobby endeavor, you can do it however you want. People will either adapt to your style or leave. The same, with some caveats, applies to running your own company (the caveats being lawsuits and needless drama if you take it too far).

But if you're a line employee for a corporation, this is the wrong approach, for two reasons. First, you will encounter many people who misinterpret directness as hostility, simply because your feelings toward another person are hard to convey in a chat message unless you include all that social-glue small talk. And if people on average think you're a jerk, they will either avoid you or reflexively push back.

But second... you're not that brilliant. Every now and then, the thing you think is wrong isn't actually wrong, you just don't understand why your solution was rejected beforehand. Maybe there are business requirements you don't know about, maybe things break in a different way if you make the change. Asking "hey, help me understand why this thing is the way it is" is often a better opener than "yo dude, your thing is broken, here's what you need to do, fix it now".

lich_king··on Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters
Anthropic, maybe, but what is the philosophical niche of OpenAI? Their only consistent philosophical position about AI is "let's make more money".
lich_king··on Are LLM merge rates not getting better?
You realize that the reason you need to manage this organizational complexity is largely because the organization is so huge?...

The reality is that you could run LinkedIn with far, far fewer people. You probably need fewer than 100 for core engineering, and likely less than 1,000 overall if you include compliance, sales, and so on - especially since a lot of overseas compliance stuff is outsourced to consulting firms, it's not like you have a team of lawyers in every country in the world.

Before there was so much money in the system, we used to run companies that way. Two decades ago, I worked for a company that had tens of millions of users, maintained its own complex nationwide infra (no AWS back then), and had 400 full-time employees. That made coordination problems a lot easier too. We didn't need ten layers of people and project management because there just wasn't that many of us.

lich_king··on Are LLM merge rates not getting better?
> In practice this still doesn't mean 50 % of white collar can't be automated though.

Let me ask you this, though: if we wanted to, what percentage of white collar jobs could have been automated or eliminated prior to LLMs?

Meta has nearly 80k employees to basically run two websites and three mobile apps. There were 18k people working at LinkedIn! Many big tech companies are massive job programs with some product on the side. Administrative business partners, program managers, tech writers, "stewards", "champions", "advocates", 10-layer-deep reporting chains... engineers writing cafe menu apps and pet programming languages... a team working on in-house typefaces... the list goes on.

I can see AI producing shifts in the industry by reducing demand for meaningful work, but I doubt the outcome here is mass unemployment. There's an endless supply of bs jobs as long as the money is flowing.

lich_king··on Avoiding Trigonometry (2013)
Almost every critique of the axiom of infinity is philosophical. I don't think you can just say "the axiom is sound, so what's your point". And you don't even get to claim that because of Godel's incompleteness theorem.

The axioms were not handed to us from above. They were a product of a thought process anchored to intuition about the real world. The outcomes of that process can be argued about. This includes the belief that the outcomes are wrong even if we can't point to any obvious paradox.

lich_king··on Kotlin creator's new language: a formal way to talk to LLMs instead of English
Did you mean AbstractNeighborDispatcherFactory?
lich_king··on Kotlin creator's new language: talk to LLMs in specs, not English
We built LLMs so that you can express your ideas in English and no longer need to code.

Also, English is really too verbose and imprecise for coding, so we developed a programming language you can use instead.

Now, this gives me a business idea: are you tired of using CodeSpeak? Just explain your idea to our product in English and we'll generate CodeSpeak for you.

lich_king··on Show HN: I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage
You break highlighting and copy-and-paste. If I want to share or comment on a piece of your website... I can't. I guess this can be a "feature" in some rare cases, but a major usability pain otherwise.

I'm not a fan of all the documentation and marketing content for this project evidently being AI-generated because I don't know which parts of it are the things you believe and designed for, and which are just LLM verbal diarrhea. For example, your GitHub threat model says this stops "AI training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, etc.)" - is this something you've actually confirmed, or just something that AI thinks is true? I don't know how their scrapers work; I'd assume they use headless browsers.

lich_king··on Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web
Mobile OSes don't allow random people to run code on your device. They allow you to install software you want and sort-of trust, which is conceptually close to the desktop model. There are some safeguards on top of that, but the primary line of defense is that cheap-pillz.virus-basket.ru can't actually execute anything on your device.
lich_king··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.
People who are posting AI comments or setting up AI bots are... people. They can show their ID. If a website owner doesn't have a way to ban that specific human and the bad guy can always get another voucher, it's sort of meaningless.

In fact, even if you can ban the human for life, I'm not sure it solves anything. There are billions of people out there and there's money to be made by monetizing attention. AI-generated content is a way to do that, so there's plenty of takers who don't mind the risk of getting booted from some platform once in a blue moon if it makes them $5k/month without requiring any effort or skill.

lich_king··on Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web
Without the bindings this talks about, so it really couldn't do nearly as much.
lich_king··on Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web
I don't think it's "much smaller" once you aim for feature parity (DOM). It might be more regular than an implementation of a higher-level language, but we're not getting rid of JS.

By the same token, was Java or Flash more dangerous than JS? On paper, no - all the same, just three virtual machines. But having all three in a browser made things fun back in the early 2000s.

lich_king··on Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web
The web is fascinating: we started with a seemingly insane proposition that we could let anyone run complex programs on your machine without causing profound security issues. And it turned out that this was insane: we endured 20 years of serious browser security bugs caused chiefly by JavaScript. I'm not saying it wasn't worth it, but it was also crazy.

And now that we're getting close to have the right design principles and mitigations in place and 0-days in JS engines are getting expensive and rare... we're set on ripping it all out and replacing it with a new and even riskier execution paradigm.

I'm not mad, it's kind of beautiful.

lich_king··on Lego's 0.002mm specification and its implications for manufacturing (2025)
This is an LLM-written article. It also doesn't say anything. I get it that it's a cue for us to reminisce about childhood and say that LEGO isn't what it used to be, but we're being played for clicks. Open the article and look for a single statement that actually tells us something meaningful. It's just a sequence of impressively-sounding factoids like this:

> A 2x2 brick can withstand over 4,000 Newtons of force, which lets children build tall structures.

> But in an assembly system like LEGO's, small errors accumulate. Stack ten bricks end-to-end and the cumulative tolerance is ten times larger. This is why LEGO models larger than 1 meter become difficult to build

> The lesson isn't that everyone should match LEGO's tolerances. It's to understand what your product actually requires, then build your manufacturing system to deliver that at the scale and cost your business model demands.

I know I'm tilting at windmills, but come on.

lich_king··on Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
When someone tells you "you can have this if you pay me", they don't mean "you can also have it if you don't pay". They are implicitly but clearly indicating you gotta pay.

It's as simple as that. In common use, "if x then y" frequently implies "if not x then not y". Pretending that it's some sort of a cognitive defect to interpret it this way is silly.

lich_king··on Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
> The Wason selection task is the classic example: most people fail a simple conditional reasoning problem unless it’s dressed up in familiar social context, like catching cheaters.

I've never heard about the Wason selection task, looked it up, and could tell the right answer right away. But I can also tell you why: because I have some familiarity with formal logic and can, in your words, pattern-match the gotcha that "if x then y" is distinct from "if not x then not y".

In contrast to you, this doesn't make me believe that people are bad at logic or don't really think. It tells me that people are unfamiliar with "gotcha" formalities introduced by logicians that don't match the everyday use of language. If you added a simple additional to the problem, such as "Note that in this context, 'if' only means that...", most people would almost certainly answer it correctly.

Mind you, I'm not arguing that human thinking is necessarily more profound from what what LLMs could ever do. However, judging from the output, LLMs have a tenuous grasp on reality, so I don't think that reductionist arguments along the lines of "humans are just as dumb" are fair. There's a difference that we don't really know how to overcome.

lich_king··on Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions
> Precisely. “AI” contributions should be seen as an extension of the individual.

That's an OK view to hold, but I'll point out two things. First, it's not how the tech is usually wielded to interact with open-source software. Second, your worldview is at odds with the owners of this technology: the main reason why so much money is being poured into AI coding is that it's seen by investors as a replacement for the individual.

lich_king··on Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions
> My question on AI generated contributions and content in general: on a long enough timeline, with ever improving advancements in AI, how can people reliably tell the difference between human and AI generated efforts?

Can you reliably tell that the contributor is truly the author of the patch and that they aren't working for a company that asserts copyright on that code? No, but it's probably still a good idea to have a policy that says "you can't do that", and you should be on the lookout for obvious violations.

It's the same story here. If you do nothing, you invite problems. If you do something, you won't stop every instance, but you're on stronger footing if it ever blows up.

Of course, the next question is whether AI-generated code that matches or surpasses human quality is even a problem. But right now, it's academic: most of the AI submissions received by open source projects are low quality. And if it improves, some projects might still have issues with it on legal (copyright) or ideological grounds, and that's their prerogative.

lich_king··on Windows: Microsoft broke the only thing that mattered
I get that it says something we like to hear, but it's a content-free post that's almost certainly LLM-generated to get clicks. Serious content mill vibes - here's their latest blog article:

https://www.yankodesign.com/2026/03/09/a-cluster-of-volcanic...

Different byline, but somehow essentially the same as this story that appeared several days ago elsewhere on the internet:

https://newatlas.com/architecture/volcano-in-hotel-of-arriva...

lich_king··on Algebraic topology: knots links and braids
> A high ratio of upvotes to comments is generally a sign of a high quality HN submission.

I think that the parent is trolling, but I don't think what you're saying is true. Low number of comments usually means that no one understands the topic, but they still want to upvote because it sounds interesting or geeky. High number of comments usually means a topic where everyone feels like they can chime in without reading the article, just reacting to the title.

We're not that sophisticated. And you have evidence of this on the front page right now. A story about AI copyright with 388 comments, versus Scott Aaronson's short rant about quantum algorithms with 12 comments.

lich_king··on Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
> Curious, how many people do you need on a social network before you can find someone to talk to or before it is engaging enough for you?

I don't think that's a meaningful parameter to think about? I'd say that on any social network, I have meaningful, ongoing relationship with maybe 20 people. I suspect that's the norm. But that doesn't mean you can join a social network with 20 users and get that. I mean, if it's a mailing list for friends and family, sure. But not if it's 20 randomly-selected strangers from around the world.

So the critical mass to make the "random stranger" type of a social network work is much, much higher than the number of daily interactions you need to keep coming back.

lich_king··on Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
Yes they are? E.g., https://api.backlinko.com/app/uploads/2025/11/bluesky-websit...

This is also visible in your stats if you extend the time window. They had a peak in 2024 and are pretty much declining month to month ever since.

lich_king··on Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
Bluesky is not just a shadow, it's on a pretty steady decline. Their DAU numbers are dropping every month. Which probably tells you something about the unspoken reason for this change.
lich_king··on Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are.

Mastodon ended up losing its user base to Bluesky during the early Twitter exodus because many influencers and journalists wanted to have an "elite" status and a special relationship with the platform, so they preferred a platform owned by Dorsey to some hippie open-source thing. Bluesky, in turn, ended up losing back to Twitter/X when it turned out to be a place where you mostly talk about how awful Twitter/X is.

I want to say that we don't need social networks where we constantly interact with hundreds of thousands of strangers, but I'm writing this on HN, so...

lich_king··on Flash media longevity testing – 6 years later
> Do you have experience with this? Or is it common knowledge? Just curious!

I collect vintage stuff that sometimes comes with paperwork, usually after spending a decade or two stashed away in the attic.

lich_king··on Flash media longevity testing – 6 years later
I don't think there's a simple answer. For example, someone recommended black ink on white paper, but it really depends on the composition of that ink. Inorganic pigments last forever, but the ink used in black sharpies actually fades pretty quickly.

Pencil definitely lasts if the paper is undisturbed. I have some paperwork that's 100+ years old and with legible pencil text. On the flip side, if the paper is handled a lot, the writing will gradually fade because graphite particles just sit on the surface and can flake off.

On some level, the medium is your main problem. Low-grade paper, especially if stored in suboptimal conditions (hot attic, moist crawlspace, etc), may start falling apart in 20 years or less. Thick, acid-free stock stored under controlled conditions can survive hundreds of years.

lich_king··on Ask HN: Please restrict new accounts from posting
Many HNers strongly argue that it's absolutely impossible to distinguish between AI text and non-AI text. Some of it seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to some of the occasional, one-sided stories of people who were accused of using LLMs and fired from their jobs. And some of it seems to be just hedging so that we don't develop a culture that could penalize their LLM-generated posts or code.

We had people defending the fired Ars Technica guy, even though he admitted to using an LLM in some sort of a contrived non-apology along the lines of "I did it because I had a cold".

My main problem with that is that you can just generate an infinite supply of LLM op-eds about LLMs, and is this really what we want to read every day? If I want to know what ChatGPT thinks about the risks or benefits of vibecoding, I'll just ask it.

lich_king··on The changing goalposts of AGI and timelines
I don't know what you're trying to argue about here. I meant "charitable" as in "not necessarily implying the thing critics worry about". The less charitable interpretation is that the implied thing is true but is seen as a necessity.

We'll leave the morality of war for another time.

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