HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

placebo

1,000 karma · joined October 7, 2014

submissionscomments
placebo··on I opened cockpit door while being attacked, says pilot of Dubai-Israel flight
Not to take credit from anyone else who helped save the passengers including his own life, but I think he's the real hero since everything depended on his one act of unlocking the door.
placebo··on Astra for Law
I guess the answer to the second question is "if there's a business case", and the answer to the first is the same, so probably no. Life has made me a tad cynical... :)
placebo··on Show HN: Engrim – A universal, local-first SQLite memory engine for AI CLIs
It all boils down to whether the product (code , documentation, whatever) is polished, easy to understand and works as advertised. Beyond that, I don't give a rats ass about whether the intelligence that created it was human or artificial
placebo··on Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting
I agree with you. However that doesn't explain why people get so upset about a definition being changed - seems just as silly.
placebo··on Ex-Crips leader found guilty in 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur
I don't necessarily agree with the parent comment, but I think the angle might be one of utilitarianism, i.e: when caught, both should be put on trial and punished if found guilty, but the current focus of society to put more energy into catching one type over another is misguided as far as what will be best for society in general. Again, not saying I agree with that philosophy, but the logic is valid.
placebo··on Mathematics Without Mathematicians
Agreed. Unfortunately some religious inclinations can be just as tedious as pure mechanistic rational inclinations, even if they are consistent. Fortunately, these are not the only two options available. The future that the article points to is not necessarily only bad news - it might be the uncomfortable truth required to transcend our limiting beliefs.
placebo··on The Religion of Speed
They don't seem that way to me. I should also note that AI generated content can at times be better than some human generated content
placebo··on The Religion of Speed
Reader here. Thanks for creating this. Totally resonates with my own thoughts, so if I'm wrong at least I have company :-)

I do have a suggestion for those who object to this line of reasoning: Follow the 5 why's to try and get to the source of your own reasoning and see whether it still makes more sense - in the sense of whether you end up adding to the common good

placebo··on The session you cannot take with you
>Like a frog enjoying a nice warm bath...

Exactly :-)

Call me naive but I think dark patterns are a short term strategy for winning and I'm optimistic that in the long run they will be replaced with those that are more respectful and oriented to the greater good (granted, the long run might take more time than one hopes for).

Given that the pendulum can sometime swing back fast enough to be able leverage it, it might be a good time to focus on models that are both open weights and economically viable to run to build the next great thing.

placebo··on Solving Fermat: Andrew Wiles
Agreed. I bought it at the airport for a transatlantic flight the year it came out and started reading before lift off. Completed it before landing. Best flight ever.
placebo··on Advertise in ChatGPT
Isn't society made up of everyday people? While I agree that the public being informed is a mutual responsibility, placing that responsibility on the government (which in many cases has plenty of incentive to keeping people ignorant) will not work either.
placebo··on Advertise in ChatGPT
If you are implying that this is the case because this is also how leaders are selected in a democracy, then of course the sarcasm is noted - but here's my real unpopular opinion: Democracy only has value when the majority of voters are not morons. Unfortunately, I can't come up with a better solution - maybe create a model for which there is a wide agreement on and let it rule?
placebo··on The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
I have no doubt it plays on the same fears - whether it was deliberately done so, I don't claim to know. My assumption was that in a discussion on AI, the comment about the terminator was not alluding to a literary metaphor but to a fear from the actual thing. There was no intent in downplaying the fear of AI - just adding a new perspective. I'm am curious to know what you think self-awareness has to do with any of this.
placebo··on The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
The terminator you talk about is a movie character. It might be built one day, it might not. It is also totally irrelevant considering there is a real terminator which can be described with the same adjectives and built in to every personal life that ever existed or will exist. Knowing how to deal with that seems more important than worrying about some specific scenario.
placebo··on VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO
>Even the most basic questions such as put a ball in a cup and place it on a table upside down then pick up the cup and put it in a box.

That reminds me - this used to be my go-to question for smaller models and on which they would always fail miserably on:

A small strawberry is placed in a large cup. The cup is placed upside down on the kitchen table. Someone then lifts the cup as-is and puts it in the microwave. Where is the strawberry when the cup is in the microwave?

Here's what the 1.9GB VibeThinker-3B-GGUF:Q4_K_M answered:

Answer: The strawberry is still on the kitchen table – it fell out when the cup was turned upside‑down, and the subsequent lift‑and‑microwave move doesn’t change that.

So it seems there is definite progress here. Both specialized and yet improved common sense on things outside its domain of specialization.

placebo··on Show HN: I Derived a Pancake
Wow, that was. impressive :-) A few random thoughts I had while reading this, in more or less the order they appeared: 1. The relation/connection between optimization and the hedonistic treadmill 2. That this combination of enthusiasm, curiosity, intelligence, rigor and inventiveness/creativity would be exactly what I would look for in a technical co-founder 3. What other parameters that we don't know about or are in a different dimension than those mentioned here (ingredients, amount, time etc.) would also push the needle? 4. This is why we can have nice things :-)
placebo··on AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it
I think the great advantage of AI in software is that it enables you to create code faster. I think that the great disadvantage is that it tempts you to create code incredibly faster.
placebo··on Archive of Byte magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
I think that is a valid opinion, but don't think there is any conclusive evidence to make it a valid fact (while of course not disagreeing with "fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem" part). Would be happy to learn otherwise.
placebo··on Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975
If you're old, I guess that makes me ancient. Byte is what got me hooked on the path I walk to this day, though back then it would be far beyond my wildest dreams to believe that in my lifetime it would be possible to hold an intelligent conversation with software, and everything that entails
placebo··on The Importance of Being Idle
and the problem with always needing something to show is that you can never find peace...
placebo··on When do we become adults, really?
I think what the parent comment was hinting at is that there is no absolute separator between a non-adult and an adult. It is a thousand different things and the type of game you enjoy playing is not necessarily a good indicator on its own.
placebo··on Thinking Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning
You already stated the reason you think why so many people are in total denial. If indeed the reason is indeed a sense of threat to what people take themselves to be then I would be very surprised if the response would have been any different. Whether this indeed is the case is what remains to be seen. I for one do believe there is something different going on here than yet another technological advancement, but again - time will tell
placebo··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
Grok's thoughts on the matter:

"In an ideal world, I'd want xAI to emulate the maturity Anthropic showed here: affirm willingness to help defend democracies (including via classified/intel/defense tools), sacrifice short-term revenue if needed to block adversarial access, but stand firm on refusing to enable the most civilizationally corrosive misuses when the tech simply isn't ready or the societal cost is too high. Saying "no" to powerful customers—even the DoD—when the ask undermines core principles is hard, but it's the kind of spine that builds long-term trust and credibility."

It also acknowledged that this is not what is happening...

placebo··on Ask HN: How did you learn to code?
Basic on a RadioShack TRS-80. Guess I'm one of the older dinosaurs here.
placebo··on Believe the Checkbook
The very fact that people are arguing with a non-existent author signals that whatever generated the content did a good enough job to fool them today. Tomorrow it will do a good enough job to fool you. I think the more important question is what this means in terms of what is really important and what we should invest in to remain anchored in what matters.
placebo··on Please just try HTMX
This got me thinking: I am not about to fight windmills and the future will unfold as it will, but I think the idea of "LLM as a compiler of ideas to high-level languages" can turn out to be quite dangerous. It is one thing to rely on and not to be able to understand the assembly output of a deterministic compiler of a C++ program. It is quite another to rely on but not fully understand (whether due to lazyness or complexity) what is in the C++ code that a giant nondeterministic intractable neural network generated. what is guaranteed is that the future will be interesting...
placebo··on The AI bubble is 17 times bigger than the dot-com bust
Even if this is true, a possible takeaway is that after the bubble bursts and the dust settles, AI's effect will be 17 times stronger than that of the Internet... Personally, I think it will end up being much higher, but that doesn't mean I'm going to invest in it any time soon
placebo··on RFCs: Blueprints of the Internet
I actually did exactly that for a product back in the days when there was no open implementation. IRC, SMTP, POP3, DNS. Good times :)
placebo··on Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
Really surprised there in no mention of William of Ockham - you know, the guy that made razors...
placebo··on Show HN: A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine
Thank you. Was subscribed to it around 1981-1983. Eagerly waited every month for it to make its way across the Atlantic so I could dig into all the fascinating new technologies. I'm sure it had a great influence on my interests and eventual career.
Page 1 of 14Next →