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thom

9,927 karma · joined October 28, 2009

Recovering startup person.
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thom··on SpaceX's Starship launching to orbit for first time ever today
It’s a go!
thom··on Postgres SELECT DISTINCT Does Not Scale
Yeah, it's almost always more intention-revealing to use CTEs and WHERE EXISTS.
thom··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
Yes, we can come up with all sorts of weird situations where you can get it to be confused. But what I'm saying is it's _trivial_ to give it a simple prompt that prevents it from ever making any errors, and so I don't think it's this big LLM gotcha (of which there are many!)
thom··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
Humans do make these errors when playing blindfolded. If you even the playing field and give the LLM the position at each turn, it does not make mistakes.
thom··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
I maintain that the amount of effort to teach a human to do this vastly outweighs the amount of effort to teach an LLM to do this unless you're deliberately trying to make them fail. I honestly have no bigger point than that, I just think this isn't a very good thing by which to evaluate LLM capabilities. If there's no argument you'll accept, I am happy to move on.
thom··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
A human wouldn't do that, they'd look at the board. I'm not disagreeing that to demonstrate clear superhuman ability the LLM should be able to do this, but it plays better than most humans blindfolded, and with fair prompts seems very good otherwise.
thom··on Saving Jet Fuel
This is sad to hear! Early in my career I worked for a company making airport collaborative decision making (A-CDM) software. One of the most impactful projects to which I contributed was a model that calculated the exact right moment for a pilot to turn their engine on given likely pushback times etc. That saved quite a lot of fuel (and therefore cost and pollution) back in the day. It's a real shame if similar thinking isn't being applied to the problem you describe.
thom··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
I've not noticed this happening if you give it the FEN each move. The alternative is just blindfold chess and very few humans can do that for long.
thom··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
How long a prompt do you think would be required to cajole an LLM into making legal moves at the rate of a human? Or do you think no amount of prompting could do that?
thom··on People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination
Not sure what to answer on any of those questions. There's no 'perfectly clear but nothing like normal vision' option.
thom··on People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination
Gotcha. I _do_ have extremely clear auditory hallucinations, especially when I'm sleepy, but I was never talented enough to write them down properly, so I can believe more vivid visual ones are possible. Just always anxious that's what people mean during these threads.
thom··on People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination
I really don't think this is the right definition. I don't think I have aphantasia: I picture things in my mind's eye, can manipulate those images, and I get the various stimulus responses described in some of the literature. But it's totally different than dreaming: it's an act of will, I can dismiss it at any time, and I would never be able to convince myself I was actually 'seeing' what I imagined.

But heck, if that's it then hail, brother.

thom··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
Skald sold well which is stylistically very similar, and this has a slightly more popular confluence of genres.
thom··on Details.so
AI curated lists of homogenous websites, flayed to their bare bones to inspire the utterly uninspired. The internet is better and weirder than this, even in these dark hours.
thom··on Thelio Mira AI Linux Workstation: 192 GB GPU Memory
I remember losing sleep when I bought my RTX Pro 6000, but somehow they keep going up in price, and waddya know I’ve even done real work that appreciates the VRAM size.
thom··on Object storage is all you need
What about... queries?
thom··on GPT-6 Astra
Well look, the wall is already losing every point by volleying your serve so I feel like I'm on pretty strong ground here already. But give me an exact specification for your curved wall and I'll tell you how I'd beat it.
thom··on Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
How do you disseminate that information to humans?
thom··on GPT-6 Astra
Yes? You just hit the ball so that every return is out. It’s very easy.
thom··on GPT-6 Astra
I don’t like being this person, but you can very easily beat a wall at tennis.
thom··on It’s so hard to finish an idea that is not yours and is just suggested by AI
Yes. Note taking apps were very much the precursors of modern agentic coding.
thom··on What's new in Emacs 31.1
Yeah, I've always had the problem in Emacs that I know some quality of life feature would be possible to implement, but it'd take me hours or days so I just end up going back to work. With gptel, I've been able to really take control of my environment. And what's great is the LLM can write better LLM-integration functions too so you really end up with the perfect harness for whatever you're doing.
thom··on Show HN: Automatically detect and patch walking-dead states in Sierra games
Talking of being softlocked on a boat crossing:

https://www.kensblog.com/update-on-our-journey-through-the-n...

thom··on Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
Still unclear what your point was. There was nothing politically unifying about Brexit. Individual politicians weren’t even consistent in their support or opposition to it. The closest we have to a unifier now is centrist and Left politicians degrading themselves in ever more desperate attempts to vilify immigrants and trans people in an attempt to placate the Right (which as yet hasn’t unified anybody, to everyone’s surprise).
thom··on 2026 Eclipse Webcams
Different cruise in the Bay of Biscay but hello!
thom··on Kelly Criterion Simulator
The problem with sports betting is that if you really want an edge (at least in something like soccer) you could easily end up dropping six figures a year on data licenses to have a decent model and be able to find worthwhile bets across all competitions. That puts a lot of pressure on the amount of capital you need to deploy, which rules out a lot of bookmakers. As you graduate to markets with more liquidity (i.e. Asia) you’ll also find your edge shrinking. Still obviously very doable, but it’s hard to guarantee stress free passive income this way.
thom··on The Absurdity of Albert Camus
Cantona.
thom··on "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"
Amazed you’re continuing with this bit tbh.
thom··on "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"
Imagine, if you will, that it's a necessity for a healthy internet forum that people not be performatively obtuse in order to score points. That forum might continue to exist, but it would stop being a fun place to hang out.
thom··on "the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"
You’re probably right, but I’d also bet some things that we’re about to sweep aside will turn out to have been necessities and we’ll find it very difficult to bring them back.
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