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dinobones

There are a lot of people working in software that have limited knowledge of information theory or machine learning.

Unfortunately LLMs are magic to them.

When you lack a first principles understanding of how something really works, you will bolt on hacks and duct tape on the wrong approach.

Re:Human brain is two separate organs, research finds on Friday September 18, 2026 @04:32PM (#49759887)
Not relevant to the article.

Also, that study is extremely dubious/barring on fan-fiction.

Homer (if he was even a person) recited oral epic poetry (that we've lost most of) and we've written down an extremely lossy version of it.

Why should we take any of the mythical character's interactions with mythical gods as any insight for the brains of real humans???

It'd be like year 4000 historians citing World of Warcraft claiming the Lich King is a very obvious example that humans lack an internal monologue because he was not able to distinguish his own motives/actions between Ner'zhul/Arthas (both spiritual entities inhabiting the "Lich King" body).

Re:Towards Self-Driving Codebases on Thursday September 17, 2026 @09:55PM (#49749333)
> Agents can oneshot games that are actually fun.

Stopped reading right there.

Is this really that big of a flaw in this implementation? I don't think it's worth the additional complexity to address it. (Encoding depth information in some way, trying to detect "flat" surfaces, whatever).

Discerning a camera taken image of an image is typically very very easy. The collors/exposure/etc will all be obviously wrong in ways to a human, even without doing any analysis.

Re:Jev: New frontier model 40-400x cheaper and 20-200x faster on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @05:12PM (#49718973)
This is a good product but the naming/branding is pretty unfortunate.

Typesafe.AI sounds like some typescript/structured output type of tool…

What even is “system one” ?

IMO the product/tech is really there, just needs better communication.

As someone with keratoconus, I hardly noticed! This is what all text looks like for me.
Re:The Last 24 Hours Are the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie on Friday September 11, 2026 @12:49PM (#49661476)
AI researchers: Yeah our AI models are a bioweapon threat and a nation state level cybersecurity threat and also a genius math researcher and very dAnGeRoUs!

The world: Cool, can you rewrite this email with a professional tone.

Re:Waymo – Dallas Open to All on Wednesday August 05, 2026 @12:56PM (#49185525)
Why are you assuming there’s some taxpayer that will pay for my transportation?

I fully intend to pay my transportation costs myself.

It’s not about getting a free ride, it’s about being able to get to work while sleeping, saving money on housing, and pocketing the difference.

Re:Waymo – Dallas Open to All on Tuesday August 04, 2026 @07:51PM (#49176833)
Here's another idea:

The places where people want to live have no land or archaic zoning laws.

I wouldn't want to live two hours away, but if I could sleep/work during my commute, and pay $400/month for it, I might do it. My housing costs would be like less than a third of living in the metro where I work.

Supercommuting becomes slightly more palatable.

Re:Mitchellh starts a new company: Superlogical on Wednesday July 29, 2026 @03:16PM (#49101756)
This is like the “why not use FTP yourself” response to the YC Dropbox page.

Yes, but good, standardized developer tooling is valuable.

Postman could’ve also been a “just use CURL and dump to JSON” for example.

I actually am bullish on this. Tmux and ssh are somewhat clunky and probably under utilized by most people. I struggle to find commands, navigate sessions, see history, and so on.

Also in an “agent” based world where you might ask an agent to execute things for you, how do you manage that context well beyond just giving it its own Tmux session to drive?

It’s a good idea, and I’m surprised no one’s built it sooner.

Just start pricing in bytes input/output. This whole "token" and "tokenizer" thing is an implementation detail that shouldn't even be leaking out into the API.

Providers change tokenizers all the time with model updates, and it's often not even possible to query/figure out how text is tokenized without actually just sending the LLM a request.

Just switch to charging for bytes of intelligence. Please. Claude Shannon figured this out decades ago.

Don't underestimate corporate waste. If it's not someone's job to care for something, they really won't.

Even before this AI wave, it was common for me to see spinning dev environments for like $3k/month that hadn't been used in months on AWS.

Yeah, this implementation and their behavior these past few weeks is especially laughable when you consider that they consider themselves “philosopher programmers” or whatever.

You would think they’d be more reflective and introspective about these brash moral decisions. Their product quality is akin to my CS capstone lab group.

Re:SFO Quiet Airport (2025) on Friday April 24, 2026 @11:42PM (#47898436)
Those walkways are only in between each set of gates, there aren’t any actually near gates or anywhere near seating. Where did you sleep lol?
Re:Google Flow Music on Friday April 24, 2026 @08:59PM (#47897655)
I've noticed that all of these music generators suffer from something like "mean" collapse (as opposed to mode, you do get variance, but all results are highly centered around similar sounding songs).

The music is all just very average, it sounds like the most average song with the most average chord progression/drum pattern per genre.

I guess that makes sense if these are most likely next audio token predictors... but it'd be cool if there was a way to inject some type of creativity/novelty into these, or at least tune up the temperature.

Everything so far just sounds like stock library music to me.

Re:Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs on Thursday April 16, 2026 @01:51AM (#47789155)
Couldn't someone just uhh... patch their macOS/kernel, mock these things out, then behold, you can now access all the data?

If it's not running fully end to end in some secure enclave, then it's always just a best effort thing. Good marketing though.

Wait, the linter re-ordered the file. Let me restore it to the previous state.

whisper: There is no linter.

why tho? it's just an alternate alphabet/set of symbols.
> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.

There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.

Re:Young adults report lower life satisfaction in Sweden on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @03:29PM (#46876830)
There are 67 million baby boomers in the US. How can you rationally blame them all? Roughly 20% of the population.

Saying the "boomers ruined everything" is not sophisticated, we can't move forward from a blame game, we have to diagnose the actions and actors that implemented them, but of course this is much more challenging.

Ancedotally, I know plenty of poor boomers. Have you seen who works at a Dollar Tree lately?

The popular dialogue that boomer=rich and greedy, millennial=poor and exploited is not productive, it's a fabricated generational war that distracts us from the real issues.

Re:Young adults report lower life satisfaction in Sweden on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @03:25PM (#46876785)
Has any society ever behaved that way? It's already a push to get people to think of the middle/lower classes during the present.

I understand the desire to find an entity or group of people to blame, but they were acting in their own self interest at a peak time, they didn't know the party would be over soon, for many of them, it still isn't.

Re:Young adults report lower life satisfaction in Sweden on Tuesday February 03, 2026 @03:03PM (#46876470)
Can you blame them for existing during early globalization, before over the financialization of everything? It's not like they actively took more than they "should have" from anyone directly, it's a consequence of their local economy and where it was at the time.
It's not that hard to notice this, just google "{university} {degree} syllabus" and you can see all the courses that the student will take.

In my case, I have CS degree and work as SWE but I probably would've been fine with just my Data Structures & Algos course as I already had programming experience.

Are computational theory, circuits 101, discrete math, logic 101, etc necessary for being a good SWE? Probably not, but they do probably expand your mind a bit.

Re:Why didn't AI "join the workforce" in 2025? on Tuesday January 06, 2026 @01:20AM (#46509298)
A brief history of programming:

1. Punch cards -> Assembly languages

2. Assembly languages -> Compiled languages

3. Compiled languages -> Interpreted languages

4. Interpreted languages -> Agentic LLM prompting

I've tried the latest and greatest agentic CLI and toolings with the public SOTA models.

I think this is a productivity jump equivalent to maybe punch cards -> compiled languages, and that's it. Something like a 40% increase, but nowhere close to exponential.

Re:A website to destroy all websites on Thursday January 01, 2026 @04:36PM (#46458289)
I used the early web. I miss forums, I miss the small webmaster, I miss making fun, small websites to share with friends.

And while you could make the argument that these forms of media were superior to TikTok, I’d also argue that this is mostly just taste.

While we have closed ecosystems now, they’re much easier to make and share content to than the web of the past. It’s much easier to get distribution and go viral. There’s also a well trodden path to monetization so that if you craft great content people love, you can make a living from it.

Yeah quirky designs, guestbooks, affiliate badges, page counters, all that stuff. I miss it. But only ever a very small fraction of society was going to be able to make and consume that stuff.

This new internet is much more accessible and it occasionally produces diamonds of culture, you just have to know where to look.

So no, I don’t think any amount of decentralized protocols or tooling or any technology really can change this. I think this trend is set and will continue, and I’ve had to learn to be more open minded to how I perceive internet content.

No one is going to make personal websites or change their behavior in a major way.

Look, you can still sign up for free web hosting and make an HTML page and tell your friends. There are still people that do this. But it’s naturally eclipsed by these other methods of much easier content sharing.

The point is the content itself, not the packaging. Just get over the shape of the packaging and enjoy.

You spent 3 months on this hacked together garbage when you probably could’ve just configured a pre-existing solution off the shelf with like 10 minutes of reading and understanding documentation.

This blog post reeks of “you can just do things” type of engineering. This is the quality of engineering I would expect from “TPOT” (that part of Twitter) where people talk about working 12 hour days. It’s cause they’re working 12 hours on bullshit like this.

Building some sweet custom codec or binary transportation algorithm was barely cute in like 1989. It definitely ain’t cute now.

How many of these AI and “agentic” companies are just misled engineers thinking they are cracked and writing needlessly complex solutions to problems that dont even exist?

Just burn it all down. Let it pop already.

Re:Rats Play Doom on Friday December 12, 2025 @06:08PM (#46250157)
The year is 2034. Countless attempts at re-producing the sophisticated wetware of the brain have failed. Modeling research has proved unfruitful, with the curse of dimensionality afflicting every attempt at breaking the walls of general intelligence. With only a few million of capital left, and facing bankruptcy, they knew that only one option remained.

"Bring me the rats."

Re:GPT-5.2 on Thursday December 11, 2025 @02:19PM (#46235868)
It's becoming challenging to really evaluate models.

The amount of intelligence that you can display within a single prompt, the riddles, the puzzles, they've all been solved or are mostly trivial to reasoners.

Now you have to drive a model for a few days to really get a decent understanding of how good it really is. In my experience, while Sonnet/Opus may not have always been leading on benchmarks, they have always *felt* the best to me, but it's hard to put into words why exactly I feel that way, but I can just feel it.

The way you can just feel when someone you're having a conversation with is deeply understanding you, somewhat understanding you, or maybe not understanding at all. But you don't have a quantifiable metric for this.

This is a strange, weird territory, and I don't know the path forward. We know we're definitely not at AGI.

And we know if you use these models for long-horizon tasks they fail at some point and just go off the rails.

I've tried using Codex with max reasoning for doing PRs and gotten laughable results too many times, but Codex with Max reasoning is apparently near-SOTA on code. And to be fair, Claude Code/Opus is also sometimes equally as bad at doing these types of "implement idea in big codebase, make changes too many files, still pass tests" type of tasks.

Is the solution that we start to evaluate LLMs on more long-horizon tasks? I think to some degree this was the spirit of SWE Verified right? But even that is being saturated now.

Re:Ilya Sutskever on Dwarkesh Patel's Podcast on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @06:41PM (#46052211)
I stopped listening to Lex Fridman after he tried to arbiter a "peace agreement" between Russia and Ukraine and claimed he just wanted to make the world "love" each other more.

Then I found out he was a fraud that had no academic connection to MIT other than working there as an IC.

Re:You Can Now Make PS2 Games in JavaScript on Friday November 21, 2025 @01:18PM (#46007116)
Mega cool, I’m curious if there’s a way to burn the ISO to a disc and get this playing on a physical console?

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