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dreambufferon The sigmoids won't save you

There was no implication of anything you're suggesting. It's a question of correctness (bias vs facts, predicting the sun will rise vs predicting the end of the world), whether you think it's important to be correct as a matter of reputation, and how correctness should be weighed if it is indeed important to one's reputation (a once-off comment vs a full report).

Not interested in further arguments about this.

dreambufferon The sigmoids won't save you

He co-authored a report, which is something more than an opinion. It may be used to inspire policy. There should be greater reputational consequences for publishing something you spent a few months studying and writing about along with several experts. Just my opinion.

dreambufferon The sigmoids won't save you

FYI: The author has predicted that "AGI" will be here in 1-2 years and has staked his public reputation on it. He is personally invested in trendlines being lindy rather than sigmoid.

I don't think you can use lindy on trends as if trends are static objects, but that's another conversation.

dreambufferon Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

This assumes:

- that you spend no amount of time looking things up, reorganising, or otherwise getting stuck

- that you have a solution to the problem ready to go at all times

- that your solution is better than the LLM's solution

I highly, highly doubt that all 3 of these are true. I doubt even 1 of them is true, I think you just don't know how to use LLMs in a focused way.

dreambufferon Security through obscurity is not bad

Depends, some systems are dynamic. There is also a gray area where obscurity can be computationally infeasible to attack, but not bound by traditional polynomial assumptions in cryptography.

As is always the case in these semantic discussions, the answer depends on your initial axioms and assumptions, which does kind of make most of these discussions pointless (but I did learn a lot from this one).

dreambufferon Security through obscurity is not bad

I understand it now, thanks

dreambufferon Security through obscurity is not bad

I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean here. If something is obscured, by definition it is less visible. Being 'less typical' is a form of security because most attacks rely on some form of pattern recognition, and obscurity literally dissolves patterns into noise.

dreambufferon New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag

England has a long history producing artwork against some institution, only for that institution to get worse over time. George Orwell wrote about the dangers of authoritarianism and surveillance, and since then the UK government has only ratcheted up their surveillance and authority. They also made a movie called This is England which straightforwardly depicts young English nationalists ruining their lives with nationalism, and 20 years later there are more nationalists in England than at any point after WW2.

Will Banksy's legacy be more or less the same?

dreambufferon Maine is about to become the first state to ban major new data centers

It's not an environmental issue, data centers are overleveraged in the US due to a belief that they need to win the "AI race". The government is putting their hand into the market to try and shift this balance, when they should be creating basic infrastructure and services.

dreambufferon Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection

The silent ones have also gone insane though. You don't get to see it as much, but they're the people promoting bad policies and funding delusional projects behind the scenes. Every so often one of them will make a public statement or political contribution which reveals that they have also been spending way too much time online.

dreambufferon Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only

If it is that easy for foreign governments to influence the very thoughts people have day-to-day, then something is extremely broken in your system and nearly all the blame is on your government for allowing that to happen.

dreambufferon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2026)

  Location: South Africa
  Remote: Only
  Willing to relocate: will relocate anywhere for ~95k USD p/a salary, anything less is remote
  Technologies: Game engines of various kinds, Blender, Python, Go, AI tools
  Résumé/CV: bugcatching.github.io
  Email: agngel @proton.me
  Interests: IR, Essay writing, Design, Biology, Cryptography, Information
  Projects: 3D network multiplayer game, Various 2d games, Data analyses
  Weaknessess: Less experience, takes ~1 month to learn. Wont take initiative.
  Strengths: Can learn just about anything in ~1 month.
  Experience: 4 years in various fields

dreambufferon Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents

Photons hit a human eye and then the human came up with language to describe that and then encoded the language into the LLM. The LLM can capture some of this relationship, but the LLM is not sensing actual photons, nor experiencing actual light cone stimulation, nor generating thoughts. Its "world model" is several degrees removed from the real world.

So whatever fragment of a model it gains through learning to compress that causal chain of events does not mean much when it cannot generate the actual causal chain.

dreambufferon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2025)

Location: Johannesburg, South Africa

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Go, Python, C, LLMs I suppose

Résumé/CV: bugcatching.github.io

Email: agngel @proton.me

I have a few years of experience building software of all kinds, primarily games with highly advanced backends (protobuf-based communication systems, concurrent multiplayer systems, among others). I have some experience with data science and an old certificate for it, mostly in reinforcement learning. Right now I'm building an RL-based fuzzer for security analysis and evolutionary programming based on a hypervisor architecture, which would be a first of its kind if I can get it done.

I am not too selective, I only ask that you don't make me do more than 1 technical interview and 1 phone interview. I will take almost any job if you skip the technical interview. Thank you.