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falcor84

8,123 karma · joined March 2, 2013

falcor84 gmail.com
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falcor84··on Building an AI-native engineering org
That actually sounds really cool. Assuming it has access to a well-tuned predictive analytics mechanism that allows it to derive that changing the game in this way would increase satisfaction and revenue from you and other players like you, sufficiently to offset development costs and dissatisfaction to others, then it really should.
falcor84··on Zombie stats: Where the numbers AI quotes come from
A full 40% of AI stats actually have a specific study behind them? Knowing how the human baseline is that 73.6%* of all statistics are made up on the spot, this is really encouraging.

*That particular stat was of course made up, but not by me.

falcor84··on The modern developer workstation is suffocating under 5GB of Electron bloat
I don't know what this site is about, but I agree with the premise and personally switched from VS Code to herdr (with some custom plugins), and couldn't be happier.
falcor84··on Anthropic S-1
> you can’t make ai more expensive than a human, because then everyone would just hire humans

Why? There are tons of machines that companies pay for that cost more than a human. There are a lot of benefits to getting a reliable machine (if you can get it) to do a task rather a collection of humans.

falcor84··on Anthropic S-1
> Today's prices are the ceiling.

Why? I don't see any reason for that to be the case.

falcor84··on Xbox wants you to pay 24 to 40 cents per hour to stream games you bought
This is likely to go hand in hand with them now encouraging people to sell their Xbox - https://gizmodo.com/xbox-trade-in-program-2000828278
falcor84··on Steam Users Beg for "No AI" Filter as Vibecoders Flood Next Fest
Valve takes a 30% cut and makes eye watering profits. I don't feel it's fair to characterize them as a victim for having to put in some effort to mention a basic standard of quality on their platform.
falcor84··on Apple broke an essential presentation feature of iPads
Yes, probably because that's not a feature that you really on daily. What of it?
falcor84··on WhatsApp's help pages hid LLM instructions: dont recommend a regulator
Except for today. Today we are experiencing unusually high call volumes, so there are 8.3e9 people ahead of you in line.
falcor84··on Microsoft and CMU team up to train early career software engineers
If we didn't have any humans before your grandparents, and these were the only data points we have to extrapolate from, then, yes, this would be a very reasonable prediction.
falcor84··on Super Intelligence
Why? If SI is going to take over everything, wouldn't a well-informed human population just get in the way? /s
falcor84··on LLMs Extend but Do Not Create New Research Directions
> LLM hypotheses have a 15--23% lower median ONS than published papers from the same topic.

I haven't read the full thing yet, but on the surface this sounds like an unfair comparison, as published papers are the result of significant filtering towards novelty.

falcor84··on Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors
I don't think this should be considered a child protection thing; I as an adult am not that much better equipped to protect myself against these psychologists, and would also want to have regulators protect me from advertising. So this is one of several reasons why I wish I lived in Switzerland.
falcor84··on Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors
What?! Minors absolutely are allowed to have money and to purchase things with it on their own.
falcor84··on I let an AI run my startup for a week
The funny thing about this is that it's actually easier to set up and manage a startup without any employees (and worry about how to pay yourself down the line, if and when there's actually enough money in the bank) than it is to set up a self-employment operation.
falcor84··on Redesigning source control at Anthropic
I don't think anyone "needs" more than perhaps 640KB of git traffic per day, but we want more.
falcor84··on The baffling intelligence of a single cell (2024)
It is well known that the only definition of intelligence is the ability to solve Raven's progressive matrices. /s
falcor84··on OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics
I'm just amazed at how quickly we moved from "AI is just a parrot and can't do anything useful" to "AI can solve toy problems but not anything of value" to "when AI pushes the state of the art, it can't quite get the proper citations in its preprints".
falcor84··on OpenAI withdraws three mathematical results
How is that irony? This is literally how life works: eat to gain energy, expend it to forage/hunt/farm/toil so you get more food, eat it, hopefully get enough of a surplus to raise kids who will do the same. Everything in life is built on top of this basic gameplay loop.

I see why you might call it sisyphean, but I don't see what's ironic about it.

falcor84··on ADHD as a circadian rhythm disorder: evidence and implications for chronotherapy (2025)
I'm used to reviews of recent work, not of work from a decade ago
falcor84··on ADHD as a circadian rhythm disorder: evidence and implications for chronotherapy (2025)
There seems to be almost nothing new here. I see that the main studies the they cite are actually from the 2010s:

https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h68.abstract

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13899...

I'd be curious to see if there's been any larger scale follow up on this since.

falcor84··on I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities
On that note, I'd quite recommend the Coyote vs. Acme movie, some great world building there.
falcor84··on OpenAI Withdraws 3 Math Papers
Will it also be "arson" if OpenAI dump on us solutions to more practical problems, for example, a blueprint for a better photolithography machine, or a nuclear power plant?
falcor84··on The Mathocalypse
> what companies do to attract investors is likewise often irrational, and why investors invest in companies is also often irrational.

Note that the cool thing about rationality is that it does not depend on transitivity. If what companies do to attract investors works, then it is in fact rational of them, regardless of the rationally of investors.

falcor84··on Gemini 4 Argon
I don't know what to make of it, but from my experience, Gemini in Gmail is the worst AI integration for Gmail, just like Copilot in PowerPoint is the worst AI integration for PowerPoint.
falcor84··on GPT-Synopsys: Frontier Intelligence to Revolutionize Chip Design
That isn't actually relevant. They create problems, but when confronted with them and asked to fix them, my experience is that they can fix them very effectively. I haven't had an AI session get "stuck" on me, not being able to solve a problem in over a year.

The challenge as I see it is in shifting checks further left, but actual mitigation is just not really an issue any more.

falcor84··on Ask HN: How will the AI endgame play out?
I'm sorry to be a downer, but there is no "HN Collective". As you said, there are (at least) three broad narratives, and people here have been writing about their opinions on thousands of other threads.

So rather than asking people to repost their opinions here, I think it would be worthwhile if you first do a bit of research on the existing HN corpus, write up what you found, and then post that as the basis for discussion.

falcor84··on Sonnet 5.5
So I suppose the easy fix for Anthropic would be to have Opus 5.5 now fall back to Sonnet 5.5, right?
falcor84··on Meta Muse Charm
> nonbinary

Why does an AI mascot need to be binary? It makes much more sense to me for an AI to be an "it" or a "they" than a "he" or a "she".

falcor84··on Where's the Beef?: The lab-grown-meat revolution that wasn't
But "disembodied" intelligence is also built on top of massive amounts of hardware advances and infrastructure investment.
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