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gowld

9,503 karma · joined January 27, 2017

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gowld··on Sonnet 5.5
Does it also take 2 seconds of critical thinking to realize that the models that are covered should be accurately named by the people making the decisions?
gowld··on Inverse-Square Law
I don't think that's true at all.
gowld··on Inverse-Square Law
It makes sense when you realize that all the information inside a black hole is present at its surface. An object itself approaches singularity, but to an outside observer it never crosses the event horizon, so everything "inside" (in its own view) is also "on the surface" to an outside observer.
gowld··on Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes
"public-text" doesn't describe the purpose of a public key.
gowld··on Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes
And in fact, we have a dedicated term for shared secrets
gowld··on US confirms for first time it has deployed space weapons
Space Review website has malware-download ads all over the page. That spooks me.
gowld··on Chopping up books when they're physically too big
Quick, someone make a startup to print chopped-up-books on demand.
gowld··on Let's make quality the norm again
Comment is unrelated to the link, except that both have the word "Warranty".
gowld··on Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?
Nothing can be observed travelling faster that speed of light in the observer's proper time, but many things can be observed having travelled faster than the speed of light, when considering the traveler's proper time and the traveler's observation of distance before and after the journey.
gowld··on The k-server conjecture is true
Yes, LLM is excellent at optimizing exhaustive search algorithms into "representative" search algorithm, by generating heuristic classifications at high scale.
gowld··on The k-server conjecture is true
I wonder what Karlin thinks.
gowld··on A beginning for mathematics
Why is "Doctor of Philosophy" the correct certificate of "becoming expert in a topic"?

That's a radical departure from "PhD" being a certificate that someone is qualified to produce new research.

What you describe is more like a Masters Degree.

gowld··on Why don't machine learning research agents overfit?
That's not true. It's pretty clear that she meant "do something you knew they were going to say no to and now you are trying to get away with something."

https://youtu.be/wHdHCoeUbU4?t=861s

> So I want to tell something to all the young people here on many many occasions you'll find it is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission. You do it then when somebody comes after you and say are you supposed to do that, "oh gee I didn't know I wasn't supposed to do that" ... so just remember it's frequently much easier to apologize than it is to get permission do it

She goes on further, explaining how to deceive your superiors to manipulate them to get what you want.

gowld··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
Also, the fact that both are very unusual from a spelling perspective makes it an easy human mistake.
gowld··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
Criminal law may be lagging or inapplicable. (Crimes require "mens rea", a "guilty mind")

Tort law is very general: Contribute toward harming someone -> civil suit for damages $$$

gowld··on [dead]
Why is a poorly written forum comment on the front-page as a top link?
gowld··on Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route
Updated Sept. 11, 2026 9:49 am ET is less than 30 minutes ago
gowld··on Anthropic Says Iran Used Its American AI Model to Target U.S. Navy Warships
re-report here: https://www.stripes.com/branches/navy/2026-09-11/anthropic-a...
gowld··on Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route
Do you consider every trial defendant to be exonerated?
gowld··on The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
Any indictment of LLM needs to distinguish LLM from pocket calculators and books. Calculators and books quietly made reasearch less collaborative.

Also, Waymo is an automated taxi service, so it's an exteremly misleading analogy. Taxis existed before Waymo.

gowld··on The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative
Currently, the leader of USA national AI policy (Trump admin and OpenAI) is a history Bachelors with no technical training or advanced training of any kind, Dean Ball.
gowld··on Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
It's a new presentation, an online hypertext, and uses YouTube publications of 21st Century music as example.

https://musictheory.pugetsound.edu/mt21c/frontmatter-5.html

gowld··on The Four-Color Theorem Gets a Rare New Proof
I would love to have a unicorn pegasus, but some things might just be impossible.

Even something as simple as the computer you are posting from is not optimized for human comprehensibilty, in its full detail.

gowld··on I have a theory that software drives people insane
Even that is overselling it:

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...

> Key messages

> We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed.

> Hand hygiene programmes may help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses.

> There is uncertainty about the effects of face masks. The low to moderate certainty of evidence means our confidence in the effect estimate is limited, and that the true effect may be different from the observed estimate of the effect.

> Hand hygiene is likely to modestly reduce the burden of respiratory illness, and although this effect was also present when ILI [influenza-like illnesses] and laboratory‐confirmed influenza were analysed separately, it was not found to be a significant difference for the latter two outcomes.

> Our confidence in these results is generally low to moderate for the subjective outcomes related to respiratory illness, but moderate for the more precisely defined laboratory‐confirmed respiratory virus infection, related to masks and N95/P2 respirators.

> Relatively low numbers of people followed the guidance about wearing masks or about hand hygiene, which may have affected the results of the studies.

gowld··on Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]
"Seinfeld isn't funny". Hofstadter was one of the pioneers of the "not uncommon" idea.
gowld··on Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]
I don't quite know what Aaronson is trying to say.

First, LLM AI systems have incredibly huge blind spots despite their incredible performance on many tasks, so self-reference might be the key to what's missing (or not). For example, an LLM AI just solved Navier Stokes, but could not explain the LEAN proof, while a human could.

Second, Hofstadter had more than one idea about intelligence and the mind (see the OP topic of this HN discussion!), and LLMs are quite on-point regarding analogy-forming.

So it may be well be that self-reference and analogy are both part of intelligence, and self-reference is missing and that is leading to major weaknesses.

Third, Aaronson links to a (paywalled) Hofstadter essay form 2023, which was eons ago in AI, and from the intro it seems to be about the sadness of AI replacing humans, not a disparagement of AI ability.

gowld··on To write non-fiction, draw the trunk, then the rest of the tree
> And presumably would go on to add systems to allow them to persecute others they deem to be slackers.

According to the story (which seemed to lack a "trunk"), the proposed system was individual essays.

gowld··on A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came with by Looking at Specification Gaming
Create a Meeseek to destroy non-Meeseek AI
gowld··on Show HN: Compute polynomials twice as fast
"monic" is a separate switch from the example functions radio-selector. Enabling "monic" removes the leading coefficient.
gowld··on Show HN: Compute polynomials twice as fast
From the abstract, a name that many on HN would recognize:

> We also give an injective polynomial construction for universal hashing that uses N multiplications to hash 2N values with a single random key. This improves the best previous construction by Daniel J. Bernstein (this http URL).

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