HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

leonidasv

1,647 karma · joined June 27, 2019

https://leonidasv.com/
submissionscomments
leonidasv··on Don't credit the LLM
I don't see like that, for me it's like: here's an approximate answer. Is that sufficient or do you need a 100% accurate number? I can get this info for you, but I will have to stop everything I'm doing right now to figure it out or do it after I'm done with other priorities.

Sometimes the person asking just needs an estimate, a ballpark number. It doesn't really make a difference if 17 or 18 support requests were received.

leonidasv··on GCC steering committee announces AI policy
They still allow LLM-generated code for tests, LLM-assisted debugging, bug discovery and code reviews. It doesn't seem so.
leonidasv··on Scanning for Pangram Errors
Pangram is witchcraft to me. The way they can correctly detect AI writing from small samples, with so little statistical signal, is crazy. I've seen it correctly detect AI writing even when people use those "humanizer" rewriting skills that remove the hallmarks of AI writing and make the text indistinguishable from human text. But not to Pangram.
leonidasv··on Global Warming at 3 °C by 2050? What's Behind the New German Climate Warning
This is the most important part most people don't get:

> And what would 3 °C mean for Germany?

> FB: In summer, meteorological records could reach up to 50 °C. Three degrees of global warming does not mean hot days will just be 3 or 4 degrees hotter. It could mean up to 10 degrees hotter. We would also face much longer droughts.

3°C warming implies summer days can get 10°C hotter. This is nightmare scenario.

leonidasv··on GPT-5.6
Same here (Business Plan).
leonidasv··on Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
Is very difficult (not to say impossible) to ban a ill-defined thing.
leonidasv··on Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra
When I clicked, I thought that it was going to smash the turbine blades from the animation to suggest something like "all the performance without the thermals," but nope, they just became laptop fans. And seconds later, it started blowing heat/steam out of them!

That's the most uncanny marketing for an ARM laptop I've ever seen.

leonidasv··on Anthropic confidentially submits draft S-1 to the SEC
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
leonidasv··on What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications
Yeah, but I still see apps that don't implement those features. Mostly React Native/Flutter apps that don't bother implementing native features. On Android it's even more depressing.
leonidasv··on What Apple and Google are doing to push notifications
When they exist at all. Many apps that provide important notifications (like delivery tracking, drop-off time etc) put them under the same category as marketing stuff. You can't have just the transactional tracking, you have to opt-in for the marketing notifications as well.
leonidasv··on Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs
Sure, but they didn't spend on training the model. If DeepSeek is providing the model for the same price as third parties, then it's probably still losing money when you account for the training.
leonidasv··on Outsourcing plus local AI will soon become more economical vs. frontier labs
We shouldn't take free open models for granted. They're a byproduct of the current AI craze, but the economics aren't on their side. It's not sustainable. Alibaba already stopped releasing the weights for their best models, for instance.
leonidasv··on What color is your function? (2015)
The Node world was built with asynchronicity in mind. First via callbacks, then Promises, then async/await (Promise-based), so it feels natural now.

But if you take Python (for example), it's a shitshow. You usually have two versions of the same API, split by function name, client, package, or namespace: `foo` and `afoo`, where the a-prefixed one is async and meant to be used inside async function call chains, and the other one is the blocking version for non-async chains (which are still very much in use). It's a pain to develop for, to maintain, to scale, everything.

leonidasv··on Jira Is Turing-Complete
https://mattrickard.com/accidentally-turing-complete
leonidasv··on Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier
Same here. Can't stand 4.7.
leonidasv··on Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier
Qwen Max are usually closed, unfortunately.
leonidasv··on Stochastic Parrots: Frequently Unasked Questions
What a hill to die on.
leonidasv··on Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit
The post is about Linux vulnerabilities, but given the recent supply chain attacks, I'd be especially careful with Homebrew: https://x.com/i/status/2052106143271354859
leonidasv··on AI Self-preferencing in Algorithmic Hiring: Empirical Evidence and Insights
Same thing happened to my wife as well. I helped her tailor her LinkedIn profile and resume with a lot of attention to detail: adding metrics, keywords, results, etc. Nevertheless, she never received any outreach recruiters and got very few application responses. It went like that for months, almost a year.

Then she asked ChatGPT 5.x for help. I was skeptical about the changes it recommended (and was skeptical at all about using AI for this given the homogeneification it tends to produce). But somehow it worked: few days later, a recruiter reached out, then another, then applications started moving forward, etc.

My guess is that, as LLMs are shoveled into every phase of the recruiting process, not having an LLM write your resume for you is now playing on hard mode. The LLMs reviewing resumes are downranking resumes and profiles that are not "speaking" the same language and activating the correct neurons, thus preventing you from moving forward. This contrasts with years ago when we had more humans in the loop and the pasteurised writing of GPT 3.5/4o would make you look less worthy. Again, just a theory, but...

leonidasv··on The smelly baby problem
When my mother gave birth to my younger brother, she started using cloth diapers on him, worried about the environmental impact of disposable diapers like the ones she used on me during my childhood. She went back to disposable in less than a month.
leonidasv··on UAE to leave OPEC
"Oil" is not a homogeneous thing. There are different grades of oil and refineries are built to process specific grades of oil. UAE produces the so-called "Dubai Crude" oil grade, which is very sought after.
leonidasv··on Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary
The article has a benchmark and Opus has best score in two categories and the second-best in another (there are only three categories). Opus is probably the best choice when it comes to producing readable code right now. GPT (for example) lags way behind.
leonidasv··on Opus 4.7 to 4.6 Inflation is ~45%
>perhaps we can come up with something like the "linux/postgres/git/http/etc" of the LLMs

I fear that this may not be feasible in the long term. The open-model free ride is not guaranteed to continue forever; some labs offer them for free for publicity after receiving millions in VC grants now, but that's not a sustainable business model. Models cost millions/billions in infrastructure to train. It's not like open-source software where people can just volunteer their time for free; here we are talking about spending real money upfront, for something that will get obsolete in months.

Current AI model "production" is more akin to an industrial endeavor than open-source arrangements we saw in the past. Until we see some breakthrough, I'm bearish on "open models will eventually save us from reliance on big companies".

leonidasv··on The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?
What strikes me is that AI can also be the best teacher in the world: your Makefile is not working, you ask the LLM what's wrong, you learn something new about the syntax, you ask for more details, you learn more, you ask about other Makefile syntax gotchas, etc. This is the most efficient deliberate practice possible: you can learn in minutes what would take hours of Googling, tinkering and scouring docs. You have a dedicated teacher you can ask your silliest questions to and have the insight you need "click" way faster.

The problem is: (almost) nobody does that. You'll just ask Claude Code to fix the build, go grab a coffee and come back with everything working.

leonidasv··on OpenAI's $852B valuation faces investor scrutiny amid strategy shift, FT reports
My 2 cents: Claude is more expensive, but it has something that Codex/GPT lacks that's not easy to quantify. Opus is probably a bigger model (my guess) and trained on code and technical writing (books?) of better qualify compared to GPT.

HOWEVER, it has a flaw that makes some people prefer Codex: out of the box, it's lazy: https://x.com/i/status/2044126543287300248

However, once you learn how to deal with the laziness (which can be dealt with some CLAUDE.md instructions and context docs), Claude shows a better taste for coding. It replicates patterns from the repo, writes more readable/maintainable code, follows instructions, captures implicit information.

GPT/Codex is not a bad model/agent, but it lacks something. It's amazing for code reviews, but it writes code with zero regard to your existing codebase or SOLID/DRY principles. It just likes to output code (a lot of it) that works for the task you gave it right now, with zero regard for maintenance later. And also over-uses defensive programming in a way that quickly makes the codebase unreadable for dynamic languages.

Claude is not perfect, I still have to steer it sometimes to prevent overengineering or duplicate code, but a lot less than when I try Codex (and the built-in /simplify does half of the work for me).

leonidasv··on I still prefer MCP over skills
And call MCPs as well
leonidasv··on I still prefer MCP over skills
This is the same as saying "I still prefer hammer over screwdriver".
leonidasv··on Moving from WordPress to Jekyll (and static site generators in general)
The comment system bundled with Wordpress is not enough for "serious blogging", you'll need plugins to manage spam, allow users to use social accounts, etc. You'll also need plugins for caching. Oh, and you'll need plugins for SEO as well, because the core Wordpress doesn't handle the bare minimum of SEO and isn't flexible enough to allow you to do it yourself. And each plugin expands the attack surface to a system that's known for the persistent attacks, so you have to be constantly looking for updates and keeping everything update. Oh, but not everything, because there are breaking changes. And there are versions that introduce bugs or regressions.

But yeah, a bunch of html pages is over-engineering.

PS: you don't need to use Disqus if you don't want to, there are a myriad of free open-source alternatives you can self-host that will take a fraction of the maintenance work of self-hosting a Wordpress instance.

leonidasv··on I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
It works on Safari.
leonidasv··on I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii
Nice work and write-up!

A side note: you embedded .mov videos inside <img> tags. This is not compatible with all browsers (notably Chrome and Firefox), which won't load the videos.

Page 1 of 9Next →