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sponnath

71 karma · joined September 22, 2023

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sponnath··on US Government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
I think it's being silently downgraded. Can't tell for sure.
sponnath··on Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise
I feel like they're also ignoring the increase in actual real world use costs due to reasoning. Just looking at token costs doesn't capture the whole picture.
sponnath··on Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged
It's actually baffling that Github struggles to load a 1000 comments. It can't even load a single one it seems like. It just straight up silently fails. How is this a thing in 2026?
sponnath··on Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged
I don't think people's main concern is just the use of AI. The main concern seems to be that a PR of this scale was merged probably without a proper review process.
sponnath··on Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged
I don't think something like this and an entire rewrite of your codebase in 9 (?) days is the same thing.
sponnath··on Where the goblins came from
I think Studio Ghibli has made some of the most beautiful films I've ever seen and I make it a habit to rewatch many of them every year. I think Sam and the others overusing the Ghibli artstyle is absolutely a petty dig at Miyazaki saying that AI animation is "an insult to life itself" (although he said this well before AI art took off).
sponnath··on Anthropic Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle on macOS without warning
While the whole "Claude Code is just like a game engine" tweet was silly, this comment seems too derisive. I highly doubt engineers at Anthropic are lacking in talent.
sponnath··on Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced
I have to agree. It's off-putting to me too. I'm impressed by the performance of their models on this take-home but I'm not impressed at their (perhaps unintentional) derision of human programmers.
sponnath··on Notes on Apple's Nano Texture (2025)
Absolutely. I honestly wouldn't ever recommend doing this. Imo, you should just spent a little extra time cleaning your display over taking dubious preventative measures.
sponnath··on A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
It's not silly when you consider what longnow stands for. They look at "now" on a 20,000 year scale so the extra zero is just emphasizing that 01931 is still the "long now".
sponnath··on Notes on Apple's Nano Texture (2025)
There's honestly not much you can do to prevent the "oily cubes" problem, especially if you keep the laptop docked often. You'll just have to clean the screen more often.

I've seen some people place a keyboard-sized microfibre cloth in between the keyboard and display but I'm not sure how well that actually works in practice. It might cause other issues.

sponnath··on “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
There are "ungodly geniuses" within mathematics but no one is saying every mathematician is an "ungodly genius". The quality of results you get from an LLM can vary greatly depending on the environment you place it in and the context you provide it. This isn't to say it's your fault Claude Code can't fix whatever issue you're having.
sponnath··on “Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”
Not disagreeing with you, but I don't think Tao is blowing this out of proportion either. I think it's a pretty reasonable way of saying, "Hey, AI is now capable of something it wasn't able to do before".
sponnath··on How to code Claude Code in 200 lines of code
I think at this point it's not easy to accurately detect whether or not something is AI written. A real person can definitely write like this. In fact, that's probably where the LLMs got their writing style from.
sponnath··on Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far
Refactoring does always cost something and I doubt LLMs will ever change that. The more interesting question is whether the cost to refactor or "rewrite" the software will ever become negligible. Until it isn't, it's short-sighted to write code in the manner you're describing. If software does become that cheap, then you can't meaningfully maintain a business on selling software anyway.
sponnath··on Brave overhauled its Rust adblock engine with FlatBuffers, cutting memory 75%
It does not recursively install dev-dependencies.
sponnath··on Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”
Why do you think the models are AGI?

I also like to think that Einstein would be smart enough to explain things from a common point of understanding if you did drop him 2000 years in the past (assuming he also possesses the scientific knowledge humanity accrued in that 2000 year gap). So, your analogy doesn't really make a lot of sense here. I also doubt he'd be able to prove his theories with the technology of the past but that's a different matter.

If we did have AGI models, they would be able to solve our hardest problems (assuming a generous definition of AGI) even if we didn't immediately understand exactly how they got there. We already have a lot of complex systems that most people don't fully understand but can certainly verify the quality of. The whole "too smart for people to understand that they're too smart" is just a tired trope.

sponnath··on I program on the subway
Reading is usually more passive than coding. I'm often never sleepy if I'm actively coding something late at night but reading a book (no matter how engaging) or watching a tv show can very easily make me sleepy. That said, everyone's brains work very differently.
sponnath··on Google Antigravity
How is a compiler and an LLM equivalent abstractions? I'm also seriously doubtful of the 10x claim any time someone brings it up when AI is being discussed. I'm sure they can be 10x for some problems but they can also be -10x. They're not as consistently predictable (and good) like compilers are.

The "learn to master it or become obsolete" sentiment also doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Isn't the whole point of AI as a technology that people shouldn't need to spend years mastering a craft to do something well? It's literally trying to automate intelligence.

sponnath··on 'Attention is all you need' coauthor says he's 'sick' of transformers
I've tried to make AI work but a lot of times the overall productivity gains I do get are so negligible that I wouldn't say it's been transformative for me. I think the fact that so many of us here on HN have such different experiences with AI goes to show that it is indeed not as transformative as we think it is (for the field at least). I'm not trying to invalidate your experience.
sponnath··on 'Attention is all you need' coauthor says he's 'sick' of transformers
Wouldn't say it's transformative.
sponnath··on State of AI Report 2025
This is peak pseudo-intellectualism.
sponnath··on AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents
Why would these things not be relevant for humans?
sponnath··on GPTs and Feeling Left Behind
I don't think it's correct to generalize front-end work like this. I've found it very underwhelming for the kind of front-end stuff I do. It makes embarrassing mistakes. I've found it quite useful for a lot of the braindead code I need to write for CRUD backends though.

It's good at stuff that most competent engineers can get right while also having the sort of knowledge breadth an average engineer would lack. You really need to be a domain expert to accurately judge its output in specific areas.

sponnath··on ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action
I would even argue the hard parts of being human don't even need to be automated. Why are we all in a rush to automate everything, including what makes us human?
sponnath··on I don't think AGI is right around the corner
Something big is definitely happening but it's not the intelligence explosion utopia that the AI companies are promising.

> Who cares if AGI isn’t five minutes away. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve built the closest thing to a machine that actually gets what we’re saying. That alone is insane. You type in a paragraph about your childhood trauma and it gives you back something more coherent than your therapist. You ask it to summarize a court ruling and it doesn’t need to check Wikipedia first. It remembers context. It adjusts to tone. It knows when you’re being sarcastic. You think that’s just “autocomplete”? That’s not autocomplete, that’s comprehension

My experience with LLMs have been all over the place. They're insanely good at comprehending language. As a side effect, they're also decent at comprehending complicated concepts like math or programming since most of human knowledge is embedded in language. This does not mean they have a thorough understanding of those concepts. It is very easy to trip them up. They also fail in ways that are not obvious to people who aren't experts on whatever is the subject of its output.

> And the logic complaints, yeah, it screws up sometimes. So do you. So does your GPS, your doctor, your brain when you’re tired. You want flawless logic? Go build a calculator and stay out of adult conversations. This thing is learning from trillions of words and still does better than half the blowhards on HN. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be useful, and it already is.

I feel like this is handwaving away the shortcomings a bit too much. It does not screw up in the same way humans do. Not even close. Besides, I think computers should rightfully be held up to a higher standard. We already have programs that can automate tasks that human brains would find challenging and tedious to do. Surely the next frontier is something with the speed and accuracy of a computer while also having the adaptability of human reasoning.

I don't feel threatened by LLMs. I definitely feel threatened by some of the absurd amount of money being put into them though. I think most of us here will be feeling some pain if a correction happens.

sponnath··on Techno-feudalism and the rise of AGI: A future without economic rights?
The human brain demonstrates that human intelligence is possible, but it does not guarantee that artificial intelligence with the same characteristics can be created.
sponnath··on LLMs as Compilers
True but this only works well if the natural language "processor" was reliable enough to properly translate business requirements into code. LLMs aren't there yet.
sponnath··on Show HN: Comparator - I built a free, open-source app to compare job offers
There's some minor content overflow in the x axis. I think it wouldn't hurt to tweak the max width of the page content as I feel like it's a bit too much right now. Also not sure if I'm a fan of the animation you have going on with the quotes. Feels tacky.
sponnath··on Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]
I think the only places where the entry-level coder is being killed are corps that never cared about the junior to senior pipeline. Some of them love off-shoring too so I'm not sure much has changed.
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