<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: AlexErrant</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AlexErrant</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 25 Sep 2026 03:30:50 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=AlexErrant" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's 0.5 g of creatine per 4 ounces of red meat.<p>That's pretty insignificant. Does anyone really wanna eat 2.5lbs of beef every day for the usual dose of 5g?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:43:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49838297</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49838297</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49838297</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "Claude Code reads AGENTS.md only when telemetry is on [fixed]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"No bitch, that's a whole new sentence."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 21:35:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49822908</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49822908</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49822908</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "Once Claude can measure something, it can make it faster"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Here's a simpler bug:<p>Claude Cowork <i>still</i> can't persistently reference a local dir, broken ever since they moved to their cloud project system, breaking many non-technical people's workflows.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:21:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821965</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821965</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49821965</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "AX – Google’s Open Agentic Orchestrator"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well, they're not above forking their own project to patch security holes and never upstreaming the fixes.<p><a href="https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576" rel="nofollow">https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117282080803799576</a><p>> Google should not be gatekeeping security patches to the standard Android platform code from Android OEMs but that's what they've started doing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2026 23:20:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781154</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781154</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49781154</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "Microsoft director: AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a memo taken out of context from Jan 2023, literally 1 month after the ChatGPT public release. All the article cites:<p>> The brief cited an internal memo dated January 2023 by Microsoft director of Applied Science Brent Hecht, where he allegedly said, “Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” and also called it “the largest theft of labor in human history.”<p>No need to add religion into this. Let MS employees write their emails. If anything, what he said a month after ChatGPT's release was prophetic.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 19 Sep 2026 21:33:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770303</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770303</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770303</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It _is_ sus, but you should be willing to forgive. It's not like it was done out of animus, and I assume that an academic/foreigner is unaccustomed to how production software conventions work. Their baseline is less important, more important is how quickly they learn/adopt "best practices". Y-intercept, slope, etc.<p>I say this as literally the first HN comment to call them out on this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:54:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757867</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757867</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757867</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mean... If you wanna build your project on a language that has no auditable history, reproducible builds, artifacts/releases, force pushes and breaks literally EVERY fork/PR, has no way to build or even see v2.0.3, and doesn't have changelogs... then I guess that's cool. You must be a trusting person; I unfortunately am not like that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 18 Sep 2026 03:58:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750031</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750031</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49750031</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Props. G'luck with your project, I know what it's like to work nights & weekends. Unfortunately, first impressions matter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:08:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747960</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747960</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747960</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Erm, because it looks weird? Do you know any other language projects that squash their repos down to 1 commit? That's a destruction of trust, which is kinda important if you want people to build on your language.<p>Virtually everyone has AI slop in the commit history. No one's judging you for the commit history. Everyone's code smells, but the fact that you're ashamed/hiding it is... odd.<p>> there's a lot of personal info<p>You should know that force pushing doesn't hide actual commits; it's trivially viewable if someone just iterates <a href="https://github.com/bendlang/bend/activity?ref=main" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bendlang/bend/activity?ref=main</a> e.g. <a href="https://github.com/bendlang/bend/commit/d184863" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bendlang/bend/commit/d184863</a> so like... why bother.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:52:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747118</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747118</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747118</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "Bend – a language that blocks AI mistakes via proof and runs on GPUs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://github.com/bendlang/bend" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/bendlang/bend</a><p>...did they just squash the repo to 1 commit for v2.0.4? Why? Yall should know that in this age of AI trust is the real currency... and nuking your history is one hell of a way to raise eyebrows.<p>> Enjoy <i>bug-free</i>, fast vibe-coded apps! Hints: ask it to write laws for whatever should never break, and to parallelize everything you want running fast. Bend is
young: <i>if anything goes wrong</i>, ask it to open an issue.<p>Emphasis mine. I don't want to be snarky but like... come <i>on</i>.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:58:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746480</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746480</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49746480</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "Performance Improvements in .NET 11"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Dumb Q: should a non-systems-language dev know/read assembly?<p><pre><code>    ; Arm64
    --- .NET 10
    +++ .NET 11
    @@ -13,8 +13,6 @@
                ble     G_M000_IG04

    G_M000_IG03:
    -            cmp     w1, w2
    -            bhs     G_M000_IG05
                str     wzr, [x0, w1, UXTW #2]

    G_M000_IG04:
    @@ -25,4 +23,4 @@
                bl      CORINFO_HELP_RNGCHKFAIL
                brk     #0

    -; Total bytes of code 68
    +; Total bytes of code 60
</code></pre>
I know C#/F# decently well, but is there any reason to actually pull out the ol textbooks and learn wtf the above is saying?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 23:01:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49734207</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49734207</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49734207</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "Performance Improvements in .NET 11"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>FWIW the .NET 10 release also had 2 occurrences of "real" in literally the first paragraph.<p>I, too, tire of the constant YOU WROTE THIS WITH LLMs outrage. An incredible engineer dumped an ENORMOUS amount of technical knowledge at your feet, and you're commenting on the <i>smell</i>? Is that all you have to contribute?<p>I saw this too on the Ryan Carniato/SolidJS 2.0 announcement post. A world-class engineer makes a great blog post, and all the comments can focus on are the LLM-smells. Oh well. Any reason not to learn, I guess.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:54:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49734149</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49734149</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49734149</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "AI 2027 (2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This doesn't solve grinding? If it did, we'd see results by now (Published: 27 January 2026), and there's months of delay between submission and publication.<p>I'm willing to be wrong, but I'm just not seeing anything worth doomering over. There are multiple companies throwing AI at materials discovery; a research paper about a "data-driven framework" is about as unthreatening to my thesis as it gets. I'm willing to cede the point if say, Radical releases ~3 new materials that have commercial applicability and ~3x some useful metric e.g. tensile strength, but until then, to my amateur eye, it looks like AI+Real World is missing its ChatGPT moment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:52:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650631</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650631</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49650631</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "AI 2027 (2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Agree.<p>Gonna note that biology is even less grindable than ordinary chemistry/physics/engineering. We'll have advancements in other real-world fields before AI-powered bioengineering becomes A Thing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:48:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649968</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649968</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649968</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "AI 2027 (2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sup fellow Alex.<p>> AI with real-world competence is coming very soon<p>Disagree, Moravec's Paradox remains undefeated. How long has Elon promised self-driving cars? Or how long have we been seeing humanoid-robot-walking demos? Laundry folding demos?<p>Let's assume that a magical AI powered robot hand lands tomorrow. How long do you think it'll take to ramp up assembly/production/distribution/sourcing/materials/QA for, say, a million of them? Never mind the legal/integration/maintenance time.<p>And even once those have landed, and assuming they are ALL put to work on iterating on research testing to build out super-high-capacity-drone-batteries, how long do you think it would take for that to evolve into killer-insect-drones? BTW you should know that even though high capacity silicon carbon batteries exist, they haven't supplanted other Li-ion batteries for a host of reasons. A million things stand between a technology working in a lab and surviving the real world.<p>And during this entire process, the (geo)political/social/legal process will be churning away, changing the societal landscape in which the killer-robots land. Not to mention that mechanistic interpretability is (likely) somewhat grindable. A lab just needs to dump a billion dollars of compute into it after it declares AGI.<p>I'm unconvinced we get killer insect drones before we crack mech-interp.<p>And even once we get killer insect drones, they need to somehow have no kill-switch and then literally exterminate everyone on the globe? Can you see why I have a problem with doomers predicting human extinction within the decade?<p>I'm putting words in your mouth and not replying to precisely what you said, just the general vibe. LMK if I overstepped.<p>P.S. we do have mass production of AI designed systems today e.g. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna</a> There's nuance to this whole thing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:36:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649826</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649826</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649826</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "AI 2027 (2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Literally 2 days ago, from a former Anthropic researcher:<p>> The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.<p><a href="https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476203863224394" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476203863224394</a><p>> The dynamics are plausible<p>Please elaborate: what dynamics? This is rather vague. My point is that AI can't grind real world physics/chemistry/engineering. What dynamics are in play here?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:10:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649553</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649553</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649553</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "AI 2027 (2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My main issue with this timeline is that AI still has trouble transitioning to the real world. It predicts for 2029:<p>> There are swarms of insect-sized drones that can poison human infantry before they are even noticed; flocks of bird-sized drones to hunt the insects; new ICBM interceptors, and new, harder-to-intercept ICBMs. The rest of the world watches the buildup in horror, but it seems to have a momentum of its own.<p>Does anyone really predict insect drones _in production_ 3 years from now, to the degree that we need bird drones to hunt the insect drones? How the hell are these things powered?<p>Lean/math/millenienium prizes are "grindable" [0]. Wake me up when AI is making order-of-magnitude improvements in ungrindable real world tasks like batteries, hypersonic engine manufacturing, and stealth/silent motors that you can't hear.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm" rel="nofollow">https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:53:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648601</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648601</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49648601</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ah derp; that's what I get for moving too fast. Genuine thanks for calling me out on my bullshit. (and this is also why I prefer auditable citations instead of casual "my reading of twitter is...")<p>I retract the projectnash citation; I grabbed it from the Cool World's youtube description, thinking it was a blog version of the video. It was not. I suggest watching the video instead.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:15:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49618492</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49618492</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49618492</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>2. Fair, and further I would agree that OpenAI not knowing if prior user prompts were part of training data is concerning and will only lead to more secrecy.<p>3. ctrl-f "x.com" in this thread only yields <a href="https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/sama/status/2097385167002415140</a> <a href="https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/SebastienBubeck/status/2097379411691516310</a> <a href="https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2097375276384567642" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2097375276384567642</a><p>and frankly, I'm unwilling to give Elon any more traffic to dig up drama that ultimately doesn't matter. I'm not seeing anything especially childish, but y'know... I'm not sure I care.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:20:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49616454</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49616454</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49616454</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by AlexErrant in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This clarification substantially changes the flavor/nuance of your OP; may I suggest an edit (assuming the locktime hasn't passed)?<p>Separately, I disagree that intellectual work has ever been free of "dark forest"-style secrecy. Scientists everywhere have worried about being scooped; AI just magnifies that (as all tools have; e.g. Leeuwenhoek lenses).<p>And thirdly, if you want to make a stronger case for "I feel even less confident in them as a team to be shepherding this much capital and compute", you should give citations and arguments. From what I've seen, there's drama, it's much OpenAI trying to avoid scooping, and Tristan being stuck in a game of telephone, and Levent being incommunicado.<p>If you have a better analysis, you should say so instead of being vague.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:04:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49615132</link><dc:creator>AlexErrant</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49615132</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49615132</guid></item></channel></rss>