Hacker News: ComplexSystems

New comment by ComplexSystems in "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]"

ComplexSystems — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:36:07 +0000

How many tokens would it cost to write some library functions to fill in the gaps?

New comment by ComplexSystems in "Cloudflare Drop"

ComplexSystems — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 04:19:26 +0000

Who, exactly, should help people host a website?

New comment by ComplexSystems in "Claude Sonnet 5"

ComplexSystems — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 22:08:25 +0000

So the post-introductory price is set such that Sonnet 5 will cost 100%-135% as much?

New comment by ComplexSystems in "GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks"

ComplexSystems — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 04:41:14 +0000

Sonnet 4.6 is ahead of Opus 4.7? Hm.

New comment by ComplexSystems in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

ComplexSystems — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:46:36 +0000

The guy is genuinely worried for his future. I see nothing shameful or narcissistic about that, and I don't think it makes sense for you to wish him any harm.

New comment by ComplexSystems in "Meta’s chaotic AI strategy"

ComplexSystems — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:02:29 +0000

Yes, they certainly should have taken one of the many other jobs that are widely available right now.

New comment by ComplexSystems in "What it feels like to work with Mythos"

ComplexSystems — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:51:11 +0000

Who can afford to use this damn thing though? They're pricing everyone out of the market with stuff like this.

New comment by ComplexSystems in "Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking"

ComplexSystems — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:24:39 +0000

Can you imagine ChatGPT terminating a conversation because it thought your question was "low effort?" The behavior wouldn't be viewed as helpful or aligned, and nobody would use it.

StackOverflow was, all too often, not helpful or aligned. It died because the staff were unable to get the moderators to be helpful.

New comment by ComplexSystems in "Language Models Need Sleep"

ComplexSystems — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:27:38 +0000

That's because the purpose of this article is not to have an objective debate over their abilities at all. Most interesting research in this field isn't. Instead, it's to present a new technique to improve LLM performance, which is much more interesting than (once again) rehashing the philosophy of LLM personhood.

New comment by ComplexSystems in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

ComplexSystems — Wed, 20 May 2026 21:18:00 +0000

That may be true for now, but it seems clear enough that letting the model use Lean in its internal reasoning process would be a great idea

New comment by ComplexSystems in "Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid"

ComplexSystems — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:09:21 +0000

Sure, you can substantially reduce the information collected about you as long as you don't just give it away somewhere else instead.

New comment by ComplexSystems in "Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid"

ComplexSystems — Thu, 14 May 2026 20:07:30 +0000

The reason I think this is a bad idea is that it lulls you into a false sense of security. The article makes recommendations that seem thorough and sensible - keyword "seem" - but, as mentioned elsewhere here, there are other potential hidden sources of telemetry (in CarPlay and Android Auto), and who knows what else.

For this kind of thing to succeed as a general lifestyle, you would need to invest an enormous amount of time making potentially irreversible modifications to all kinds of electronic equipment - only to be virtually guaranteed to miss something.

Do this kind of thing if you want, but don't be fooled into thinking you're actually solving the problem for real.

New comment by ComplexSystems in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

ComplexSystems — Wed, 13 May 2026 23:59:21 +0000

You know, back when it was a noble democracy where all men were free, or something.

New comment by ComplexSystems in "Parents say ChatGPT got their son killed with bad advice on party drugs"

ComplexSystems — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:18:58 +0000

Surely there's room for the view that this is misaligned behavior for ChatGPT to have. I would guess this is during the "sycophantic" phase last year.

New comment by ComplexSystems in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

ComplexSystems — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:47:07 +0000

Yet another round of layoffs. Is there a fallback career? :-/

New comment by ComplexSystems in "A polynomial autoencoder beats PCA on transformer embeddings"

ComplexSystems — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:41:27 +0000

That makes sense. If you could magically just get the top d PCs in quadratic kernel space without having to compute the whole kernel matrix, and then just do top-d quadratic PCs -> ridge, would that be better than doing the PCA -> top-d -> quadratic kernel ridge as you are now?

New comment by ComplexSystems in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"

ComplexSystems — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:34:47 +0000

Absolutely. Who cares if the LLM automates some of the grunt work? Mathematicians are artists, and they paint with ideas. The goal is map out more of the beautiful structure of how things work. The enjoyment in it derives entirely from the payoff of seeing the larger view of how things fit together. If part of their process involves bouncing things off of other people, or even LLMs, I don't think it matters much, nor does it take away from the enjoyment in getting things figured out.

New comment by ComplexSystems in "A polynomial autoencoder beats PCA on transformer embeddings"

ComplexSystems — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:37:55 +0000

What makes this different from just kernel PCA with the quadratic kernel?

New comment by ComplexSystems in "US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos"

ComplexSystems — Sat, 09 May 2026 00:13:10 +0000

People can and do see unidentified things and take plenty of photos of them.

New comment by ComplexSystems in "Maybe you shouldn't install new software for a bit"

ComplexSystems — Fri, 08 May 2026 05:09:51 +0000

While I am sure FreeBSD is more secure than your average Linux distro, I sure hope they are using these new AI models to harden everything.