Hacker News: DennisP

New comment by DennisP in "Feds freaked over Fable 5 after simple 'fix this code' prompt, not jailbreak"

DennisP — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:53:18 +0000

Yes, but the scary part of Mythos was that it was able to chain a bunch of seemingly minor vulnerabilities into a serious exploit. "Fix this code" doesn't do that, but does allow defenders to prevent it.

If the government had experts involved in this decision at all, it's tempting to think they were on the offensive side. Those guys do have access to Mythos:

https://www.ft.com/content/d02d91b3-2636-454e-9442-dc7e69f51...

New comment by DennisP in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

DennisP — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:25:04 +0000

The solution here might be the appeals court, since there is a deed restriction. The city agreed to it when they paid $10 for the land. The article mentions that Texas courts tend to be pretty serious about enforcing deed restrictions.

New comment by DennisP in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

DennisP — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 23:13:34 +0000

True, but that's a different problem and to hedge against that you probably need hard assets.

New comment by DennisP in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

DennisP — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:05:01 +0000

It's fine as long as t-bill rates match or exceed inflation. Then you can avoid losing purchasing power by just putting your money in the world's safest investment. Over the past century, t-bill returns have slightly exceeded inflation on average, though there have been periods when they didn't.

Stash paper cash in your safe and sure, you lose purchasing power. Use fiat money the way it's designed to be used, instead of using it like gold coins, and it works better.

New comment by DennisP in "Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S."

DennisP — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:40:12 +0000

Of course, and so would those same people.

New comment by DennisP in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"

DennisP — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 02:11:55 +0000

So if I don't think any words for a few seconds, am I not conscious?

Suppose I'm an advanced meditator and maintain that state for hours?

New comment by DennisP in "MacBook Pro Rival with the Nvidia Powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

DennisP — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:14:40 +0000

CUDA support is another reason, if you have a particular need for that.

New comment by DennisP in "Ferrari Luce"

DennisP — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:00:51 +0000

Among modern EVs, the Aptera will probably be closest. I don't think they're opening the software but they're going all out on right-to-repair for the hardware.

New comment by DennisP in "DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent"

DennisP — Sun, 24 May 2026 21:46:44 +0000

If you look at total debt instead of just national government debt, then China is even worse off than the US.

Article in Fortune: https://archive.is/53Vu0

New comment by DennisP in "DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent"

DennisP — Sun, 24 May 2026 21:38:20 +0000

China also has 1,271 GW of coal capacity, and is planning 500GW more.

New comment by DennisP in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

DennisP — Tue, 19 May 2026 12:58:34 +0000

Steve Yegge wrote about this in his book Vibe Coding. He says it takes about a year of experience before you're consistently getting good results. He writes about lots of different techniques for doing that, but also says a lot of it comes down to just getting a feel for when the LLM is going to go haywire.

New comment by DennisP in "Colossus: The Forbin Project"

DennisP — Sun, 17 May 2026 23:58:57 +0000

Plenty of interesting sci-fi later, though. Gattaca, Ex Machina, Her, Interstellar, Inception, The Matrix, Contact, Arrival, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind...

New comment by DennisP in "Making the news available at no cost is a victory"

DennisP — Thu, 14 May 2026 00:37:09 +0000

It's not like the one comment is the only newsworthy thing that day. It's a big complicated world with so many important things happening that we can't possibly keep up. It'd be easy to fill up the news with a tiny fraction of them, instead of picking one or two facts and spouting lots of opinions about them. Doing the latter is just a choice they've made.

New comment by DennisP in "Using AI for just 10 minutes might make you lazy and dumb"

DennisP — Mon, 11 May 2026 20:06:41 +0000

I wasn't attempting anything like that, just working out the implications of a simple model of a real process.

New comment by DennisP in "Using AI for just 10 minutes might make you lazy and dumb"

DennisP — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:05:03 +0000

I think it depends on how you use it. Recently I spent several days using Opus Extended for help on a simple mathematical model. I came up with the modeling ideas and some hypotheses, it did the math and worked through implications. Then I carefully read through everything it wrote, made sure it hadn't misinterpreted what I'd said (which it sometimes did), and checked all the math. Occasionally it used math I didn't understand, so I opened another chat to teach me that math.

In one way it was sycophantic, frequently saying how "sharp" my ideas were, but I just reminded myself to discount that. In other ways it pushed back. If the math didn't work out to the conclusions I expected, it pointed that out. It was like working with a reasonably smart, extremely productive, but less creative coworker.

I don't think it made me lazier, because it was intense and exhausting. But I learned a lot.

New comment by DennisP in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

DennisP — Mon, 11 May 2026 02:09:45 +0000

For most of that time, I don't think many people had much use for more ram than that. If demand picks up, companies will provide it.

And the Mac Studio was available with 512GB until ram got scarce and they cut the max in half recently.

New comment by DennisP in "AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields"

DennisP — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:18:19 +0000

I don't think it's valid to draw broad conclusions from the funding of a new company vs. an industry leader. If AMI builds something that looks impressive considering the funding they got, then they'll get plenty more in the next round.

New comment by DennisP in "AlphaEvolve: Gemini-powered coding agent scaling impact across fields"

DennisP — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:12:59 +0000

Could always use a local LLM for stuff like that. One of my relatives works for one of the big audit firms and that's what they do.

New comment by DennisP in "I'm scared about biological computing"

DennisP — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:51:17 +0000

Since well before LLMs, people have been talking about "philosophical zombies," hypothetical objects that could emulate human behavior perfectly but had no inner experience.

Some philosophers (one modern example being Kastrup) point out that the only thing we really know is our own conscious experience. We don't go full-on solipsist because other people appear to be built the same way as ourselves, so it's a small jump to think they're conscious as well. Over the past few decades scientists have found that other animals' brains are quite similar to our own in important ways, mammals especially, and are more willing to credit them with consciousness.

But AIs run on completely different hardware with different algorithms. It's entirely possible that they're philosophical zombies. It's a bigger leap to say they're conscious like us, because they're more different from us.

New comment by DennisP in "I'm scared about biological computing"

DennisP — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:22:38 +0000

Ironically, it seems you may not have read past the first sentence of your GP comment.