Hacker News: ImprobableTruth

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "Grok 4.6"

ImprobableTruth — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:31:15 +0000

These exist and are used. The issue is that because they're so much smaller, they're also much worse, so they tend to have lots of false positives while still being easy to circumvent.

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%"

ImprobableTruth — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:57:03 +0000

The fundamental issue is that for these systems bigger is essentially always better (if affordable). So if we can squash something like Kimi K3 down to run on a 'normal' system, that just incentivizes devs to increase the model size until once again we're at the limit of what can be run.

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]"

ImprobableTruth — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:48:56 +0000

This is not what the bitter lesson is about. It's not "don't develop better methods, just scale", it's that those methods which scale best win. LeCun's work is fundamentally about devising a method that scales better with data than LLMs. Agree with him or not about the feasibility of it, but this is fundamentally still a bitter lesson-pilled mindset.

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models"

ImprobableTruth — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:25:19 +0000

This is some bizarre victim inversion. The providers of closed models are the ones who are trying to use regulation to stop their open model competition, not the other way around.

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "AI is a bad tool"

ImprobableTruth — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 21:44:37 +0000

Now, what if you order a construction crew for building your house? What if you also hire an architect to design the plan? And an overseer who manages everything?

Surely at some point you would stop saying "I built this house", even if you ordered and financed it?

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "The gauge broke: devs felt 20% faster with AI, measured 19% slower"

ImprobableTruth — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:03:23 +0000

Sure, but "10x faster, but only applies on small greenfield, throwaway projects" is a major caveat. In fact, there's a good chance this doesn't disprove the original blog post, you could be way faster on small projects but slower on 'real' projects.

>Also give it a chance - as you said "good" models have only been available very recently and you wouldn't expect everyone to start using them instantly.

But I'm not expecting everyone to have built something like that, but surely among millions of users someone should have, especially the people proclaiming insane productivity gains? There are no super impressive open source projects done using AI and all the companies boasting about how all their code is AI written now don't show much improvement either.

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "The gauge broke: devs felt 20% faster with AI, measured 19% slower (2025)"

ImprobableTruth — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 10:56:09 +0000

Opus 4.5/4.6 are what many people consider the first 'good' models and it's from last year/start of this year.

But fine, let's say everything before gpt 5.5 was unusable crap. Then there should still be projects that would normally have previously taken ~2 years done in just two months. Where are they?

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "The gauge broke: devs felt 20% faster with AI, measured 19% slower (2025)"

ImprobableTruth — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:24:06 +0000

>I just did a ~6 month project in ~2 weeks using a frontier model.

Claims like this are hard for me to take seriously because 'good' models have been available since the start of the year. So, if they really 10x one's productivity, then people should be able to have gotten done 5 years worth of work since then, but I've never actually seen anybody show any project like this.

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "Not everyone is using AI for everything"

ImprobableTruth — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:29:56 +0000

This is a very strange mindset. Even if you want to treat everything as sort of billable hours this doesn't really make sense because the average boss's boss's isn't paid anywhere near 144x. If a SWE spends 100 hours to save their boss's boss one hour, they're wasting a ton of money.

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "Notes on DeepSeek"

ImprobableTruth — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:19:19 +0000

Anthropic had to settle with authors because they literally pirated books! Their behavior regarding distillation is genuinely beyond parody.

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do"

ImprobableTruth — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:25:54 +0000

Except it's not just a tool.

It's when a woodworker, musician or painter completely outsources their work and just marks what's wrong, sending those parts back. Yes, the final art piece might be the same, but the artist definitely uses less of their "soul".

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

ImprobableTruth — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:26:10 +0000

Shared memory of the past meant reserving a part of the memory for the GPU, which could then not be used or accessed by the CPU. If the CPU wanted to access something, it had to copy it from the GPU's section of the memory to its own. Unified memory means both just fully share the same memory.

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "Qwen3-Coder-Next"

ImprobableTruth — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 18:04:36 +0000

If that was the real reason, why wouldn't they just make it so that if you don't correctly use caching you use up more of your limit?

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "If you put Apple icons in reverse it looks like someone getting good at design"

ImprobableTruth — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 02:33:47 +0000

The quill and ink at least communicates that it's about writing. The new one is so abstract that when I first looked at it I had no idea what I was even looking at, it certainly doesn't communicate "this is like word" to me. Without comparison to the previous icon, how many people do you think would understand that the bottom line is intended to be a stroke drawn by the pen?

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear"

ImprobableTruth — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 20:53:30 +0000

The key thing is that you teach multiplication tables in a structured, incremental manner. Yes, it's just rote memorization, but the structure makes it way easier. You don't just dump all tables on the student at once and start quizzing them until they get it.

Imo not being able to select a subset of intervals to train heavily limits how useful this is.

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability"

ImprobableTruth — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 22:16:48 +0000

How is the raw Gemini 3 CoT accessed? Isn't it hidden?

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "Reflections on AI at the End of 2025"

ImprobableTruth — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 14:21:55 +0000

They're not making money on inference alone because they blow ungodly amounts on R&D. Otherwise it'd be a very profitable business.

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles"

ImprobableTruth — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 10:55:14 +0000

> These games are the starting point, but the bulk of the game is new puzzles combining mechanics from different games together

Seems like the puzzles are novel, but the mechanics are not?

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "GPT-5.2"

ImprobableTruth — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 18:38:26 +0000

An almost 50% price increase. Benchmarks look nice, but 50% more nice...?

New comment by ImprobableTruth in "Open models by OpenAI"

ImprobableTruth — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 17:43:34 +0000

Unfortunately not, this model is noticeably worse. I imagine horizon is either gpt 5 nano/mini.