Hacker News: Mithriil

New comment by Mithriil in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

Mithriil — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 02:50:22 +0000

What's almost certainly true is the amount of insanity he encountered at Anthropic.

New comment by Mithriil in "Black hole singularity is a surface not a point"

Mithriil — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 21:48:29 +0000

They do speak of the gravitational singularity (not the event horizon). It's within the horizon, there is a contradiction between the need for two infallers' position to reach the singularity (thus hitting a point) and the causal impossibility of them actually meeting (following General Relativity?). This suggests that the point should maybe be a surface.

I don't follow most of the arguments however.

New comment by Mithriil in "I stopped trusting USB-C cable labels and started testing them"

Mithriil — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 03:25:38 +0000

The first 1 star comment on the "YEREADW USB-C Tester Power Meter" marketed here is worrisome:

> HOWEVER, the issue is that, for some reason, on some devices, it seems to mess with PD negotiation. On chargers that I know can output 15V, it will not negotiate to 15V, it will only charge the device at 5V 3A.

New comment by Mithriil in "The Sylvester–Gallai Theorem"

Mithriil — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 03:09:49 +0000

Say you've got a set of 5 points that are not all collinear (e.g. everytime you draw a line, you never get all 5 of them). Now every time you try to draw a line between two points, you always end up with a third one. Can this happen?

This is what is stated here: there always exists at least a pair where this does not happen.

New comment by Mithriil in "The Sylvester–Gallai Theorem"

Mithriil — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 03:06:53 +0000

Also, see the title of the website.

New comment by Mithriil in "Show HN: An AI agent that trades inside limits you set, starting on paper"

Mithriil — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:01:34 +0000

Not necessarily. Selling a tool doesn't incur the same risks as using it, not at all.

New comment by Mithriil in "I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel"

Mithriil — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:34:51 +0000

I understand the point that the physical world is still our (human's) anchor, but the virtual world still "exists" anyway, as in: it impacts the physical world.

Whether some humans are "Real humans", anchored in the physical world, and some are "LLM psychosis victims" is, in itself, not problematic I think: they each deal with parts of reality that are divided, but still affect one another.

Of course, a society more grounded in the physical would feel less dystopian... But ultimately, I think that GA is an intellectual's approach to fighting *for* humans in this numerical world.

New comment by Mithriil in "I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel"

Mithriil — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:23:39 +0000

I don't think that GA would be incapable of that, from what I know of LLMs and agents. The part where you make the GA uphold your set of values could, instead of coming from an individual, come from a collective. Price could be shared too!

(Oh wait, is this the birth of AI mayors?)

New comment by Mithriil in "I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel"

Mithriil — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:20:47 +0000

One of the example Gwern brings [1] is a GA as an agent for public discourse and political life, to bring your "set of values" to have an effect in solving society's issues, when you yourself don't have the time or energy to.

I don't think it solves or reconciles with self-actualization, but, from a pragmatical point of view, it offers the promise of extending causally your set of views and philosophies to politics.

Gwern also mentions that it allows to keep "human values" (if the GA truly upholds yours) in the loop, in processes that are to eventually be automatized beyond human's reach.

[1] https://gwern.net/guardian-angel#use-cases-politics-politics

New comment by Mithriil in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

Mithriil — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:11:46 +0000

Even if pi is an approximation, it is still representable mathematically. Floating-point arithmetic is an algebra (in this case, a magma [1]), which can be studied mathematically.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magma_(algebra)

New comment by Mithriil in "OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened"

Mithriil — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:07:06 +0000

And yet, open source models saved the day.

New comment by Mithriil in "OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened"

Mithriil — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:53:39 +0000

Some people do read these cyberpunk dystopia, but see them as inevitable.

New comment by Mithriil in "The Beauty of Tautologies"

Mithriil — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:03:47 +0000

And what the author goes and shows are equalities, not tautologies.

New comment by Mithriil in "Hot surfaces during Europe's heatwave 'seen' by Sentinel-3"

Mithriil — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 03:16:43 +0000

This is of the 26th of May.

New comment by Mithriil in "Show HN: High-Res Neural Cellular Automata"

Mithriil — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 14:22:52 +0000

If you hold the eraser for a second at the center, I find that it destroys the image more often than not.

New comment by Mithriil in "Show HN: Forge – Guardrails take an 8B model from 53% to 99% on agentic tasks"

Mithriil — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:32:51 +0000

It's relevant to the "thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters".

New comment by Mithriil in "The quiet renovation at Bitwarden"

Mithriil — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:26:01 +0000

'Always free' does not sound like an opinion.

New comment by Mithriil in "AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]"

Mithriil — Mon, 18 May 2026 17:22:04 +0000

The ratio of AI startups at YC surprised me... (slide 48). This is a clear trend.

New comment by Mithriil in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"

Mithriil — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:37:15 +0000

> Probabilistic analysis can carry you very, very far in doing something that looks like logical inference at the surface level, but it is nonetheless not logical inference.

A statistical approximation of logical inference (as vague as I state it) could (and will) very well pass for logical inference, at least for the common people, whose logic skills are far from perfect.

Also, humans are certainly not capable of the perfect logical inference you speak of. And I get the irony of what I'm saying with such certitude. Logic is still framed in axioms that are framed in languages, we'll never truly get there. Ah, but absoluteness gets in the way of practicality.

Yet, here we are with a tool, that is maybe not at its prime yet, that equals and beat many human beings at logical inference on some problems that are pragmatically relevant. Should I say symptoms of logical inference at that point?

As to why LLMs capacity for (apparent) logical inference is only limited to specific use cases, I don't have a clue. But I'd like to argue that, humans are like that too.

New comment by Mithriil in "There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning"

Mithriil — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:31:06 +0000

> nobody understands the fundamentals

Funny statement to be found in the discussion about... research results on the fundamentals.