Hacker News: QuadmasterXLII

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "San Francisco Onion Futures Company"

QuadmasterXLII — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:47:52 +0000

narrowly scoped laws limit the blast radius of a stupid law without the political price of opposing a law in the aftermath of a disaster that law would have prevented. imagine if they had banned commodities trading in general!

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "AI chatbots are becoming experts at changing people's minds"

QuadmasterXLII — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 18:59:15 +0000

When maliciously convincing a person of a point, a huge fraction of the effort in every sentence goes into convincing the mark to listen to the next sentence. Individuals certainly can walk away at any point, but populations do and don't respond to tricks in this direction, and any engagement tricks that work generalize to any point of contention. Lots of avenues to this, from scientology's fortune telling to timeshare's trapped presentations. RL on engagement was the first billion dollar use of deep reinforcement learning!

Would you like to hear more examples of humans using these techniques?

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities"

QuadmasterXLII — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 19:32:53 +0000

Growing up, actual peak existence was visiting Grandma's house and playing with my mom's old toys. The seemingly unlimited, completely novel hoard from another time. My son feels similarly about visiting my parents' house and playing with my old toys. This may or may not be sustainable but it seems like it is well on its way with four generations involved- from where I stand, keeping a good pile of consumerism around to pay it forward in 20 years doesn't seem out of proportion with the joy I've received. It's definitely a culture thing- nobody in my family tree seems to move much, and has decent taste in throwing out the actual trash and keeping stuff stored nicely over the long time gaps, then not being fussy about the next generation being pretty hard on stuff (within reason, as appropriate for their age)

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "AI is breaking our proxies for expertise"

QuadmasterXLII — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 16:41:10 +0000

No proof verifier verifies all valid proofs and terminates on all invalid proofs.

(actually I am wrong. You would introduce a new proof, and then step the verifier on all ongoing proofs, so non-termination isn't a driving concern)

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "XCancel service is suspended until further notice"

QuadmasterXLII — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 21:00:18 +0000

Pretty well everyone who still posts on X is deep fried, smart or dumb. Some of them can tell but can't stop (Nate silver, one of the greens, Zvi) and some seem unaware.

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "The contagion of fear"

QuadmasterXLII — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 23:12:52 +0000

“ Coxon himself likely has these fears because he has heard them from someone else”

Or, maybe, he’s considered the arguments on the object level, an activity OP participates in to a depth not exceeding “Robots are pretty hard to make right now”

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "Kenyans Did College Students' Homework for Years. Then A.I. Arrived"

QuadmasterXLII — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:06:00 +0000

Scandal as fraternity discovers 2/3rds of pledges were cheating by paying TaskRabbit temp workers to drink and dance in their stead, while the pledges stayed home and doomscrolled.

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "DeepSeek v4.1 Flash"

QuadmasterXLII — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:49:38 +0000

its clocktower syndrome. they are fucked in the head and can beg us to stop them but cant stop themselves

Ask HN: Does Gusto drop dependents randomly for anyone else?

QuadmasterXLII — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:41:02 +0000

I’m not sure if I’m holding it wrong or if Gusto is particularly bad about this. Small startup, last enrollment they dropped my wife, I was able to get her re added. This enrollment dropped daughter and denied re-add. Insurance is UHC but it really looks like gusto is doing it- the problem is that gusto help forwards to UHC help to add dependents, but then this never updates gusto so at enrollments, the gusto state overwrites the uhc state (gusto website shows uhc state not gusto state)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49634792

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "Anthropic researcher says more than 10% chance AI "could kill all humans""

QuadmasterXLII — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:54:32 +0000

if meatspace stays hard, we are fine.

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "Anthropic researcher says more than 10% chance AI "could kill all humans""

QuadmasterXLII — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:44:04 +0000

Right now, if you want to pay money to a stranger on the internet, and have them draw you a high effort picture using a pencil, this is hard. Recently this was easy.

Instead, what is extremely likely is that you will pay more than the cost of tokens, and get back AI generation. You won't make this mistake more than a few times before you stop trying.

This leads to impoverishment once we get to a point where employing a human to do anything is hard- try to get your sink fixed, exercise your moral principles to pay extra for a human plumber ($100 bucks! The robot plumbing service only charges 99c!), human shows up with a robot and doomscrolls on your porch while the robot does the work. Times are tough and you don't have that much money to waste on bullshit like this. Next time you just hire the robot.

This leads to extinction once paying UBI to a human is hard because robots are much better at applying for UBI than humans.

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?"

QuadmasterXLII — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:17:48 +0000

It is actually pretty nice that now we can spin up an isolated copy of our whole system with one command line call- this was mandatory for letting agents run wild trying things, but mostly now it makes manual development and onboarding easier.

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "Ask HN: Anyone still coding like 2021? Where do you work?"

QuadmasterXLII — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:13:57 +0000

Every four months or so we try getting hyped on agents for ~ a week. Up to this point the answer has always been a pretty solid "nope this sucks back to manual code." The agentically coded parts of the codebase that came from these trials are palpably more annoying than the rest. However, the current trial is going better than the last ones have (Fable 5.1 really is astonishing). On the other hand, each other trial started with a honeymoon so it's up in the air.

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "Do you think it happened? Research stolen from their Codex private chats"

QuadmasterXLII — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:40:44 +0000

This is a good FYI. I guess my microsoft trauma is showing.

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "Do you think it happened? Research stolen from their Codex private chats"

QuadmasterXLII — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:50:44 +0000

If one of the researchers forgot to check "don't train on this" a single time, the pretrain is going to know what they were working on. The question of whether they remembered to check "don't train on this" every single time is super concrete, and embarrassing to _both_ sides if the answer is "no, he didn't read the eula."

These models will absolutely remember a brilliant insight that appeared a single time in the pretrain corpus, because if they couldn't-- they would get a slightly worse loss. I don't know what this wishy-washing "well maybe we trained on it but we didn't read it" is supposed to mean.

(Example of Fable knowing the content of a deeply unimportant LessWrong post I wrote: https://claude.ai/share/a907b46c-bf7b-4fca-9c71-8582cf8507cc a working Navier Stokes solution would be way more salient)

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "No AI Fridays"

QuadmasterXLII — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:51:38 +0000

How much rote memorization did it take to harm you? the addition of 1 digit numbers is kind of mandatory to function in everyday life, the multiplication table is at most (8*9)/2 36 facts.

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope"

QuadmasterXLII — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:48:13 +0000

Whatever the reason, it seems specific to the intersection of space and telescope. Space probes, landers, and crewed vehicles all get made in multiples, as well as ground based telescopes like Keck or the gravitational wave observatories.

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "Indirect Calling of Nested Functions on GCC Without Executable Stack"

QuadmasterXLII — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 18:22:33 +0000

but that can just be executable heap?

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services"

QuadmasterXLII — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:55:17 +0000

LLMs are a magic machine to turn commons into tragedies.

New comment by QuadmasterXLII in "What we lost when search stopped making us think"

QuadmasterXLII — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:21:27 +0000

"I am against these tools generally. I use them myself" would be a more interesting take