Hacker News: TimPC

New comment by TimPC in "Gemini 4 Carbon"

TimPC — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 23:19:10 +0000

The original was that’s too lame for BitchX.doc and then it got replaced by all sorts of other things. Was an IRC meme before memes were a thing.

New comment by TimPC in "This I Believe (1952)"

TimPC — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 16:07:55 +0000

Your definition is pretty much minarchist forms of libertarianism. Not conservatism.

New comment by TimPC in "Has AI tells"

TimPC — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:51:49 +0000

A lot of the annoying AI writing is actually good writing patterns done far too often. Rule of three is something every writer should use but not three times in one paragraph, etc.

New comment by TimPC in "Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI"

TimPC — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:49:26 +0000

LitRPG is fairly new (2017 or so) as a genre so in terms of significant works it’s quite possible to read all the major titles.

New comment by TimPC in "Unsealed Briefs in Authors’ Case v. Microsoft/OpenAI"

TimPC — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 18:58:35 +0000

I am on a LitRPG site (RoyalRoad) and there are routinely AI Gen novels in the top 5 novels on Rising Stars on the site which is basically traffic and rating metrics for newish novels. People say they hate AI writing and downvote it when they know it’s AI but seem to read it just fine without noticing fairly often as well.

New comment by TimPC in "Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter"

TimPC — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 21:52:26 +0000

I think this mostly comes down to what work is productive for a person. People who are fascinated by research topics are likely to work on them and people who are enamoured with creating art will do so. But people who's productivity was largely being some cog in some machine will be all too happy to say good riddance.

New comment by TimPC in "I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words"

TimPC — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:26:32 +0000

It seems to me that recent changes have dramatically exacerbated this problem. Pangram is still claiming their extremely low false positive rate from before adding humanization detection and now very frequently detects actual human works as humanized AI.

New comment by TimPC in "I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words"

TimPC — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:55:34 +0000

There seems to be a huge backlash to existing works where AI was detected already at least in my art (creative writing). So I think we already have evidence consumers care. I don't think blockchaining is the solution for the general public, but I'd probably do exactly that if I was taking a university course these days since they tend to be hyper sensitive about AI and err on the side of the accuser so I want strong evidence my writing is mine. Which of course is ridiculously insufferable because I used to do a good portion of my homework in paper notebooks on the subway without stable internet.

New comment by TimPC in "I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words"

TimPC — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:52:02 +0000

LLMs still write middling quality prose. Aspects of it are good but they write in a very tropey manufactured style that isn't something we are fatigued of, it's something that's inherently flawed and disliked.

New comment by TimPC in "I'm Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words"

TimPC — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:50:19 +0000

A lot of writing publications are so overwhelmed by submissions that they run an AI tool on everything and don't even read the ones that fail (for whatever threshold they think is best). Plus look at the recent backlash against the book where the author according to detectors used about three quarters AI gen. If you do your art for anyone but yourself you care a great deal about your work showing as human and being treated as having soul rather than testing as machine and being treated as witch hunt grade slop.

New comment by TimPC in "International chess federation sanctions Kramnik"

TimPC — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 19:31:16 +0000

Pangram’s market claims are very different from independent validations of the platform. The 99.98% rate is on a toy dataset not resembling reality.

Even if 2/10000 is true that’s nowhere near accurate enough to make aggressive accusations that create anxiety at levels people need to medicate with potentially fatal consequences.

New comment by TimPC in "Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand"

TimPC — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:20:16 +0000

Neutrality is impossible. Left, right and centre are all relative terms that vary dramatically across cultures. A model that is slightly left in the U.S. is right wing in most of the world.

New comment by TimPC in "What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?"

TimPC — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:05:20 +0000

I think pop musicians are capable of doing greater works later, but the perception of pop works are so heavily influenced by the image/presentation of the artist that we view the works as lesser. I don't think there is something fundamentally different about pop music that leads to best works being earlier relative to other genres of music beyond that.

New comment by TimPC in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

TimPC — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:44:27 +0000

Elderly retirees seldom move. They’ve long paid off their mortgage and we keep property taxes extremely low so they are pretty much immune to the cost of housing. Once you put down roots in a community it’s hard to leave.

New comment by TimPC in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

TimPC — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:03:04 +0000

It's easier to define safeguards and the definition of inside information for stock markets than for prediction markets though. There is plenty of information that should ban someone from prediction markets that also wouldn't meet the definition of material non-public information.

New comment by TimPC in "OpenAI resets spending expectations, from $1.4T to $600B"

TimPC — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:10:25 +0000

OpenAI is a bet on LLMs replacing a large chunk of the labour force in whatever sector it’s best at replacing. It’s essentially looking to get companies to pay $5k-$10k a month to have coding agents replace the output of a single software engineer.

If the S-curve levels off below that level OpenAI will be an unsuccessful company.

New comment by TimPC in "The Age Verification Trap: Verifying age undermines everyone's data protection"

TimPC — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:38:55 +0000

Big tech likes this because there are a lot more face recognition technologies in the wild in real life and being able to connect all real life data to online data is quite valuable. It's also quite possibly the largest training set ever for face recognition if ids are stored and given how ids and images are sold across many companies it seems very high probability that some company will retain the data rather than delete after use.

New comment by TimPC in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

TimPC — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:05:24 +0000

I think more than ever programmers need jobs where performance matters and the naive way the AI does things doesn't cut it. When no one cares about things other than correctness your job turns into AI Slop. The good news right now is that AI tends to produce things that AI struggles to do well with so large scale projects often descend into crap. You can write a C-compiler for $20,000 with an explosive stack of agents, but that C-compiler isn't anywhere close to efficient or performant.

As model costs come down that $20,000 will become a viable number for doing entirely AI-generate coding. So more than ever you don't want to be doing work that the AI is good enough at. Either jobs where performance matters or being able to code the stack of agents needed to produce high quality code in an application context.

New comment by TimPC in "Texas is suing all of the big TV makers for spying on what you watch"

TimPC — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 23:30:43 +0000

It’s far less important for ad-free content. They mainly want to connect your ad watching behaviour to an email and then have loyalty program data connected to the same email so that they can identify which ads convert vs not.

New comment by TimPC in "The "confident idiot" problem: Why AI needs hard rules, not vibe checks"

TimPC — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 13:56:51 +0000

The benchmarks are dumb but highly followed so everyone optimizes for the wrong thing.