Hacker News: Timpanzee

New comment by Timpanzee in "I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture"

Timpanzee — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:06:24 +0000

Even if the busy beaver sequence were computable and the halting problem were decidable, Gödel's incompleteness theorems would still prevent all theorems from being solved, regardless of if one used LLMs or not.

New comment by Timpanzee in "Felony Bench"

Timpanzee — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 04:03:24 +0000

Who gets prosecuted is the correct question since we live under a system of laws. Who is responsible for the failure is a far more difficult question to answer.

New comment by Timpanzee in "There's no reason for software to be slow anymore"

Timpanzee — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 03:15:32 +0000

I agree with traffic example, however, I don’t think it quite applies to software in the same way. Imagine a world where for some reason our current quality of hardware is locked in place; they can never get better or faster in any way shape or form. Then the big tech race will be optimizing software. I personally think that there would be a 10x to even 100x increase in software speed that is possible through many optimizations. The current software incentive is geared more towards adding more features rather than optimizing performance since software engineers know they can always know hardware will keep getting better which will keep their slower, less optimize software at similar speeds. This isn’t a critique of software engineers, simply a statement of the incentives under which they operate.

New comment by Timpanzee in "Companies promote incompetent employees to management to limit damage they do"

Timpanzee — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 23:33:08 +0000

3) You’re incorrect about the metrics being used to evaluate who to promote and they are not incompetent according to those metrics.

New comment by Timpanzee in "The Problem"

Timpanzee — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 16:25:57 +0000

If anything, the transformer style attention architecture and language models have pushed AGI further into the future because the vast majority of finding for AGI research is going into the dead end of transformer style architecture and language models, pulling it away from methods that actually could achieve AGI.

New comment by Timpanzee in "The most official water costs $120k a gallon"

Timpanzee — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:51:04 +0000

Experience 0F wind in central North America or Central Asia vs 0F wind on the coast and tell me it’s not different. Also, it’s killer, not a killer, as in it sucks a lot.

New comment by Timpanzee in "The most official water costs $120k a gallon"

Timpanzee — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:39:40 +0000

You only think it makes sense for humans because it makes sense for you, where you live the same way you feel changing a thermostat by 1F is perfect but 1C is too much: that’s true for you, not universally.

Fahrenheit functionally requires you to be biased in order for it to seem like a good system.

New comment by Timpanzee in "The most official water costs $120k a gallon"

Timpanzee — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:34:04 +0000

Except 0F being “really cold” and 100F being “really hot” is a personal bias of yours based on where you’ve lived. It’s not true for everyone or everywhere.

And even if it were true, it still wouldn’t work. 100F in a dry environment is nice while, in a humid environment, 100F is awful. Same for 0F, a dry and static 0F is fine while a wet and windy 0F is killer.

New comment by Timpanzee in "Show HN: Analog Watch"

Timpanzee — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:49:17 +0000

Analog clocks are still being taught in schools, at least partially, for their mathematical education purposes. The age at with kids learn to read analog clocks is the same age where kids are skip counting and starting to see numbers in different modes of representations, both of which analog clocks provide, forcing kids to think mathematically in their everyday lives. Further in their math education, it also becomes a helpful jumping off point for understanding modulo arithmetic and non-base 10 counting systems.

New comment by Timpanzee in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

Timpanzee — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:12:31 +0000

>Even Hacker News acknowledged 15 years ago that it was a social site

As with all discussions of whether something does or does not fall into a specific category, the devil is in the demarcation. How you define a social site, or how I define it, or how the vague general consensus vaguely defines it, or how Hacker News defined it 15 years ago, or how Hacker News defines it now; changes the answer to whether it belongs in the category or not.

The same applies to whether AIs are conscious/sentient, whether a certain governing body is fascist/totalitarian, or even something as simple as whether something is good or bad, comes entirely from how those categories are defined in the context of the conversation. Without the same, agreed upon definitions, we're all just talking past each other.

New comment by Timpanzee in "Minnesota passes the nation's first ban on 'nudification' apps"

Timpanzee — Tue, 19 May 2026 18:04:52 +0000

At a certain point, a difference in amount becomes a difference in kind. Anyone being able to nudify anyone else is very different from a limited number of people having the skill to nudify people in an application that has numerous other uses.

New comment by Timpanzee in "Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model"

Timpanzee — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:52:33 +0000

AI isn't a tool for creating art in the same way as a paintbrush or clay. AI is describing a painting you want, then having someone else creating the artwork for you. You aren't doing art in the same way hiring a sculptor isn't doing sculpting.

AI is well on the way to eliminating human made art since the skills to actually make art will be lost to the skill of being able to describe art. You know, since the only thing that matter is reducing costs.

New comment by Timpanzee in "AirPods Pro 4 Could Feature Cameras to 'See Around You'"

Timpanzee — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:10:39 +0000

IR cameras, not visible light cameras, so this should be a non-issue.

New comment by Timpanzee in "Is It Time for a Nordic Nuke?"

Timpanzee — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 17:27:49 +0000

In light of renewed aggressions from powerful states, the only recourse smaller states have to defend themselves is to turn themselves into a fortress like Taiwan (which is prohibitively expensive for most larger states) or nuclear deterrence (which Ukraine gave up for false guarantees of protection from invasion). Guarantees aren't what they used to be, and I wouldn't be surprised if many waning US allies are covertly developing nuclear capabilities.

I hope my state is because the alternative is being at the whim of the powerful nuclear states around us in a political climate of rising authoritarianism.

New comment by Timpanzee in "Mozilla appoints new CEO Anthony Enzor-Demeo"

Timpanzee — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:14:30 +0000

Just because people can get together to work towards a cause while believing in mutually exclusive ideals, that doesn't mean it's the most effective way for people to work together. The ability to do a thing and the ability to do a thing well is a big difference.