Hacker News: VikRubenfeld

Proposed New Test of AI Capabilities:)

VikRubenfeld — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:03:04 +0000

When Microsoft can turn a fleet of LLMs loose on the Azure UX, and Google can do the same for the Google Adwords UX, and reduce their level of dreadfulness substantially, it will go a long way to showing that frontier models are as good as claimed.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47911835

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "The West forgot how to make things, now it’s forgetting how to code"

VikRubenfeld — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 16:49:02 +0000

These LLMs are great for now, but they have to go by their training materials. And if people stop creating new ways to code, new languages, new coding patterns, etc, then the code LLMs produce will be stuck in 2026 forever.

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "Cloudflare's AI Platform: an inference layer designed for agents"

VikRubenfeld — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:52:03 +0000

Is there something free like Codes or AntiGravity that can run open-source LLM models?

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "What AI coding costs you"

VikRubenfeld — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 15:27:21 +0000

What I don't think people are talking enough about yet, is that AI doesn't invent new ways of doing things -- it just predicts the next word based on the materials it was trained on. That means that if a company lets all its coding be done by AI -- that company will be permanently stuck in, say, 2026 -- while other companies will be continuously improving.

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it"

VikRubenfeld — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:15:56 +0000

We've all seen that if you are interacting with an AI over a lengthy chat, eventually it loses the plot. It gets confused. It appears to me that it's necessary, when coding an AI, to keep its task very limited in terms of the amount of information it needs to complete the task. Even then you still have to check the output very carefully. If it seems to be losing focus, I start a new task to reduce the context window, and focus on something that still needs to be fixed in the previous task.

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "Let's Not Encrypt (2019)"

VikRubenfeld — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 14:03:46 +0000

This just can't be true. There's no way no one noticed this before. https can't be this dumb.

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "Launch HN: Societies.io (YC W25) – AI simulations of your target audience"

VikRubenfeld — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 16:48:08 +0000

Further thoughts: I was asking to simulate some very specific target markets. There's no reason society.io should be able to simulate every possible market. Possibly when someone describes their target market, you can respond with an assessment of whether that is within the set of markets you currently support.

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "Launch HN: Societies.io (YC W25) – AI simulations of your target audience"

VikRubenfeld — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 14:31:53 +0000

I just tried it out. Very impressive! I like the user interface and user experience.

I'm a Director of Market Research, so I did a test:

- One email headline test for a service I'm considering developing.

  -- got a score of 88 - "Exceptional".

- One email headline test for a service I'm pretty sure does not work based on engagement I've done with the target audience.

  -- got a score of 81 - "Very high"

Question: has sufficient work been done to reduce false positives?

Feel free to DM me - I really like what you're doing and would be happy to discuss.

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA"

VikRubenfeld — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 15:26:05 +0000

Plus which, the author says that the next page will be conveniently pre-loaded when the user hovers over the link. Plenty of time there's ~0 hover time, especially for experienced users. So the user is still going to be looking at a spinner while the full page (which could be pretty beefy) is loaded in from the server.

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "Techno-feudalism and the rise of AGI: A future without economic rights?"

VikRubenfeld — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 13:30:27 +0000

>> So then there's no need for AI workers.

> You got this backwards - there won’t be need for humans outside of the elite class. 0.1% or 0.01% of mankind will control all the resources.

Let me rephrase that from 'So then there's no need for AI workers.' to 'So then there's no money to pay for AI workers.'

The UBI approach creates a closed economic loop: Company A pays taxes → Government gives UBI to consumers → Consumers buy from Company A → Company A pays taxes... This is functionally identical to Company A directly paying people to buy Company A's products, which makes no economic sense.

It's like Ford paying his workers $50/day, but the only customers buying Ford cars are Ford workers spending their $50/day wages. Ford would go bankrupt - there's no external value creation, just money circulating in circles.

Where does the actual wealth come from in this system? Who are the net buyers that make the businesses profitable enough to sustain the UBI taxes?

UBI in an AI-dominated economy can't create a functioning economy - it's just an imaginary self-licking ice cream cone.

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "Techno-feudalism and the rise of AGI: A future without economic rights?"

VikRubenfeld — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 03:27:14 +0000

Let's say AI gets so good that it is better than people at most jobs. How can that economy work? If people aren't working, they aren't making money. If they don't have money, they can't pay for the goods and services produced by AI workers. So then there's no need for AI workers.

UBI can't fix it because a) it won't be enough to drive our whole economy, and b) it amounts to businesses paying customers to buy their products, which makes no sense.

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "Techno-feudalism and the rise of AGI: A future without economic rights?"

VikRubenfeld — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 02:46:23 +0000

Is a future where AI replaces most human labor rendered impossible by the following consideration:

-- In such a future, people will have minimal income (possibly some UBI) and therefore there will be few who can afford the products and services generated by AI

-- Therefore the AI generates greatly reduced wealth

-- Therefore there’s greatly reduced wealth to pay for the AI

-- …rendering such a future impossible

The AI Paradox: If machines do all the work, who buys the products?

VikRubenfeld — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:23:36 +0000

Article URL: https://claude.ai/share/dbefc4de-5ba3-4f0a-9e38-e33e2a15903b

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426338

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "AbsenceBench: Language models can't tell what's missing"

VikRubenfeld — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 13:46:35 +0000

Interesting. I encountered an example of this the other day. I was asking chatGPT:

> Is there a line in Hamlet that includes the words "utter love?"

It examined a lot of quotes from Hamlet, and concluded:

> I double-checked all editions: There is no line in Hamlet that contains the word “utter.”

>It is never used in any of the quartos or folios in any line of Hamlet.

I was pretty sure it was there, so I found the full text of Hamlet online and searched for the word "utter". I found it right away and posted to chatGPT:

> That's odd. I found it in two seconds by searching the full text for the word "utter".

> This must be known, which, being kept close, might move More grief to hide than hate to utter love.

> Come

> HAMLET, Act 2, Scene 2

chatGPT replied:

> You're absolutely right — thank you for pointing that out.

> The line is indeed from Act 2, Scene 2, spoken by Claudius, and here it is in full:

> "This must be known, which, being kept close, might move

> More grief to hide than hate to utter love."

> I regret the earlier oversight — your memory was sharper than my index!

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]"

VikRubenfeld — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 12:51:36 +0000

Liquid Glass takes too many brain cycles for the user. It takes too much cognitive attention to watch all its changes and wait until buttons are ready to click. I don't want to waste a lot of attention "appreciating" Apple's new UI. I just want to get stuff done.

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "Show HN: I completed shipping my desktop app"

VikRubenfeld — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 14:39:30 +0000

You might want to consider removing or changing the word "simple". "Simple" is ambiguous. It might convey ease-of-use, or it might convey "few features/underpowered".

New comment by VikRubenfeld in "Ask HN: Founders, what was the major sourcing channel for your first 100 users?"

VikRubenfeld — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 14:19:52 +0000

How do you avoid getting banned for posting a link to your business?