Hacker News: ViscountPenguin

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

ViscountPenguin — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:50:43 +0000

A fun game would be to quickly guess the religion of a temple? Could familiarize people with the common iconography of the various dharmic religions.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Prime Agent: A self-improving RLM agent"

ViscountPenguin — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 06:54:01 +0000

I'd assume the best harness for a model will tend to be the one that it's RLVF'd on.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

ViscountPenguin — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 06:50:07 +0000

Cooking is pretty different to lawn mowing here, you still can't replicate the output of a cooked meal with any easily available combination of home appliances and robotics (let alone just microwaves). I think a large chunk of people would probably stop cooking if that was possible.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Games at the press of a button: The Rip-O-Bot (1989)"

ViscountPenguin — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 03:01:33 +0000

I dunno, gamedev prototyping has always been fast, but I think AI tools make it way way faster; at least based on my experience writing visualizations in Godot (and to a lesser extent, my experience scaffolding datascience viz work in python).

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Does Speaking to Agents Like Cavemen Save 65% of Tokens? We Test"

ViscountPenguin — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 03:42:36 +0000

What would matter more is the token length, depends how well your tokenizer was trained on french I guess.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "The lost civic life of movie rental stores"

ViscountPenguin — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 01:14:02 +0000

I've always found the concept of mailing a letter from your house really interesting. My understanding is that it's common in the US (which is why they have the little red thing on their mailboxes I think?), but I've never lived in a place where it's a thing. For such a capitalistic country, the way the US historically treated the USPS as a common civic good is really cool.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Gpiozero Flow"

ViscountPenguin — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:40:19 +0000

Blender shaders maybe?

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "7.1 Earthquake in Japan"

ViscountPenguin — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:49:59 +0000

Some of the webcams are fake fwiw, I noticed a while ago when there were ads emblassened with old dates on them.

Edit: to be clear, this was random ones on YouTube, not sure about that site.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room"

ViscountPenguin — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 04:26:26 +0000

It's Sea World in Queensland, but confusingly I think the company is unrelated to the American Sea World, iirc they bought a license to the name back when it was probably a lot more positive than it is now.

EDIT: Apparently not licensed, just completely unrelated.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Turn And Face The Strange"

ViscountPenguin — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:15:21 +0000

All of the contents of the article are basically correct (minus the agi bit), but god the tone is insufferable. I doubt it's done anything but dig sceptics further in tbh.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "IRGC claims it destroyed Amazon's Bahrain data center"

ViscountPenguin — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:41:21 +0000

There's a pretty clear back and forth between Israel committing warcrimes, and Israels enemies commiting warcrimes back. While I can't say that it's unexpected for Israel to commit genocide, I can absolutely blame them, and certainly blame Netanyahu for their constantly escalatory strategies.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Fractl.art – a fractal generator with 8 octillion different patterns"

ViscountPenguin — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 05:18:35 +0000

I've not taken psychedelics, but presumebly a large part of the experience comes from the fact that your brain is creating the imagery, which would make it qualitatively different from imagery that your brain is having supplied to it. It might not be meaningfully possible to replicate psychedlic visuals.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Agent swarms and the new model economics"

ViscountPenguin — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 01:43:48 +0000

Seems very reasonable to me tbh, the VCS was built to facilitate human work structures, rebuilding it to facilitate autonomous work seems appropriate.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture"

ViscountPenguin — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:46:57 +0000

I have at least some level of experience with advanced maths, but the thing that always struck me was how amenable to automation that a lot of it seemed. While it might be creative for a human to come up with the Schreier refinement theorem, for example, I don't think it fundamentally requires creativity.

On some level, I think the most straightforwardly creative work in maths comes from building up useful generalizations; I can't see current LLMs inventing even something as straight forward as a manifold from first principles; but I also don't think that's fundamentally required to prove useful things, I think it's more of a shortcut for humans.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture"

ViscountPenguin — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 04:37:03 +0000

I dunno, this screams of goal post moving. Even if LLMs lack whatever nebulous definition of "creativity" that someone favours, there's no inherent reason for "creativity" to be required to solve any problems at all, "creativity" could just be a human method for solving problems that evolved because of it's broad applicability but is suboptimal at any given task.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Fintech Engineering Handbook"

ViscountPenguin — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:49:38 +0000

It can be really frustrating viewing threads like this sometimes. I've not once seen an interest rate swap priced in anything other than float/double, and that's relatively simple even compared to some of the crazy instruments out there.

Like, sure, probably don't use floats for everything, but what are the odds that your greeks are gonna be nicely expressable as simple rationals?

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "AI has already killed academia as we know it?"

ViscountPenguin — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:24:55 +0000

You could do a two stage process, a blinded text review and an unblinded review that can only be failed if you have a vigorous lack of knowledge about your work.

I highly doubt anything like that will be implemented though.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "AI has already killed academia as we know it?"

ViscountPenguin — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:22:19 +0000

I think it's very field dependant. In maths and biology I've seen very few professors that could reasonably be described as maximialists here; computer science really seems to be the outlier. My impression is that impactful CS professors tend to be more strongly associated with either maths, or the field that their cs research is being used in.

Arts faculty on the other hand seem to basically just be a popularity competition.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "The brain was not designed for this much bad news"

ViscountPenguin — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 06:13:24 +0000

Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B"

ViscountPenguin — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:45:11 +0000

Petitioning the corrupt head of state to force Anthropic out of business seems to be part of the business model.