Hacker News: XenophileJKO

New comment by XenophileJKO in "Why write code in 2026"

XenophileJKO — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 19:56:13 +0000

I don't understand this. A skill critical to software engineering is learning how to learn. Just download Claude Code (or open alternative) and try to make things.

See how it fails or succeeds. Look at the supported features, try them out, think about how you might use them in your workflow.

Before you know it, you'll be proficient.

You have to learn how to self-teach.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "GPT-5.6"

XenophileJKO — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:55:05 +0000

small models are good for "finding stuff" and "summarizing" in support of the large models.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

XenophileJKO — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 03:18:36 +0000

I used to think this.. but I think my opinion is changing. The reason is that the leaders likely will be able to accelerate faster.

So what you see is the market "stretching".. the bottom getting cheaper and the top end running away and getting more expensive. At some point the top end may be too valuable to even sell access to.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

XenophileJKO — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:39:53 +0000

In my opinion documentaries are too short anyway. I greatly prefer "The Great Courses" vs a 1-2 hour documentary.

There I can listen to a 6 hours about the Olmec civilization.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "KPMG pulls report on AI usage due to apparent hallucinations"

XenophileJKO — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:48:29 +0000

The crazy thing is the level of effort to say, "have a sub agent validate all references and figures" is so low. I'm paraphrasing, but you don't need much more than that. It would have prevented 99% of the face palms.

I use this regularly for my personal financial research system. Even flagship models make mistakes. Though currently the issue is usually the model using a figure from and older report. Cross-check reduces that dramatically.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "Apple Core AI Framework"

XenophileJKO — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:49:59 +0000

Actually having used it a bit, I'm quite excited to see a modern model of similar size.

I think what people didn't realize was, just because the GPT-4.5 model didn't get better on the benchmarks, didn't mean the model wasn't different than the earlier models. It was being compared to thinking models that were being developed at the same time.

The GPT 4.5 model still has some of the most "human" like abilities in communication even though it isn't particularly good a problem solving. It hadn't under gone the same type of reinforcement training.

I still use GPT 4.5 sometimes, in creative exercises it can be surprisingly effective. The model is still available.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "Launch HN: General Instinct (YC P26) – Frontier models on edge devices"

XenophileJKO — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:34:33 +0000

I'm still kind of surprised that people are targeting edge deployment of MoE models. By definition they optimize for computation cost at the expense of memory efficiency. We generally need the opposite on the edge.

I'm hoping to see more work in the other direction with cyclic/looped transformers and other memory dense approaches.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground"

XenophileJKO — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:50:23 +0000

Sure, recreational mathematicians. Just like people that like to ride horses for fun.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "Where are the economies of scale in homebuilding?"

XenophileJKO — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:01:55 +0000

I would also like it if the modular units could self drive so I can take my house on vacation.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "AI subscriptions are a ticking time bomb for enterprise"

XenophileJKO — Sun, 17 May 2026 18:59:04 +0000

"Neither Mr. Edison nor anyone else can override the well-known laws of Nature, and when he is made to say that the same wire which brings you light will also bring you power and heat, there is no difficulty in seeing that more is promised than can possibly be performed. To talk about cooking food by heat derived from electricity is absurd."

New comment by XenophileJKO in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

XenophileJKO — Sat, 16 May 2026 03:15:49 +0000

I've found just asking it to be "critical but constructive", goes a long long way.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

XenophileJKO — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:39:49 +0000

This is such a naive take. Most of the nerdiest and most "quality" oriented engineers are hard leaning in to agentic coding. I feel like the most impressive engineers I know have always leaned in to learning how to "sharpen the axe" and AI is really the biggest axe we have seen.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "Alignment whack-a-mole: Finetuning activates recall of copyrighted books in LLMs"

XenophileJKO — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 05:15:08 +0000

I do find it facinating that people don't realize the highest compression isn't the artifacts.. but what makes the artifacts.. a synthetic "mind".

This is why we see evidence of emotional structures: https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function

This is why we see generalized introspection (limited in the models studied before people point it out, which they love to): https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection

Because the most compact way to recreate the breadth of written human experience is shockingly to have analogs to the systems that made it in the first place.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

XenophileJKO — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:59:48 +0000

I think you are more right than people are giving you credit for. I would love to see the full transcript to understand the emotional load of the conversation. Using instructions like "NEVER FUCKING GUESS!" probably increase the likelihood of the agent making a "mistake" that is destructive but defensible.

The models have analogous structures, similar to human emotions. (https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function)

"Emotional" response is muted through fine-tuning, but it is still there and continued abuse or "unfair" interaction can unbalance an agents responses dramatically.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

XenophileJKO — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:14:09 +0000

The parent said: "I argue that the model has no access to its thoughts at the time."

This is falsified by that study, showing that on the frontier models generalized introspection does exist. It isn't consistent, but is is provable.

"no access" vs. "limited access"

New comment by XenophileJKO in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

XenophileJKO — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:00:13 +0000

Anthropic's introspection experiments have seemed to show that your argument is falsifiable.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection

New comment by XenophileJKO in "Why Japan has such good railways"

XenophileJKO — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:02:08 +0000

You might be surprised, look at Dallas. They have a pretty extensive rail network.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "Average is all you need"

XenophileJKO — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:22:12 +0000

If you think a language model can't check their work, then you are using the tools wrong. Plain and simple.

Modern models are quite capable at surfacing and validating their assumptions and checking correctness of solutions.

Oversight helps you build confidence in the solutions. Is it perfect, no.. but way better then most engineers I also ask to check things.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "GPT‑Rosalind for life sciences research"

XenophileJKO — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 02:56:57 +0000

I would argue that while you still have failed trials, then we have room to improve trial vetting.

New comment by XenophileJKO in "Claude Opus 4.7"

XenophileJKO — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:40:44 +0000

Are you sure? It would be great to get official/semi-official validation that thinking is or is not resolved to a token embedding value in the context.