Hacker News: abecedarius

New comment by abecedarius in "Dust: Pretraining Transformers Without Backpropagation"

abecedarius — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:32:16 +0000

Energy cost may be a pointless comparison since we don't eat electricity, but it's very reasonable to look at sample efficiency and ask what we have there that our theories miss.

New comment by abecedarius in "On social reality in China"

abecedarius — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:02:16 +0000

I don't understand where you're getting "hates China" unless that's a framing of "disapproves of the Chinese government on the whole".

I have seen Zvi pushing back against the narratives that open-weights models and Chinese ICs have caught up to the frontier. Was he wrong? But I can't recall any animus against Chinese people or their talent there.

New comment by abecedarius in "The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]"

abecedarius — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:39:56 +0000

Do you have inside info about that inspiration? At one point a human character monitoring from space thinks Underhill seems like several Dawn Age geniuses rolled into one and thinks he must be a figurehead for a collective (iirc). But that's a bit different from the author taking off mainly from him. vN isn't mainly known as a font of crazy ideas -- more like supremely fast & precise intellect.

New comment by abecedarius in "Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility"

abecedarius — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:28:57 +0000

It's true unless we let freedom of speech and the press be interpreted narrowly, as the right to flap our jaws and to press paper against ink. That is up to us collectively.

New comment by abecedarius in "When did Google get so weird?"

abecedarius — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:48:54 +0000

Try deepl.com? (But I haven't needed it in a while, maybe the suck fairy has been to it too.)

New comment by abecedarius in "What even is an OS now?"

abecedarius — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 15:00:43 +0000

The right basic idea is, the UI for "do X to Y" must combine designating which Y you want and giving permission to access that Y (and no other). It's when the OS shell separates these aspects that you have to choose between extra annoying useless permission pop-ups and any security boundaries.

(Yes reworking our all our systems in terms of capability security is a giant job. But there's a difference between a giant job and )

New comment by abecedarius in "Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?"

abecedarius — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:52:36 +0000

No idea about forums, but for a book with more depth on these issues I liked Uri Alon's Systems medicine.

New comment by abecedarius in "Goodbye Google"

abecedarius — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:26:09 +0000

Go back five years on HN and look at what the mass of commenters considered sci-fi delusional thinking about AI. (GitHub Copilot was released just under 5 years ago, for instance, provoking some discussion of what the tech might mean for the programming job market.) Why do you think dismissal as sci-fi is better grounded now? Do you have arguments instead of dismissals?

New comment by abecedarius in "Z80 REPL (2018)"

abecedarius — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 14:06:40 +0000

I felt the same way.

There was another downside, that the Applesoft BASIC license gave Microsoft a hostage which they later used to kill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBASIC. Hard to tell how much it mattered that the Mac came with no user programmability, which had been expected for PCs till then.

New comment by abecedarius in "Engineering Memory: On learning to memorize first 100 digits of pi (2024)"

abecedarius — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 14:58:50 +0000

Is there "benchmark data" on different memory techniques? I also wondered about this because I also memorized 50 digits on a lark back in high school, without the post's encoding technique and memory palace.

I added one block of 10 digits per night, spending maybe 10 minutes per night? Very roughly an hour total, ~same as the poster spent to get 100 digits, but without the prior investment they spent on the PAO (memorizing 300 key-value pairs, apparently).

You'd want to compare to Anki, too.

New comment by abecedarius in "Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries"

abecedarius — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:15:23 +0000

The Austin main library has a large cafe on the ground floor. Good combo, though I liked the pre-covid one better. Maybe there should be two!

New comment by abecedarius in "The k-server conjecture is true"

abecedarius — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:11:15 +0000

Fair enough, but the abstract really is too opaque imo.

> The k-server conjecture states that a deterministic online algorithm can achieve competitive ratio k on every metric space.

I was like "algorithm for what?" when I knew what every one of those terms meant. Lots of things use k servers. Lots of problems involve metric spaces.

New comment by abecedarius in "Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?"

abecedarius — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 16:49:06 +0000

Yes! There's both the daunting problem of technically how can we even do this, and the broader problems of what's good/acceptable and how do we resolve that among each other.

I believe this mismatch of rates of progress means we need to stop slamming the accelerator on capabilities for now even though as a libertarian I'm sure whatever governance process we manage to get to will be, uh... suboptimal.

Is There an 'I' in AI?

abecedarius — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:31:36 +0000

Article URL: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article/384/2320/20240527/481691/Is-there-an-I-in-AI

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49685118

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by abecedarius in "Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?"

abecedarius — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:07:03 +0000

I agree with most of this, but you're misunderstanding "alignment" as coined. Yes, training powerful enough AI, any simple optimization target gets you malign behavior, because human values are not simple. If you insist on making powerful AI, you'd better instill respect for human values! That's "alignment".

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZxWzCGKzX84S7DBZ9/when-was-t...

New comment by abecedarius in "Logo Programming"

abecedarius — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:18:05 +0000

Was [2] meant to be https://www.amazon.com/Lines-Curves-Practical-Geometry-Handb... ? In my browser your link brought up a page with no book. I found the above by searching for Gutenmacher.

New comment by abecedarius in "The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac"

abecedarius — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 13:01:11 +0000

fwiw I also observed a persisting slowdown soon after upgrading my Studio to OSX 26. Since I haven't been using it very much I'm short on data bearing on the cause -- maybe it was GPU use though I don't recall doing anything like that.

New comment by abecedarius in "Recursion into madness"

abecedarius — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 03:30:54 +0000

Thanks! You're better at search than me. It was part of a story, described here (last 3 pages): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/403044354_Photograp...

New comment by abecedarius in "Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]"

abecedarius — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 03:22:00 +0000

> processes better regarded as generalization and prediction, which seem not only seem to have direct and obvious neural realizations

If the workings of those circuits are obvious to you, I'd really like to learn. Do you mean the level of analysis at https://transformer-circuits.pub/ ? (That looks like good work but not a deep understanding.)

Hofstadter referenced this back in the day as a promising beginning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_distributed_memory which sounds kind of similar in style to the embeddings you bring up.

New comment by abecedarius in "Recursion into madness"

abecedarius — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 03:07:58 +0000

This reminded me of a story/vignette which my fallible memory tags as by someone like Twain or Poe, about an automatic rewriting machine. It was put to work on the same passage with an ever higher intensity setting, becoming more and more gothic to the point of parody -- iirc the final output was verse including the line "to atoms dash the doubly damned".

Does anyone remember this?