<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: abstractcontrol</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=abstractcontrol</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 25 Sep 2026 02:39:40 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=abstractcontrol" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Fuck it, make it anyway"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It isn't nonsense. If AI was such a broad umbrella term, why would companies be tripping over themselves to use it? If it meant video game NPC level of intelligence, nobody would be in a hurry to adopt it. It's very clear that when Nvidia or OpenAI use the term AI, they really want you to think these LLMs are actual human level intelligence. That is why they are doing it.<p>When I use nonsense like "real AI" I think you very well know what I mean, and don't find it in any way confusing or ambiguous.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 13 Sep 2026 06:52:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680795</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680795</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49680795</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Fuck it, make it anyway"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Are those important questions that need to be answered? Rather, you should be asking whether you could use backprop and NNs to create something other than text predictors. What have LLMs changed about your conception of intelligence?<p>As far as I can see, none of the hard problems of intelligence that we had a decade ago got touched. What LLMs ultimately changed is the way I see language. I've underestimated its power, and I will admit, the companies making these models went far further than I could have imagined with them.<p>But intelligence and AI have a high hurdle to clear, and it won't be done with LLMs.<p>Revealing the secrets of intelligence will involve new concepts and understanding that that we don't have now. LLMs will be helpful with the plumbing and as replacement for natural evolution, but not so much natural intelligence.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 12 Sep 2026 18:21:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49675410</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49675410</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49675410</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Fuck it, make it anyway"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Consider that maybe AI should mean AGI. That was what its original meaning was supposed to be, and calling generative models AI is watering down the original term and accepting the frame of the LLM makers.<p>What's really disappointing about current LLM models isn't that they aren't useful, but that they really tell us much about intelligence at all. The techniques used to make LLMs aren't generalizable at all, and I cannot use them to solve problems of interest in the real world.<p>That wouldn't be the case with real AI. I want better methods and algorithms that could live up to the expectations, and I am sure we'll get them at some point even if we don't have them now.<p>The history of AI is people deciding that it really means AGI but then getting enamored with some method of the time and calling it AI, before going back to the original meaning. We're just living through the latest iteration of this where LLMs mean AI, and we're forced to invent the term AGI for what used to be AI.<p>I'll admit that to the people who don't know how LLMs work, which includes most investors, the lie seems very plausible so of course the CEOs running the companies are going to frame it as such.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 12 Sep 2026 18:09:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49675282</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49675282</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49675282</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Fuck it, make it anyway"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If I were an artist, I wouldn't really care that a machine took over the role of drawing lines on paper, and as a programmer, I don't care that the machines are taking the role of writing code.<p>The thing that actually matters is understanding the problem domain, and thinking about and visualizing the program I am trying to make, so I am happy to be doing less drudge work so I can focus on what really matters.<p>I've been doing quant research for the past year, and the amount of time (and tedium) LLMs have saved me is huge.<p>LLMs aren't even AI, if this amount of disruption is causing difficulty, having actual AI will give these people breakdowns.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:26:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49674073</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49674073</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49674073</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is the internet, so I cannot tell at all whether you're being sarcastic or not. In my view, what LLMs should get us to reconsider isn't whether there is more to intelligence, but whether there is more to language. It's the latter which I underestimated.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:45:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49498615</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49498615</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49498615</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Fun story, but I really wish OpenAI got its act together and started making actual AI breakthroughs instead of funneling compute into LLMs. I'd really like some new algorithms to get me excited about the field again. Kuddos to them for making LLMs really useful, but this is not the ride I wanted to get on.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 30 Aug 2026 10:57:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49497571</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49497571</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49497571</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Dumb people aren't going to be doing the work of the smart people ever, no matter how tech evolves. The actual implication of AI being on the level of sentient beings instead of hyped-up token predictors is that the era of humanity is over. If AIs were literally capable of doing what CEOs want them to, we'd have far bigger problems to deal with than employment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 06:21:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48566487</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48566487</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48566487</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Correlated randomness in Slay the Spire 2"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why don't they just pass the time into the RNG in order to randomize it instead of using fixed seeds?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:12:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48554776</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48554776</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48554776</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "What happened to nerds?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, this is what I mean. It's not that talent doesn't exist, but it's never the case that people on the top of their domain work less hard than others. In fact, it's the opposite. People don't have talent, the talent has them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 06:08:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48551183</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48551183</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48551183</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "What happened to nerds?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Probably one of the most ego-crushing realizations (if you're a nerd) is to discover that there are people out there MUCH more talented and higher performing than what you'll ever be, but with none of the obsession or pride. In other profession that's not really a topic. You can be a top performer in other professions, without a deep interest, clock out 4 daily, and never think about work outside work.<p>You could clock out, but I don't think the top performers ever stop thinking about work. Everything you've written here has to be wrong.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:07:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48539558</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48539558</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48539558</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Show HN: TapeSim – Practice Reading the Tape]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I made this replay simulator desktop app as a part of the Building The Trading Edge playlist on Youtube. It's my first commercial product. I needed a replay simulator that could do full tick-by-tick order book replay on US equities and when I couldn't find any, I made my own in F#.<p>If any of you ever wanted to learn to daytrade stocks, use this to practice before risking any money first.</p>
<hr>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417078">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417078</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:30:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://tapesim.app/</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417078</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48417078</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Peak unemployment for a software engineer. What did I do wrong?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The job market is somewhat of a crapshot. A dice roll if you will. I got rejected from all kinds of place before I got a highly paid one from a Reddit post of all places. I got rejected from all kinds of places that only paid like 1/2 or 1/3 of what that job was paying, and I wasn't even looking for it at that time. It's been over for over half a year, and I wouldn't be able to replicate that sort of performance at will. Though at this point, I am not even looking for one and just working on my own projects since I have a lot saved up and barely spend anything.<p>One thing that I understand at my age of nearly 39 now is that success comes pretty hard, and luck plays a large role in it. As programmers all we can do is build and develop our skills, even if the world doesn't validate our efforts.<p>You're asking yourself what you are doing wrong, but you should be asking yourself what your goal is and focus on that. Is it really to just work for other people?<p>What can you do for yourself?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 19:02:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48227475</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48227475</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48227475</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A stock market daytrading system, I am live coding it on my Youtube channel: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL04PGV4cTuIXoK6yBAFzhgBYq0uMCfeNo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL04PGV4cTuIXoK6yBAFzh...</a><p>Opus has been amazingly useful at answering various statistics question that I had for it, and my current idea is a nested auction market theory inspired model. My biggest discovery is that replacing time with volume on the x axis (on a chart) and putting the bar duration on the bottom panel instead of volume normalizes the price movements and makes some of the profitable setups I've seen described in tape reading/price ladder trading courses actually visible on naked charts. A great insight I've gleamed is that variance should be proportional to volume instead of time or trade count. When plotted, it has the effect of expanding high volume areas, and compressing low volatility ones, which exposes trending price action much more readily. It honestly amazing, it's making me think that I could actually win at the trading game.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:40:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47313435</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47313435</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47313435</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> My impression is that LLM users are the kind of people that HATED that their questions on StackOverflow got closed because it was duplicated.<p>Lol, who doesn't hate that?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:52:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46525869</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46525869</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46525869</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One takeaway from the book is that trend following strategies are really difficult to follow. Jesse Livermore had a 3 yearlong losing streak from 2011 - 2014 despite him following his rules. After the events of the book, he went short in 1929 and was reportedly worth over 100m in that time, a huge amount. Then he lost it all in the strongly mean reverting markets of the 1930s where his trend following strategy didn't work.<p>He was a problem gambler, but I think if we looked at top poker players of today, they'd all have some love the gamble in them. Jesse had godly tape reading skills that allowed him to beat the bucket shops at the start of his career.<p>After being kicked out of the bucket shops, he should have just become a floor trader and in all likelihood, he'd have had lower highs but would have fared a lot better overall. A lot of the trading cliches like cutting trading losses quickly, letting profits run, averaging up rather than down originate from this book. There is a reason people still talk about it 100 years after its publication. It's a good contender for the best trading book of all time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 01 Jan 2026 11:01:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453116</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453116</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453116</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Bitter Lesson is about AI agents"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Investment Strategy: Organizations should invest more in computing infrastructure than in complex algorithmic development.<p>> Competitive Advantage: The winners in AI won’t be those with the cleverest algorithms, but those who can effectively harness the most compute power.<p>> Career Focus: As AI engineers, our value lies not in crafting perfect algorithms but in building systems that can effectively leverage massive computational resources. That is a fundamental shift in mental models of how to build software.<p>I think the author has a fundamental misconception what making best use of computational resources requires. It's algorithms. His recommendation boils down to not do the one thing that would allow us to make the best use of computational resources.<p>His assumptions would only be correct if all the best algorithms were already known, which is clearly not the case at present.<p>Rich Sutton said something similar, but when he said it, he was thinking of old engineering intensive approaches, so it made sense in the context in which he said it and for the audience he directed it at. It was hardly groundbreaking either, the people whom he wrote the article for all thought the same thing already.<p>People like the author of this article don't understand the context and are taking his words as gospel. There is no reason not to think that there won't be different machine learning methods to supplant the current ones, and it's certain they won't be found by people who are convinced that algorithmic development is useless.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 23 Mar 2025 20:34:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43455678</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43455678</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43455678</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Perplexity Deep Research"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Can't find it either.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 16 Feb 2025 08:40:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066439</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066439</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066439</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Gary Marcus discusses AI's technical problems"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The strengths and weaknesses of the algorithmic niche that artificial NNs are in hasn't changed a bit since a decade ago. They are still bad at anything I'd want to actually use them for that you'd imagine actual AI would be good at. The only thing that has changed is people's perception. LLMs found a market fit, but if you notice, compared to last decade where we had Deepmind and OpenAI competing at actual AI in games like Go and Starcraft, they've pretty much given up on that in favor on hyping text predictors. For anybody in the field, it should be an obvious bubble.<p>Underneath it all, there is some hope that an innovation might come about to keep the wave going, and indeed, a new branch of ML being discovered could revolutionize AI and actually be worthy of the hype that LLMs have now, but that has nothing to do with the LLM craze.<p>It's cool that we have them, and I also appreciate what Stable Diffusion has brought to the world, but in terms of how much LLMs influenced me, they only shorted the time it takes for me to read the documentation.<p>I don't think that machines cannot be more intelligent than humans. I don't think that the fact that they use linear algebra and mathematical functions makes the computers inferior to humans. I just think that the current algorithms suck. I want better algos so we can have actual AI instead of this trash.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Feb 2025 17:43:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43060431</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43060431</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43060431</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Gary Marcus discusses AI's technical problems"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To me, the current LLMs aren't qualitatively different from the char RNNs that Karpathy showcased all the way back in 2015. They've gotten a lot more useful, but that is about it. Current LLMs will have as much to do with GAI as computer games have to do with NNs. Which is to say, games were necessary to develop GPUs which were then used to train NNs, and current LLMs are necessary to incentivize even more powerful hardware to come into existence, but there isn't much gratitude involved in that process.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 15 Feb 2025 08:32:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43056926</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43056926</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43056926</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by abstractcontrol in "Adding row polymorphism to Damas-Hindley-Milner"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've thought about adding record row polymorphism to Spiral, but I am not familiar with it and couldn't figure out how to make it work well in the presence of generics.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Oct 2024 13:42:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41924987</link><dc:creator>abstractcontrol</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41924987</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41924987</guid></item></channel></rss>