Hacker News: amoss

New comment by amoss in "The Mathocalypse"

amoss — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:02:06 +0000

You seem to be confusing your quantifiers a little. (Not all SWEs must understand all CS) does not imply (there can exist parts of CS that no SWE understands).

New comment by amoss in "The Mathocalypse"

amoss — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 07:57:13 +0000

> I think the next step is to demand that proofs either be human-scale or they prove that a human-scale proof is impossible and the machine proof is as good as it gets.

> I suspect that's possible without tripping over the halting problem. (But I can't prove it.)

I doubt that it is. For the language of proofs to be powerful enough to be able to express an arbitrary proof it would have be Turing Complete. Proving that a proof is the smallest proof of a given concept (i.e. there is no smaller human understandable proof) would then be proving the minimality of a program in a Turing Complete language.

New comment by amoss in "Mistral Large 4"

amoss — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:20:43 +0000

oh no that sounds really "fake". nasty word. we are calling it "super intelligence" now. much better.

New comment by amoss in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

amoss — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 06:27:19 +0000

Keeping the tech proprietary so that it can only be used on these problems by internal teams is the very definition of gatekeeping.

New comment by amoss in "ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists' signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons"

amoss — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 06:35:22 +0000

If we want to call it what it is: Copyright Laundering.

Layering and placement of copyrighted materials to evade copyright.

New comment by amoss in "ChatGPT is adding real cartoonists' signatures to fake New Yorker cartoons"

amoss — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 06:31:42 +0000

No it does not, but it does imply that if they broken system was willing to pursue one person to his death then it should fairly uphold the same standard for executives who are doing the same thing.

New comment by amoss in "Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics"

amoss — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 05:39:53 +0000

Somewhat tiring that as alway any criticism is reduced to "but have you tried this on the latest model".

New comment by amoss in "Coding is not solved"

amoss — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 14:09:24 +0000

Sometimes this also happens because the design/spec never existed, but hopefully not in the industries under discussion.

New comment by amoss in "Coding is not solved"

amoss — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 06:29:53 +0000

In many codebases when you see this happening it is because someone reported a bug and the dev fixed the narrowest instance they could. Typically if(some specific case) do_fix() else do_normal(). Over time this fragments meaning in the source and makes it harder to reason about until it is a giant pile of slop.

The thing the dev should do that often doesn't get done is to take the information about the undesired behavior back up to the design/spec level and rework the definition to account for it. This doesn't normally get done because it takes longer and it is conceptually more difficult than the patch.

This is something that LLMs can accelerate significantly and the result is a shallower gradient of technical debt over the long term.

New comment by amoss in "Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard"

amoss — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 06:43:04 +0000

Your tool looks interesting but the readme file is very "wall of text" heavy and example light. In comparison the site for this tool shows exactly what it does. Perhaps that explains the difference in response. This is a classic case of the need for "show don't tell".

New comment by amoss in "Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?"

amoss — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 06:34:13 +0000

https://xkcd.com/1319/

New comment by amoss in "How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?"

amoss — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:19:03 +0000

You should let them eat cake.

New comment by amoss in "How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?"

amoss — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:17:54 +0000

Cloud services expose their UI/UX through a web-browser will all of the pain points of running a stateful blob of javascript on the client, talking through a mostly stateless protocol to a "mess of stuff" that aims for eventual consistency in the backend.

The old folks, who are retired and dying according to this thread, mostly grew up using local applications with direct control between UI/UX and action.

New comment by amoss in "Everyone Should Build Their Own Network Stack"

amoss — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 10:44:35 +0000

Good to see that people still have this spirit of rolling their sleeves up and doing something like this for fun. Underneath it there is a very real point about mono-cultures and the increased magnitude of the impact of a risk, although more eyes checking one implementation should reduce the probability.

New comment by amoss in "The turbulent AI era is here"

amoss — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:27:12 +0000

huge if true.

meanwhile this bill gates will be remembered for asking his friend epstein how to secretly treat his wife for the std that he gave her.

New comment by amoss in "Qwen3.8-Flash-Next"

amoss — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:35:00 +0000

But the reason why it remains load bearing is key.

New comment by amoss in "OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell"

amoss — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 08:54:54 +0000

Some of it is well sourced but the remainder is well sauced.

New comment by amoss in "Mathematics in the age of AI"

amoss — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 07:19:26 +0000

No, it is the application of learning and that is why learning is central to the definition tgat you pointed at.

New comment by amoss in "Mathematics in the age of AI"

amoss — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:32:16 +0000

Quoting directly from the dartmouth conference:

"every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it."

New comment by amoss in "Mathematics in the age of AI"

amoss — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 06:54:39 +0000

If you place an LLM into a harness, alongside evaluation, feedback and problem decomposition / solution integration - it is still an LLM?

There is an LLM acting as a component in a larger system. But that larger system is not an LLM. Calling it an "AI" is indeed an act of marketing as there is no learning / adjustment as we would expect from an intelligence, but calling it an LLM seems to be inaccurate. So what is it?