Hacker News: andybak

New comment by andybak in "Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B"

andybak — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 11:32:47 +0000

Nothing you wrote contradicts the post you are replying to.

New comment by andybak in "Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues"

andybak — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:56:53 +0000

Older Wittgenstein meet younger Wittgenstein.

New comment by andybak in "Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues"

andybak — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:43:53 +0000

It can also be "mostly true but exaggerated for polemic effect".

Or your definition of political might be different to the speakers.

Or it could be intended to highlight a way of perceiving the world and thus not be subject to truth claims.

Etc. This list can be extended indefinitely.

Language is not a game of symbol manipulation.

New comment by andybak in "Omarchy development practices lead to predictable security issues"

andybak — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 13:28:10 +0000

"Proofs" in this sense of the word are things that apply to mathematics and formal systems. Language is squishy. A minimal counterexample is potentially squishy enough to be meaningless.

New comment by andybak in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"

andybak — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:08:36 +0000

> You might be too familiar with "activism" as a perjurative

Do people generally regard it as a perjurative? I always assumed it ranged from neutral to positive. I do wonder how off my calibration is sometimes.

New comment by andybak in "Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit"

andybak — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:26:21 +0000

At the risk of posting without adding anything substantive, I find this an exceedingly convincing argument.

New comment by andybak in "St Lucie Nuclear Reactor Unit 1 manually shutdown, 3 control rods drop into core"

andybak — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:31:09 +0000

Is this another post title that was mangled into ambiguity because of trying to hit the arbitrary HN word count restriction?

New comment by andybak in "A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”"

andybak — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:22:28 +0000

Ironically (for my generation in the UK at least) "Asian" meant "South Asian" and for a long time we didn't have a useful shorthand for "all parts of Asia"

New comment by andybak in "AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them"

andybak — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 21:16:44 +0000

Sometimes I wish there was a Hacker News comment hall of fame.

New comment by andybak in "Grok 4.6 scores 61 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index"

andybak — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:23:41 +0000

My entire digital existence for the last 20 years or so has been a parasitical relationship with VC funding. They keep throwing money at business models that involve building market share and I keep benefiting. It hasn't stopped working yet.

New comment by andybak in "Shade Map"

andybak — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:20:06 +0000

According to this my garden is almost entirely in the shade but I have a suntan to disprove it.

New comment by andybak in "The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment"

andybak — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:24:22 +0000

Is "Lindy" a typo or have I missed another linguistic innovation?

New comment by andybak in "Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide"

andybak — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:13:45 +0000

I get tired of saying this but "got misidentified by the police" is somewhere between an annoyance and a humourous anecdote in most developed countries that aren't the USA where it appears to be justifiably regarded as a near death experience.

New comment by andybak in "'Pervert glasses': Backlash against Meta's smart glasses grows"

andybak — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:28:20 +0000

> Many buildings are copyrighted

Well, let me stop you right there. That's the bit that needs fixing.

New comment by andybak in "'Pervert glasses': Backlash against Meta's smart glasses grows"

andybak — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:19:41 +0000

It won't matter. People will assume it has a camera. The product category is most likely (and rather predictably) dead if it depends on people wearing them ubiquitously and in public.

New comment by andybak in "My personal AI benchmark: “Generate an SVG of a frog with a Habsburg jaw”"

andybak — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:36:39 +0000

> frogmaxxed

raninemandibularprognathism-maxxed?

New comment by andybak in "Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6"

andybak — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:43:12 +0000

Don Draper in the elevator meme?

New comment by andybak in "Terence Tao: Mathematics in the Age of AI [pdf]"

andybak — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:19:26 +0000

> but the productivity gains and economic surplus.

I think you might be missing out vast swathes of human experience here. Some things are about joy, or god help me - fun.

(For the record I think AI has a role to play here as well)

New comment by andybak in "Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber"

andybak — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:12:03 +0000

I'm happy for Simon to post what he wants, when he wants. He's earned it.

New comment by andybak in "Roko's Dancing Basilisk"

andybak — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:59:22 +0000

> I can't say I've been impressed with LLMs generating code

What the hell are these people doing? Running 2 year old models on the lowest settings and then throwing their hands in the air?