Hacker News: bananaflag

New comment by bananaflag in "On AI regulation and messaging"

bananaflag — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:35:26 +0000

> AI bros consistently handwave away any notions of the material world imposing limits, because (spoiler!) it's a religion where you start from the miracle and work backwards.

How else are you going to work towards a dream? It's how Elon Musk managed to get reusable rockets when everyone said it's unfeasible.

Granted, most ideas don't work, this is why you need testing, but I am a bit surprised to see this attitude on hacker news.

New comment by bananaflag in "On AI regulation and messaging"

bananaflag — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:31:23 +0000

On the other hand, AI means actual experiments done in the physical world but coordinated by an entity that never sleeps and never gets depressed and can multiply itself manifold and always comes up with new ideas.

New comment by bananaflag in "The Case Against Formal Verification, 50 Years Later"

bananaflag — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:56:17 +0000

> Real-world systems are too messy to be specified

I agree with this counterargument.

I mean, you can verify that Euclid's algorithm computes the GCD. Or that quicksort produces a sorted version of the input array.

But how do you verify Facebook? Facebook computes what?

For some programs, the shortest descriptions of what they do are the programs themselves.

Edit: I agree with the replies that you can verify individual parts and properties, like with testing.

New comment by bananaflag in "Show HN: A public AI whose memory is shared across all users"

bananaflag — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 16:53:51 +0000

Yeah, I think this early era where every AI one interacts with is a clone of 4-6 big systems will seem quite quaint.

New comment by bananaflag in "Show HN: A public AI whose memory is shared across all users"

bananaflag — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:58:21 +0000

An early glimpse at how continual learning will feel.

Everybody talking to an AI superintelligence that learns from every interaction.

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

bananaflag — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 19:10:31 +0000

> There's nobody expecting to make significant progress with a week of work.

You underestimate my ADHD.

Source: I am mathematician.

New comment by bananaflag in "How Gödel's Proof Works"

bananaflag — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 20:10:17 +0000

(2020)

New comment by bananaflag in "The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5"

bananaflag — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:22:11 +0000

In 5 years we'll probably have locally run AI which could do something like this in a millisecond.

New comment by bananaflag in "The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5"

bananaflag — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:17:37 +0000

Probably this will be done more and more often for works which don't have translation in some language because of low interest. E.g. old manuscripts, light novels, fan fiction etc.

New comment by bananaflag in "I won't read LLM authored fiction"

bananaflag — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:50:32 +0000

HPMOR is one of those fanfics which make you feel a strong connection to the author, he really poured his soul into it ("rare vitamins" as he put it [1]), the good and the bad, kinda the exception that proves the rule. Probably this is why it was so successful.

[1] https://hpmor.com/notes/progress-14-05-01/

New comment by bananaflag in "I won't read LLM authored fiction"

bananaflag — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:09:49 +0000

I would have loved that too but that is quite impossible in this paradigm.

Probably the way people in the 20th century envisioned AGI rising out of GOFAI (also quite impossible in its own way) would have produced an "alien" entity with the properties you desire

New comment by bananaflag in "I won't read LLM authored fiction"

bananaflag — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:06:43 +0000

Thing is, I started appreciating this way of looking at art only after reading anti-LLM arguments, and I am a bit angry at myself for not feeling it during the pre-LLM decades of my life, which would have been much enriched.

There is this other way of looking at art (which probably dominated my worldview) where you don't care much about where it comes from. An extreme example is reading Harry Potter fanfiction, which in some way feels like reading math proofs, namely you continuously wonder what else can be done in a largely fixed setting.

New comment by bananaflag in "I won't read LLM authored fiction"

bananaflag — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:57:57 +0000

This effect will disappear when, instead of having 4-6 big models that everyone uses, we'll have trillions of models with memory / continual learning, each independently developing its own voice / personality, drowning all human expression.

Enjoy this "boring LLM" era while it lasts.

New comment by bananaflag in "Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage"

bananaflag — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:00:05 +0000

I thought it more in the sense of: if a clearer-thinking group has higher status, then clear thinking would be encouraged among the population.

(This did not happen that much, ofc.)

New comment by bananaflag in "Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage"

bananaflag — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:37:54 +0000

Exactly one of them threatens their lifestyle.

New comment by bananaflag in "Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage"

bananaflag — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 10:35:31 +0000

Could you elaborate?

I think back in the 90s when I was a teenager I thought it to be a good thing that there is a rise in status for a class of people characterized by clear thinking.

New comment by bananaflag in "How did Wikipedia layout become so bloated?"

bananaflag — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:42:03 +0000

I have been using MonoBook for years (early 2023 I think), I see nothing like that.

New comment by bananaflag in "LLMs reward expertise"

bananaflag — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:53:28 +0000

What you are proposing is a barrier no AI and no human and no intelligence would pass.

The idea of an AI that one-shots a task presumes that the one requesting the task already knows what the task is, and no additional expertise.

Similarly, when you ask an AI "please summarize this text" it means you already know what summarization is as a concept.

New comment by bananaflag in "LLMs reward expertise"

bananaflag — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:42:19 +0000

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a60b2eb-0b64-83ee-9c76-7931ca1de0...

New comment by bananaflag in "LLMs reward expertise"

bananaflag — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 09:06:20 +0000

Every thing passes through the following stages:

1. AI cannot do something.

2. AI starts being able to do something, but one needs to prompt it carefully, so one needs to be an expert, see, we will always need human experts <--- this article is here

3. AI just one-shots it.

Why do people still need to say this for each and every task? It's just reliving the bitter lesson over and over again.