Hacker News: bbeonx

New comment by bbeonx in "Claude Opus 5"

bbeonx — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:52:51 +0000

is it?

New comment by bbeonx in "The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway"

bbeonx — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 07:05:04 +0000

I think I'd put it this way: if I could flip a switch tomorrow and the AI boom was done, I probably would. The negative effects just super duper outweigh the fact that coders are more efficient. But since it exists, I'm going to use it. Hacking on my own small projects isn't using that many resources. But the benefit simply isn't worth the cost, as much as I personally love using LLMs.

New comment by bbeonx in "Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI"

bbeonx — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 01:38:51 +0000

there are some things that clearly exist that are really hard to nail down with definitions; once we get into anything social, we are kinda playing with that territory. everything is so fuzzy that our normal way of defining things breaks down. so saying precisely what gender _is_ is going to be almost impossible. but there are definitely roles and traits that are highly correlated with a person's birth sex that are distinct from their birth sex. there can even be genetic reasons why those correlations emerged. but they are still distinct.

as evidence, what it _means_ to be a man, woman, etc, differs from society to society. if you ask me to quantify this precisely, i will struggle. but it's plain for all to see.

New comment by bbeonx in "Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI"

bbeonx — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 01:30:20 +0000

sorry, is this in response to my post? in which case, this is exactly the distinction i'm making. the entire argument is whether or not there _is_ a distinction; my point is that this guy just, a priori, decides gender doesn't exist. but there is plenty of evidence that it does. there are plenty of social traits associated with sex that differ across different cultures: pink used to be a manly color, now it's a feminine color; "be a man" doesn't literally mean "make sure your sex is male"; etc. there are traits that are heavily correlated with a person's sex that are culturally reinforced, and this is distinct from their sex.

New comment by bbeonx in "Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI"

bbeonx — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 01:22:16 +0000

yeah, the argument is ridiculous; like, formally, it is ridiculous. i also disagree with the sentiment and conclusions of the argument, but the actual form of the argument is garbage: "i introduce an axiom that says there is no gender and therefore the distinction between sex and gender doesn't exist".

New comment by bbeonx in "Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI"

bbeonx — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 01:18:17 +0000

the first post was a swipe, i'll grant you. probably shouldn't have said it. it was a knee-jerk reaction to a structurally fallacious argument that leaves no room for discussion: "i reject your stance not based on reason, evidence, or anything that you can interact with, but based on an new presupposition i've just now decided is true". though i'll admit the severity of my knee jerking was probably amplified by some of the other opinions he holds.

the second post is actually about (a) me having understanding for a position of someone i disagree with harshly, and (b) the logical structure of an argument, not the underlying topic itself. it was in reference to the content of the link that was posted.

anyway, mods can take it down, i get why the rules are there. you're also right to ask folks to keep it clean. but i stand by it; dude just seems to have a trifecta of awful traits and i'm so so so tired of super rich tech dudes ruining the world.

New comment by bbeonx in "Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI"

bbeonx — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:16:25 +0000

wait this is kinda brilliant tho

New comment by bbeonx in "Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick"

bbeonx — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:53:58 +0000

Thank. Too much word, me try read but no more tokens.

New comment by bbeonx in "Blacksky AppView"

bbeonx — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:38:06 +0000

this is true, "black" has been used in racist ways, but it got rehabbed and reclaimed in the 60s and 70s.

but more to the point, it is not currently used in a racist manner by the vast majority of the US, and certainly does not carry the same connotations as "yellow", so not really comparable imo

New comment by bbeonx in "Blacksky AppView"

bbeonx — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:33:20 +0000

"yellowsky" sounds racist because calling asians "yellow" is racist.

"whitesky" sounds racist because...well, i don't know if you're a big history buff but in the US white-people-only gatherings were always suuuuper racist.

New comment by bbeonx in "A compact camera built using an optical mouse"

bbeonx — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 20:49:15 +0000

agreed...i think it's fine to keep up with what the corporate world is doing, but these projects bring me real joy

New comment by bbeonx in "15,000 lines of verified cryptography now in Python"

bbeonx — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 20:47:49 +0000

This isn't really a metric. It's a description to help the reader understand the magnitude of effort that went into this project. SLoC is a bad metric for plenty of things, but I think it's fine for quickly conveying the scope of a project to a blog reader.

New comment by bbeonx in "The last RadioShack in Maryland is closing"

bbeonx — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 18:55:53 +0000

Followed closely by "The Breadboard Has Been Drinking"

New comment by bbeonx in "Show HN: Open-source Counter-Strike-like game"

bbeonx — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 16:00:54 +0000

chill, be nice

New comment by bbeonx in "Microsoft Tilecode"

bbeonx — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 16:59:59 +0000

You're presuming that every phrase was worded _just so_. This could very well have been from the author refactoring their sentence and not simplifying everything. They probably were thinking in these terms (the author is a PL guy from MSR who's pretty heavy into a lot of the formalism) and this sounds like a not-perfectly-polished formal thought.

It's technical, and sometimes technical writing isn't written perfectly. That doesn't mean it's due to willful obtusity, or trying to sound smart.

New comment by bbeonx in "Git-Based Wiki"

bbeonx — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 15:40:42 +0000

Meh, it's usable w/out github but you'll be reading raw markdown files (unless you get your own markdown renderer which isn't that big of a deal). But yeah, it's either an incomplete git-based wiki or a complete github based wiki.

New comment by bbeonx in "Jacob Collier’s four magical chords"

bbeonx — Sat, 30 Nov 2019 07:34:53 +0000

I found In My Room to be an incredibly moving album. Djesse left me feeling far less after a first listen, but when I returned a few days later I started to notice things I had missed and now I really enjoy that album as well.

I am very moved by his music, in large part because of its cleverness. At the same time, I completely understand why many people are left unmoved. Different strokes, I guess.

New comment by bbeonx in "LaTeX Coffee Stains (2009) [pdf]"

bbeonx — Sat, 26 Jan 2019 22:51:13 +0000

This is going on all of my homeworks (submitted electronically, of course)

New comment by bbeonx in "People older than 65 share the most fake news, a new study finds"

bbeonx — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 15:08:36 +0000

Pizza gate is an extreme. But also, yes, news has changed dramatucally over the last couple of decades and older generations maybe don't consume as defensively as younger generations. Over time this can make ridiculous things sound plausible.

I remember there was a trump meme going around where he supposedly said "if I ever ran for president it would be as a republican, they are all a bunch of morons". The first time I saw that it looked sketchy as hell, but both of my folks (intelligent people, mind you) bought it hook, line, and sinker. In general, it's younger people that I saw citing it as a fake while older people shared it. Totally anecdotal, I'll grant you, but I hardly think my experience is unique

New comment by bbeonx in "Oft-quoted paper on spread of fake news is retracted"

bbeonx — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 04:05:03 +0000

I don't know, I might push back here. While fake news can certainly be interpreted as news that is false, that is not how it is usually used. There is definitely an insinuation, and while the vanilla reading of the definitions of "fake" and "news" don't contain this insinuation, it exists none the less.

That being said, as a writer I might not be able to resist pointing out the irony that the paper on fake news was fake news :). I really can't fault the author.