Hacker News: briandw

New comment by briandw in "Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics"

briandw — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:26:41 +0000

I'll do my best to restate the problem. If AI does all the work, then we won't have people who can understand the math that AI's are creating.

This is the real problem as I see it and it extends to most technical work. I didn't see that as the main argument of the article.

I was objecting to the old guard defending their turf.

Academia needs to contend with this problem, and start addressing it right now. People are not going to be able to beat AIs at math. So whats the solution? PhDs will have to be able to show competence in new ways. Publishing and review of mathematical work will have to change. The genie is out of the bottle and there is no putting it back.

New comment by briandw in "Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics"

briandw — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:13:51 +0000

So what was the substance that I missed?

New comment by briandw in "Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground"

briandw — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 01:59:58 +0000

You are describing the Jagged Frontier. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2023-10/SSRN-id...

New comment by briandw in "MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production"

briandw — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:47:52 +0000

Nothing will ever be cheep enough. “599 is dangerously close to 1100”? It’s 1100 is nearly double! I bought the neo for my daughter to use in HS and it’s perfect. Fast, great build and great battery life. Ill be buying a second one for my son, and paying just a bit more for both than the one air you mentioned. You should just buy a chromebook and save the 100-200$ for a plastic laptop.

New comment by briandw in "Fluid Simulation for Dummies"

briandw — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:55:31 +0000

I don't know about the CFD, but I really enjoyed reading this blog back in my iOS days. Friday Q&A was especially good. He would take some part of Obj-C or Cocoa and build a simple version from scratch.

New comment by briandw in "Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics"

briandw — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:36:53 +0000

Most of the arguments here feel like gate keeping and resistance to change. I didn't see any arguments that were directly about advancing the state of knowledge of math.

“Current automated techniques can produce plausible but unreliable (or even incorrect) arguments which are difficult to distinguish from correct mathematical proofs.”

That seems like a problem for mathematics with or without AI.

Isn’t this a problem with human proofs as well?

“Many current models are also built on data obtained by systematically exploiting licenses and access arrangements that were not made with artificial intelligence in mind, or indeed by simply violating copyright protections”

Copyright? The copyright arguments have been hard to make in domains where copyright is much stronger, mathematical knowledge isn’t even subject to copyright.

“Technologies which affect the way in which mathematics is practiced may disturb the current system of incentives”

Resistance to change again.

“Proper evaluation is endangered if results are communicated through informal channels”

Gatekeeping again.

Blue Origin's New Glenn explodes durning static fire

briandw — Fri, 29 May 2026 01:45:16 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm8wRjD3xVA

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317961

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by briandw in "Disagreement among frontier LLMs on real-world fact-checks"

briandw — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:20:34 +0000

No human baseline to compare it to. Without that you are missing an important check on the task being poorly constructed. More importantly there is an implied reference thats missing. The implication is that people would have done better, or that perfect agreement is possible.

New comment by briandw in "Magnifica Humanitas"

briandw — Mon, 25 May 2026 16:23:50 +0000

Water hogging? Show me the data. This is a lie that the socialist continue to peddle. It’s a very sticky idea completely resistant to facts. Data-centers use 48m gallons a day in the USA. Total water consumption is 322 billion a day. So 0.015% of water use. Golf courses use 30x that and Almonds 80x that.

New comment by briandw in "US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds"

briandw — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:25:52 +0000

https://candid.org/blogs/key-facts-figures-and-trends-among-...

New comment by briandw in "Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods"

briandw — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:55:09 +0000

Because they don't have a fleet of millions of people labeling the data for them and paying for the privilege of doing so. Waymo has about 3700 vehicles. Tesla has millions. Waymo only operates in known environments and collects a very limited range of data. Tesla collects data everywhere that people drive their cars.

New comment by briandw in "US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds"

briandw — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:14:27 +0000

This is an adversarial process. Unions exist to fight employers. Unions spend about 23 billion a year in total. Only spending 1.5B to defend against 23B looks like a bargain.

New comment by briandw in "Flipper One – we need your help"

briandw — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:00:51 +0000

This is a style over substance argument. At least I understand what the project is really about now. Honestly the choice here is either poorly written english or AI writing. For a technical doc like this, Ill take the AI

New comment by briandw in "Click (2016)"

briandw — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:59:22 +0000

Very fun, I enjoyed seeing what it would react to.

New comment by briandw in "MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble"

briandw — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:09:59 +0000

We just bought the Neo for our daughter to use at school. My biggest concern was the trackpad. This is the first MacBook to not use a force touch trackpad since they were introduced. I must say that the new trackpad is really good. It's not quite as good as the force touch one in my MacBook Pro, but it's close. We will see how well the Neo holds up over time, but it's off to a good start.

New comment by briandw in "New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater"

briandw — Wed, 13 May 2026 14:53:32 +0000

I truly do not understand the fixation with hydrogen as a fuel. Compressing H2 to store it requires around half of the total energy that you can expect to get from its final application. Add in production losses and the difficulty in storage and handing, its always much worse than batteries.

I can see the argument for use in industrial processes like steel manufacturing as a reducing agent, but not as a power source.

New comment by briandw in "Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare"

briandw — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:31:13 +0000

This is clearly a government power grab, not a corporate one.

New comment by briandw in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

briandw — Tue, 12 May 2026 19:18:51 +0000

In this paper AutoCodeBench https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.09101 LLMs seemed to do best on the strongly typed and functional language Elixir. This is surprising since there isn't very much training data. However the examples that it's seen are usually high quality and there aren't a large number of different way of doing the same thing in Elixir.

New comment by briandw in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

briandw — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:34:28 +0000

This is zero sum thinking. The foreign companies benefit and the local Polish people benefit. Wealth is created in the process and everyone benefits. What if those companies never came and never employed Polish people? Would Poland be any better off?

New comment by briandw in "For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day"

briandw — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:33:42 +0000

Same here. I used to listen to techno and could just disappear into the work. Those days are gone now.