<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: emtel</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=emtel</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2026 06:18:18 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=emtel" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "I resigned from Anthropic today"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do you think people should continue developing AI up until the point that there is evidence that AI is facilitating biological weapons development?<p>I think we should stop before then. But that necessarily means that there will not be evidence at the time that we stop.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:04:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49621769</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49621769</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49621769</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "How well do agents use test/verification techniques?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have dabbled with Verus in rust. I found that if you leave the agent to its own devices it will produce a spec that just restates the existing implementation. It took a lot of work to arrive at specs that were plausibly accurate and complete statements of what the code was supposed to do.<p>But once you got there, Claude had no trouble proving the code satisfied the spec, and I uncovered a few interesting bugs this way.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 08 Sep 2026 15:33:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49611844</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49611844</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49611844</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "“Next-token predictor” is the wrong mental model for LLMs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I would say that it is not even wrong. You say it’s a next token predictor. I say it isn’t. What observable behavior of the system can settle our dispute?<p>I fail to see how any possible output could cause either of us to change our mind.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 05 Sep 2026 01:03:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572037</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572037</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572037</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "Qantas Airbus A380 engine failure in 2010 (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Can anyone explain why on earth you would counter bore a pipe at all, let alone after installation? I read the article but couldn’t understand the explanation. It seems like a totally ludicrous way to make a pipe.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2026 05:06:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49546153</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49546153</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49546153</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The model did exactly what it was told, albeit in an unintended, emergent strategy<p>Yes, that is the problem!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Aug 2026 22:40:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49456896</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49456896</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49456896</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>“Rare books” usually refers to rare editions of books. Any books out there where there are only a few extent copies of the text itself, are probably not of very much interest or social value, since almost no one is able to read them, by definition.<p>If you think there is priceless knowledge locked up in books so rare that it is on the verge of being lost forever, then AI labs are not really the problem!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 05:16:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49384088</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49384088</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49384088</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In my experience fable can absolutely find very subtle bugs just by reading code and thinking. Last example I saw was a very subtle race condition that neither I not the author noticed. It wasn’t a security issue, but it could have been.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Jul 2026 03:25:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49030904</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49030904</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49030904</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite Is Going"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Compiler performance is dominated by algorithms<p>But you can always use the best algorithm no matter what your implementation language is, so it still makes sense to prefer a language that makes it easy to write fast code.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Jul 2026 23:29:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48941635</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48941635</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48941635</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> should I walk or drive to the car wash<p>there is an entire genre of riddles based on this kind of misdirection that works on humans, such as "A plane crashed on the border or US and Canada. Where do they bury the survivors?"<p>As with humans, comprehension is not a binary property of the agent - it is a quality that can be present in some situations and absent in others. LLMs may emit correct outputs sometimes because they do comprehend the input, and emit incorrect outputs in other cases when they do not comprehend the input.<p>In order to show that LLMs can't comprehend, we'd have to show that there are no (or at least very few) situations in which they exhibit comprehension, not show that there are some situations in which they don't.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:52:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48809640</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48809640</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48809640</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "What Emily Bender meant by "stochastic parrots""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even if pre-training was the only training step, it still wouldn't necessarily follow that the only thing the model is doing is stitching words together probabilistically, unless you expand the definition of "probabilistically" to the point that it becomes meaningless. This kind of thinking assumes that design of the training process and the "design" of the artifact that training produces must be similar.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Jul 2026 19:33:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48809410</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48809410</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48809410</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’m guessing you don’t have kids. My membership pays for itself just for the savings on string cheese alone. Same for eggs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Jul 2026 04:48:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48782709</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48782709</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48782709</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>audiophiles (<a href="https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/turntables-with-pace.1150775/" rel="nofollow">https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/turntables-with-pace....</a>) also claim that turntables can be rated on "timing, rhythm, and pace" in which supposedly the timing of the music can be affected by the turntable's mass and other properties.<p>How this would occur without also producing grossly audible pitch distortion never seems to be discussed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Jul 2026 22:52:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48768417</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48768417</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48768417</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What a strange paragraph! Why on earth should we assume that a body is a prerequisite for having emotions?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:03:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48393646</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48393646</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48393646</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How is drugging an animal's food a "brute force tactic"? What would qualify as a non-brute-force tactic in your mind?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:17:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364253</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364253</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364253</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The "Einstein can't get a cat into a carrier even though he is smarter" is just a hilariously bad argument. All cat owners can get their cats into a carrier! And most cats don't want to get in, because they hate the vet! And it's almost entirely because the humans are smarter!<p>You can even get a literal tiger into a carrier, even though it can kill you easily. You just drug its food and wait till it passes out. This is because you are smarter than it, and know that tranquilizers exist and how to obtain them, which is a strategy that cats of any size are not even able to conceive of, and probably can't understand what happened after it's been done to them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:17:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48362772</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48362772</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48362772</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A lot of posts urging people to get colonoscopies. But general anesthesia also carries risks. How should one weigh the risk vs benefit?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 22:54:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287125</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287125</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287125</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The goal is not to force individuals to not replace their phones, but rather to provide that as an option at all, for those who want it.<p>But my point is that you need to recognize that in so doing, you are taking away the option of having other things, such as waterproofing, larger batteries, smaller/lighter phones, etc. There is no free lunch.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:35:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836746</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836746</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836746</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's an odd reply since by that argument they also flocked to a phone with no replaceable battery, which was pretty standard in the 2000s.<p>But you could be right. I guess this will be an experiment to watch: If EU consumers show a strong preference for replaceable batteries once they become more widely available, we can expect manufacturers to start offering it in other markets as well.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:32:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836693</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836693</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836693</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are. If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".<p>It's okay to have idiosyncratic preferences (I certainly do), but people should recognize that this law will make phones _worse_ for most people, because this law will force phone manufacturers to compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.<p>I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences. But that's nonsense, because the law doesn't actually require people to replace batteries rather than replacing their phone, and by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone. At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:22:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836517</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836517</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47836517</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by emtel in "Backpacks got worse on purpose"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I bought a north face backpack for college in 1998. It cost $60. It was an extravagant expense for me at the time and I felt horrible about it for weeks.<p>That backpack is currently at college with my son, who used it all through high school as well. It is by far the oldest and most durable daily-use object I’ve ever owned.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:59:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779058</link><dc:creator>emtel</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779058</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779058</guid></item></channel></rss>