Hacker News: fercircularbuf

New comment by fercircularbuf in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

fercircularbuf — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:37:42 +0000

I would argue that all of the problems we have to solve are novel and tricky. The rest we've already solved but constantly reinvent (not novel) or already solved and just need to piece together like Legos (not tricky).

New comment by fercircularbuf in "AI models can provably hide arbitrary capabilities"

fercircularbuf — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 07:19:10 +0000

Forgive my ignorance, since I am only superficially knowledgeable about this, but how are you certain that it "completely forgot" as opposed to the knowledge still being encoded but 800 inferences was not enough to probabilistically trigger it? Like hunting down a race condition that happens rarely enough that it may not surface in 800 runs of the program.

New comment by fercircularbuf in "A Modern Web App in C"

fercircularbuf — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:53:01 +0000

I'm also working on an educational game project in C++ compiled to WebAssembly with Emscripten. Absolutely awesome to work with.

New comment by fercircularbuf in "Yes, and"

fercircularbuf — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 07:06:37 +0000

Teaching Assistant

New comment by fercircularbuf in "It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs"

fercircularbuf — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 01:21:50 +0000

We have the power to change this

New comment by fercircularbuf in "What even is an OS now?"

fercircularbuf — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 09:06:58 +0000

Out of curiosity, what definition of "intelligence" are you using when you say that an LLM doesn't have it?

New comment by fercircularbuf in "I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea"

fercircularbuf — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 22:40:54 +0000

Gorgeous! You're an amazing photographer.

New comment by fercircularbuf in "I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea"

fercircularbuf — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 22:38:56 +0000

Wow. Thank you for offering a portal to this other world through your beautiful writing.

New comment by fercircularbuf in "Compressing a Flag to 11 Bits"

fercircularbuf — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:21:52 +0000

or treat the triangles as if they were part of a larger white flag?

New comment by fercircularbuf in "Compressing a Flag to 11 Bits"

fercircularbuf — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:19:56 +0000

you couldn't dedicate one of those bit patterns to nepal?

fun stuff

New comment by fercircularbuf in "Spaceships (Reverse Asteroid)"

fercircularbuf — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 02:17:40 +0000

Nice. This makes me want to play a number of games as the bad guy.

New comment by fercircularbuf in "Open-source 3D anatomy explorer: 2,234 selectable BodyParts3D meshes"

fercircularbuf — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:17:26 +0000

thank you for the laugh

New comment by fercircularbuf in "TiVo to charge money for skipping commercials in your own recordings"

fercircularbuf — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 06:51:07 +0000

Yeah, I pay for youtube so I don't have to watch ads, but then youtube creators at some point all decided to jump on the bandwagon of interleaving ads into their content. Many are kind enough to make it easy to jump ahead to when the ad is over, but man, I would much prefer they set up a patreon or just let me pay them through youtube's own UI. Incredibly annoying.

New comment by fercircularbuf in "GPT-6 Astra"

fercircularbuf — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 04:25:51 +0000

That is the task they are constructed to perform, but that's just an output, not the inner workings of what's happening to arrive at that next token. You can give a human the same constrained task, but the output alone doesn't a human mind make.

New comment by fercircularbuf in "Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools"

fercircularbuf — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:43:32 +0000

I should clarify that when I wrote plausible I meant the societal aspects you touched on in your second point. As long as we are human, we will continue to experience our imperfection and continue to be prone to giving in to our base desires. And of course one group's culture shapes their ethics differently than another group's. Ethics is, after all, arbitrary. But one could still look at Star Trek and imagine a society where people's needs are met better than they are now, where we have systems in place to prevent a complete erosion of society better than we have now, where the basic principle of not exploiting others for personal gain is taught better than we teach it now, where we don't tolerate those that violate that principle.

You will still have hate. People will still kill. But one could look at Star Trek and imagine it's plausible to live in a society that doesn't tolerate school shootings or the systemic breakdowns that led to that.

New comment by fercircularbuf in "Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools"

fercircularbuf — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 23:30:21 +0000

Star Trek is a plausible future I'd like to live in. It depends entirely on education, cultural values, and ethics. It's a future worth striving for, real or not.

New comment by fercircularbuf in "Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination"

fercircularbuf — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 10:04:10 +0000

I share your enthusiasm for this. Creating a map of the most influential research across all the fields to identify the highest priority work, any work replicating that work or validating that work by building from it would be a good start. Ideally funded by governments, but institutions, companies, and individuals could put up bounties for replicating particular research.

New comment by fercircularbuf in "The turbulent AI era is here"

fercircularbuf — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:26:19 +0000

You will most certainly not have food, health, or security in your scenario.

New comment by fercircularbuf in "The turbulent AI era is here"

fercircularbuf — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 08:18:50 +0000

source for the first statistic?

New comment by fercircularbuf in "Scientists release biggest 2D map of the universe"

fercircularbuf — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 03:08:23 +0000

Wow, this is humbling