Hacker News: giacomoforte

New comment by giacomoforte in "Super Intelligence"

giacomoforte — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 16:28:35 +0000

Am I reading this right? Is this the Microsoft playbook of selling licenses for education? If so brillant move by OpenAI and Anthropic.

New comment by giacomoforte in "The evolution of effective altruism"

giacomoforte — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:41:59 +0000

You can call it a subculture or philosophy or movement, but social movement to me implies something with broad appeal.

New comment by giacomoforte in "The evolution of effective altruism"

giacomoforte — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:20:25 +0000

I do not think you can call it a social movement because it does not have any significant mass of people behind it and by its nature, never will.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing"

giacomoforte — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 06:42:22 +0000

It's a reflection of the demand from people who want to live in Berlin.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Ask HN: ICLR went from 143 submissions to 62,301 submission IDs – what happened?"

giacomoforte — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 10:55:57 +0000

Used to be in every AI/ML job advert, that they preferred those who had previously published in the top 3.

Ironically now it has become a bit of a meme and I see it less often as one of the "nice to have".

New comment by giacomoforte in "How GPT‑5.6 Sol helps run quantum computing experiments"

giacomoforte — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 08:24:47 +0000

Even with AI you'd want the AI to be writing python scripts instead of following an analysis.md.

New comment by giacomoforte in "US gas prices hit an average of $4 a gallon again"

giacomoforte — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:45:20 +0000

Lots of EU people are now travelling longer distances due to housing prices and job relocations.

My last commute in Germany was 1.5 hr one way and some of my colleagues had 2.5 hr commutes. Hybrid hours though.

New comment by giacomoforte in "US gas prices hit an average of $4 a gallon again"

giacomoforte — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:39:30 +0000

True although a big component of the energy prices in Europe are due to policy driven taxation. There is a huge difference in intra EU petrol prices from around 6$/gal to 10$/gal.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Is The Economist Always Wrong?"

giacomoforte — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:21:10 +0000

I like to say, traders and people you put money on the line are often far more honest about economic policy, than economic influencers like The Economist.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Is The Economist Always Wrong?"

giacomoforte — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 09:17:01 +0000

Nobody ever recognizes themselves as extremist.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Never Give Them Your Face"

giacomoforte — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:29:43 +0000

I completely agree with this, but my banking apps, my broker, my health insurance, my simcard provider all already require my face for identification.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible"

giacomoforte — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:38:12 +0000

What I do not find plausible is this scenario where AI is so smart it can replace us all, but at the same time somehow still easily controllable and utterly subservient to the ownership class.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Can Europe train a frontier AI model on the compute it owns?"

giacomoforte — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 20:16:35 +0000

No because public EU compute is adminisered by physicists and although they are very competent in their own domains they are winging it when it comes to AI. It like expecting OakRidge to train LLMs...

They already tried training LLMs.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Organic foods are not healthier or pesticide free"

giacomoforte — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:12:32 +0000

I don't think using the median lethal dose of toxicity is a good metric to compare pesticides.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Do the Hardest Thing"

giacomoforte — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 19:28:07 +0000

Idk, I often felt the opposite. I naturally tend towards working on hard problems but my feeling is that if I chose instead to focus on an easier "thing" I could execute really well and be overall more successful.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Microsoft Doubles Down on Controversial Quantum Computing Claims"

giacomoforte — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 08:01:40 +0000

Multiple Python based DSLs, just like now with GPU programming.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Mistral's CEO: Europe has 2 years to stop becoming America's AI 'vassal state'"

giacomoforte — Sun, 17 May 2026 18:24:14 +0000

I would become a patriotic European too, but only after our leaders at the national and EU level stop being transatlanticist sellouts... which won't happen any time soon.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'"

giacomoforte — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:38:24 +0000

That you need world models to sensibly deploy "thinking" machines in the real world. Else they do stupid shit like drive straight into water. You can bruteforce some semblance of thinking by training on literally all knowledge that can be digitized but even that is proving to not be quite enough.

New comment by giacomoforte in "We don't know why Malawi is poor"

giacomoforte — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:25:41 +0000

This viewpoint never made sense to me, because you have variation within any culture, and because advantageous strategies win out over time, any culture will evolve. Therefore, it never made sense to me to consider culture a static immutable group of homogeneous people. To me it is pretty obvious that some systematic challenges must exist that keep what we consider to be successful strategies from succeeding in those environments.

Your examples of Russia and Japan are easily explained by geopolitics. Indeed, Japanese individuals don't tend to excel out of Japan while many Russians do.

New comment by giacomoforte in "Waymo updates 3,800 robotaxis after they 'drive into standing water'"

giacomoforte — Fri, 15 May 2026 19:12:06 +0000

LeCun is right.