Hacker News: isomorphic_duck

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "Newly discovered spider builds spring loaded snare to catch ants"

isomorphic_duck — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 19:12:31 +0000

It might be more helpful to think of it as small changes in “genome-vector” taking place across generations of the species with the filter of it being not bad enough to cause extinction of the bespoke variation, as opposed to evolving towards more fitness as an optimisation objective. When thought of like this, one can imagine how high-dimensional the “feature”-space becomes, which leads to such intricate engineering we see in nature.

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "Claude Code is steganographically marking requests"

isomorphic_duck — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:14:48 +0000

> I've had Claude fuck over clean well documented code-bases for no reason

How exactly do you define "fucking over", and why do you suspect this "fucking" was done as a result of a faulty trigger as opposed to the inability of LLMs to write maintainable, extensible code?

"Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity."

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)"

isomorphic_duck — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:54:29 +0000

I am not an astrophysicist, but I have read that the thick layer of ice is supposed to protect the miles-deep ocean against radiation, which might harbour life.

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)"

isomorphic_duck — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 13:24:46 +0000

Tangential, but really looking forward to what Europa Clipper[0] finds in its flybys.

The delay in communication makes ambitious manoeuvres challenging - perhaps advances in AI (and by extension robotics) helps build much more autonomous space rovers. This could enable us, for example, to evaluate the samples by sending wet microscopes with the rover itself.

[0]: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/europa-clipper/

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model"

isomorphic_duck — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 11:48:09 +0000

We operate and think about subjects like Higher Topos Theory, Information Geometry and Algebraic Topology, which are several layers of abstractions removed from anything that can be termed as a skill “specialised to our survival”.

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model"

isomorphic_duck — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 14:19:10 +0000

You have to understand that the median human is terrible at (almost) everything. Humans, the only examples of general intelligence we know, are economically valuable precisely because they can train themselves to specialise at a (relatively) narrow task over time. You don’t measure how good a coding model is by how well it programs relative to Doctors, or how well it can prove theorems relative to baristas, or how well it can write coherent novels relative to programmers. That would be a dumb metric.

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model"

isomorphic_duck — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:13:30 +0000

If Claude Mythos and Fable 5 are the same underlying models just with different safeguards, I fail to see how TerminalBench has them at different scores.

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model"

isomorphic_duck — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:01:09 +0000

Continual Learning? Why is this even a question? Isn’t it a well-known glaring issue with the current models? They cannot learn/adapt to new skills (in any permanent sense) once they are deployed.

Google set to lose two more AI researchers to Anthropic

isomorphic_duck — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:36:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-24/google-poised-to-lose-two-more-high-profile-ai-staffers-to-anthropic

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48663985

Points: 14

# Comments: 5

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "Will It Mythos?"

isomorphic_duck — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 09:07:54 +0000

No, the purpose was to create a (automated) test set in the first place. The author builds an LLM judge which can score the LLMs participating during test-time. That would be why the author used the strongest model (Opus 4,7 at the time) as the judge.

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

isomorphic_duck — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 06:44:40 +0000

My biggest gripe with the discourse around AI, especially by programmers with hubris about Machine Learning, is the idea that LLMs can’t come up with “novel solutions”. They can, and they have. CoT[0] is how LLMs can output tokens in “reasoning space” to guide their “thinking” to produce absolutely novel solutions. You can imagine reasoning being multi-layered, where the top layer is an abstract heuristic (examples of which can be “try special cases”, “try solving a part of the problem with relaxed constraints”). The lower layers become more and more concrete with the details of the problem, and the result is a solution of the problem.

You don’t even have to understand how modern reasoning LLMs work to be able to tell that your perception is warped and doesn’t reflect reality - there’s plenty of news to the contrary - OpenAI resolving a major Erdos problem[1], the First Proof endeavour[2], amongst others [3].

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903 [1]: https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-c... [2]: https://1stproof.org/assets/docs/report.pdf [3]: https://archive.ph/2w4fi

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "Perlisisms (1982)"

isomorphic_duck — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 07:45:12 +0000

Also 100, which speaks to the infinite demand of software - We will never run out of things to program as long as there is a single program around.

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement"

isomorphic_duck — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:20:06 +0000

I can’t imagining investing into these frontier labs for the simple reason that Open Source is very likely to catch up in a relatively short period of time. I don’t see how OpenAI/Anthropic could then continue to serve their models with such large inference margins.

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute"

isomorphic_duck — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 06:26:47 +0000

I would say continual learning is the big missing piece that someone even from 2002 would realise.

New comment by isomorphic_duck in "Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance"

isomorphic_duck — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:09:32 +0000

It remains to be seen if LLMs would do any good in the "theory-building" heavy fields of math. They have certainly proven themselves in branches of math where the progress is verifiable, but fields like AG commonly have papers that do not concretely solve a problem but provide a new perspective/framework. This is iterated upon if other mathematicians find the construction rich and interesting enough, which eventually leads to breakthroughs.

LLMs have yet to show that they can meaningfully make such helpful abstractions. Not saying that it can't be done, but I wouldn't write such doomer posts just as yet.