Hacker News: jibal

New comment by jibal in "RipGrep musl binaries occasionally segfault during very-large searches"

jibal — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:27:23 +0000

Thank you for writing virtually all of the intelligent competent comments on this page.

New comment by jibal in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

jibal — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 09:36:10 +0000

It's not at all a joke ... that's a severe misunderstanding of the context.

New comment by jibal in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

jibal — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 08:37:30 +0000

The chess analogy is awful. If you simply want to know the answer to a chess problem, give it to the engine. Chess only lives on because it's a competition between humans to test their skill (just like bicycles, cars, trains didn't eliminate foot races) ... the computer is largely factored out, but not entirely -- people train with the computer, use it to check whether they played correctly, ... and they cheat. A lot. Thus there are more and more sophisticated mechanisms to detect and prevent cheating.

If you translate that to math, then all you get is math competitions, not math as a career. Of course the translation isn't nearly exact ... there's a lot more room for professional mathematicians because the math space is far more vast than the chess space and can't generally be cranked out mechanically (we have proof).

P.S. The response is nonsense ... I explained exactly why it's awful (others have too) and the response doesn't in any way refute the explanation ... rather it offers up a ridiculous strawman.

New comment by jibal in "Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion"

jibal — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 02:21:56 +0000

Yep. Most people are in denial and don't look up.

New comment by jibal in "Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion"

jibal — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 02:01:28 +0000

Profoundly stupid people like that are everywhere, not just HN.

New comment by jibal in "The End of an Era"

jibal — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:04:22 +0000

Logic failure.

> maybe LLMs are seen to write as well as humans because most humans have poor reading comprehension skills?

Whoa, ironic.

New comment by jibal in "The End of an Era"

jibal — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:54:39 +0000

You're misunderstanding ... that's not at all the claim. Confusion and speculation is a consequence, not an indicator. Running around naked in traffic might well cause confusion and speculation, but it wouldn't cause anyone to confuse you with an automobile or result in speculation that are one.

At least AI is better at reading than are most people.

New comment by jibal in "The End of an Era"

jibal — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:48:41 +0000

"how come" makes me want to vomit. (That "It’s a common idiom" is completely irrelevant. And note that it doesn't actually make me vomit.)

Also, here's another thought. In my opinion, here's my opinion.

New comment by jibal in "Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up"

jibal — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 04:47:46 +0000

> I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all.

Someone who writes a sentence like that is in no position to comment on writing style.

New comment by jibal in "Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up"

jibal — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 04:44:35 +0000

No one celebrates the mistakes ... what an absurd strawman (qsera's). Rather we celebrate the scientific method that finds and corrects mistakes, as you say.

New comment by jibal in "Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up"

jibal — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 04:41:38 +0000

This is a ridiculous strawman argument that misconstrues what people are saying is good about science--that it constantly reexamines and improves upon its models. You're saying that it would be preferable to have an oracle that flawlessly tells us the truth, and therefore the fallibility of science is "a weakness of the process", but that's completely absurd, a radical failure of reasoning, as of course no such oracle is possible. Given the inherent limitations of finding empirical facts, and empirical generalizations that only hold because we live in a lawful universe (so far, and everywhere we've looked--it is of course logically possible for it to be otherwise, as Hume noted), science is a very effective and powerful method, the best method conceived.

I won't engage further with such bad reasoning and arguments that verge on bad faith.

New comment by jibal in "Sam Altman is now talking to the White House about decelerating AI"

jibal — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 03:11:03 +0000

OpenAI and Anthropic are Public Benefit Corporations ... the GP is completely wrong.

New comment by jibal in "Sam Altman is now talking to the White House about decelerating AI"

jibal — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 03:08:23 +0000

This is completely wrong. OpenAI's governing charter explicitly prioritizes safety and benefit to humanity over profit, speed, or market dominance, and commits the organization to doing the very things you are saying they can't. And Anthropic is incorporated as a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation. Also, the Business Judgment Rule allows wide discretion in selecting strategy. Finally, jail time requires criminal violations such as fraud.

New comment by jibal in "Logic for Programmers"

jibal — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:04:14 +0000

The only one that isn't immediately obvious is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws

New comment by jibal in "Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident"

jibal — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 06:33:06 +0000

It was done by the agentic framework that employed the LLM. LLMs are still stochastic parrots, but they are far from useless.

New comment by jibal in "Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident"

jibal — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 06:27:18 +0000

> Its also well known in academic research

and from reading Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Lathe of Heaven".

New comment by jibal in "The Cold Email"

jibal — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 05:04:17 +0000

I've sent cold emails to Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett and received prompt and friendly replies. (I had met each briefly and mentioned that in my emails ... that may have helped.) I emailed Chomsky on 9/11, asking about blowback from U.S. operations in Afghanistan. He responded the next day, apologizing for the delay (!) because he was receiving so many queries. He sent me numerous citations, including a Newsweek (IIRC) article that was very much on point, as well as his own thoughts. I remember that he wrote "there are dark days ahead".

I also recall having an email exchange with Guy Steele about Java. Of course these days you can interact with all sorts of people publicly on social media -- I've had exchanges with Andrew Kelley and Walter Bright here on HN. Back in the day the "social media" was usenet -- and I had exchanges with various prominent people, including Marvin Minsky who sent me a draft of his book "The Emotion Machine" for review.

In 1978 I was working for a client of Interactive Systems Corporation (the first commercial UNIX developer) and a friend who worked at ISC said there was an opening but they couldn't initiate interest because it would be poaching from their client, so he suggested I send a letter. I sent a glowing letter about their being an innovative company in many ways (I meant every word) -- they were impressed and arranged an interview and I got the job.

New comment by jibal in "Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals"

jibal — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:53:19 +0000

> But you did the same thing

So your defense is a tu quoque fallacy? Note that "the same thing" is an admission.

New comment by jibal in "Underwater oxygen loss threatens earth's stability, researchers warn"

jibal — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:36:48 +0000

> Things like this, it’s still hypothetical. Climate scientists can raise the alarm or whatever but have no credibility, certainly not when the proposed solution is some kind of global authoritarian communism, and it always is.

Absolutely ridiculous. Climate scientists have credibility; climate science denying cranks who blather about communism have none.

> When things get really bad

Things are really bad.

Muted via my HN front end ... I won't be responding further.

New comment by jibal in "A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months"

jibal — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 23:26:26 +0000

You're talking nonsense. Among other things, had either the prosecution or the defense seen that the IP addresses didn't match, they would have pursued it further. "The IP addresses don't match but that just proves that the defendant tried to hide their IP address" is a ridiculous corrupt argument, one that a decent prosecutor would never make ... please do not ever serve on a jury.