Hacker News: jordanpg

New comment by jordanpg in "Astra for Law"

jordanpg — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:49:46 +0000

The lawyers I know are very fixated on the problem of hallucinated case citations which is amusing to me as a onetime programmer, since case citations have a well-defined syntax and would be relatively easy to check programmatically.

New comment by jordanpg in "LLMs are real, AI is fake"

jordanpg — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 19:27:42 +0000

In the podcast, Cal Newport repeats at least 20 times that agentic AI is nothing more than an LLM execution loop, as if this is some kind of trump card, taking for granted the usual stochastic parrot trope. At no point does he even consider the possibility that the LLM output itself is noteworthy. These people are permanently stuck in November 2022.

New comment by jordanpg in "Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board"

jordanpg — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:50:22 +0000

Simple? Just wait until a federal court finds OpenAI or Anthropic immune under Section 230 for something an agent does.

New comment by jordanpg in "The Amazon tax"

jordanpg — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 14:55:46 +0000

Also, even after you find precisely what you're looking for, there is no guarantee that what arrives will not be a cheap imitation or reduced-quality version of what you purchased.

New comment by jordanpg in "The Absurdity of Albert Camus"

jordanpg — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:41:48 +0000

Before reading The Stranger, I was headlong into the then-popular "New Atheism" movement, which came with a certain air of superiority of brainpower over the naive masses. But reading The Stranger had a profound impact on me, even before I knew anything more formal about existentialist philosophy.

It was an awakening: I began to understand that the problem with the world isn't that everyone needs to learn more physics and think more like me. The problem is that none of this stuff -- life -- really means anything; that's a hard pill for lots of people to swallow (understandably); and our stupid little lives are just 80 years or so of farting around and trying to forget about what is obvious (h/t to KV).

The book ultimately softened my overly critical views about religion and superstition and helped me mature into someone much more sympathetic to the various weird things that people think and do.

New comment by jordanpg in "Doctors die. It's not like the rest of us, but it should be (2016)"

jordanpg — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:32:03 +0000

Can confirm. Top of the article could be about my dad. Same flavor of cancer and everything.

New comment by jordanpg in "Astrophysicists Puzzle over Webb’s New Universe"

jordanpg — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 17:38:49 +0000

Have not read it yet, but recently researched this question and came to this book as a readable overview of the latest thinking in cosmology, Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins by Afshordi and Halper [1].

The book assumes a basic knowledge of physics and cosmology so it does not spend half the book reviewing basics like many pop physics books do.

[1] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo244963...

New comment by jordanpg in "AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules"

jordanpg — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 01:39:46 +0000

I suspect this is happening a thousand times a day right now. But it will be many years before the first test case gets to a federal appeals court. In the meantime, there will be some unknown tens of thousands of new patents granted that involved varying degrees of AI inventorship. The legal term of art is "reliance interest." I think courts will be extremely reluctant to rock the boat by the time this is litigated because AI will be as common as "Googling" by then.

New comment by jordanpg in "AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules"

jordanpg — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 01:33:53 +0000

Software patent law and AI inventorship are separate legal issues. For example, an AI could invent a mechanical device which is a more "meat and potatoes" kind of IP. But the question of whether the AI, or the human invoking the AI, should be listed on the patent is distinct.

New comment by jordanpg in "AI can't be listed as inventor on patent applications, Japan's top court rules"

jordanpg — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 16:44:12 +0000

The plaintiff is Stephen Thaler who has made a career of this litigation all over the world.

To my knowledge, he has notched only one win (i.e., granted patent) in South Africa, where patents are only cursorily examined [1].

The last word in the US is from the Federal Circuit a couple of years ago [2]. Same basic outcome: only a human being can be an inventor.

That said, the new Director of the USPTO has indicated that inventors should feel free to use AI however much they want as long as a human name is on the patent. However, it should be stressed that the Director's guidelines have not been litigated yet.

[1] https://artificialinventor.com/patent/

[2] https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/21-2347.OPINIO...

New comment by jordanpg in "Fox to buy Roku"

jordanpg — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:14:54 +0000

(simple, non-complicated consumer) Alternatives I'm aware of are:

Amazon Fire TV

Apple TV

Smart TV built-ins

Are there any others?

New comment by jordanpg in "New pancreatic cancer drug might open the door to much longer survival times"

jordanpg — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 23:22:16 +0000

They have absolutely no idea what they are destroying or why. An entire generation of scientists will be lost. It is breathtaking to watch what will surely be someday labeled as one of the greatest acts of intentional, national self-destruction ever.

New comment by jordanpg in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

jordanpg — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:45:31 +0000

I was just thinking about this. LLMs are nothing if not easy litmus tests for identifying bullshit jobs.

New comment by jordanpg in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

jordanpg — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:15:11 +0000

> If you had asked me this question years ago, I probably would have agreed with you.

It is breathtaking to consider how many strong opinions of the young are like this. Strong opinions voiced every day around here. Strong opinions that change with time and experience and osmosis.

New comment by jordanpg in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

jordanpg — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:45:36 +0000

> If LLMs were around when I was a student, I would've also used them to "speed up" my homework assignments then proceed to fail all my tests.

As a counterpoint, I was once a physics grad student. I didn't finish the PhD because at some point I discovered that I was not going to be the next Richard Feynman and this was too much for my ego at the time. But I think that if LLMs were available, I might have finished.

Part of my problem was that at some point the math transitioned from stuff I understood to symbols and notation that I knew how to manipulate but didn't really understand. LLMs could have helped bridge that gap.

On the other hand, it's hard to imagine I wouldn't have used it for Jackson, etc. but we got Jackson solutions from previous students and the internet anyway. Using LLMs probably would have been more effective, used correctly.

New comment by jordanpg in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

jordanpg — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:51:47 +0000

> The only possible answer in a republic is that people accountable to the political system are allocated that power.

It's not that what's happening in the US with respect to science funding is not legal, it's just dumb. And, no, it doesn't have to be this way or that way because the constitution says so.

There are probably millions of spending decisions happening daily that are delegated, by elected or appointed officials, to non-elected or non-appointed people. In the scientific realm, spending decisions have been largely delegated to scientists since the end of WW2, and it's been very effective.

New comment by jordanpg in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

jordanpg — Sat, 30 May 2026 03:05:45 +0000

That's a lovely thought but it assumes, as with so many other things about our republican form of government, that the political appointees are good faith actors, at least with respect to funding of science. There are many reasons to suspect that the goal here is not just control of funding, but the defenestration of science more broadly because scientific findings tend to conflict with assertions politicians would like to make. I would submit that people flying on planes, using cell phones and computers, and going to the doctor don't want that, even if they think they do.

New comment by jordanpg in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

jordanpg — Sat, 30 May 2026 02:48:03 +0000

Unfortunately, these are agency rules. Congress can intervene, but only with major legislative action, which is unlikely. There will be hearings and Senators will express great concern, but the Administration will probably be able to do whatever they want. If anything slows this down, it will be the courts.

WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants

jordanpg — Sat, 30 May 2026 01:39:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/white-house-proposes-new-rules-giving-political-appointees-final-say-on-research-grants/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48331511

Points: 316

# Comments: 619

New comment by jordanpg in "I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows"

jordanpg — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:03:30 +0000

> Second, the update utility got stuck. Just frozen. Couldn't open it. I hadn't tweaked anything, hadn't installed anything unusual, hadn't deviated from the vanilla setup. Day seven of a fresh Fedora install and the update tool was bricked.

"update tool was bricked"? What?