Hacker News: jph00

New comment by jph00 in "System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]"

jph00 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:32:52 +0000

Yeah this has always been the glaring blind spot for most of the "AI Safety" community; and most of the proposals for "improving" AI safety actually make these risks far worse and far more likely.

New comment by jph00 in "Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft"

jph00 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 08:19:46 +0000

GPL was created as a workaround for copyright - it wouldn’t have been needed if there wasn’t copyright. There are complex arguments both for and against copyright and there’s no reason to simply assume it must always be just as now even as circumstances change.

New comment by jph00 in "We should revisit literate programming in the agent era"

jph00 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:07:01 +0000

Nearly all my coding for the last decade or so has used literate programming. I built nbdev, which has let me write, document, and test my software using notebooks. Over the last couple of years we integrated LLMs with notebooks and nbdev to create Solveit, which everyone at our company uses for nearly all our work (even our lawyers, HR, etc).

It turns out literate programming is useful for a lot more than just programming!

New comment by jph00 in "We Will Not Be Divided"

jph00 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:41:18 +0000

This is exactly the thinking that has characterized responses to new sources of power through history, and has been consistently used to excuse hoarding of that power. In the end, enlightenment thinking has largely won out in the western world, and society has prospered as a result.

Centralizing power is dangerous and leads to power struggles and instability.

New comment by jph00 in "We Will Not Be Divided"

jph00 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 02:38:27 +0000

In the alternative, asymmetry is guaranteed.

When you only allow gov and big tech access to powerful AI, you create a much more dangerous and unstable world.

New comment by jph00 in "Fast KV Compaction via Attention Matching"

jph00 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:26:47 +0000

Yes there is. Lots of researchers are more interested in making a contribution to societal flourishing than in making incredible sums of money. That’s why there’s still lots of top AI researchers in academia.

New comment by jph00 in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

jph00 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:09:11 +0000

llms.txt files have nothing to do with crawlers or big LLM companies. They are for individual client agents to use. I have my clients set up to always use them when they’re available, and since I did that they’ve been way faster and more token efficient when using sites that have llms.txt files.

So I can absolutely assure you that LLM clients are reading them, because I use that myself every day.

New comment by jph00 in "Breaking the spell of vibe coding"

jph00 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 23:41:10 +0000

It's not a mistake. It's correct, and is a excellent way to present this information.

New comment by jph00 in "Breaking the spell of vibe coding"

jph00 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 23:38:06 +0000

> I don’t know how to trust the author if stuff like this is wrong.

She's not wrong.

A good way to do this calculation is with the log-ratio, a centered measure of proportional difference. It's symmetric, and widely used in economics and statistics for exactly this reason. I.e:

ln⁡(1.2/0.81) = ln⁡(1.2)-ln⁡(0.81) ≈ 0.393

That's nearly 40%, as the post says.

New comment by jph00 in "Polis: Open-source platform for large-scale civic deliberation"

jph00 — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:48:15 +0000

The x.com/twitter "Community Notes" feature is based on this algorithm, BTW.

(Disclaimer: I'm on the board of the org that runs Polis.)

Tool Shaped Objects

jph00 — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 01:47:56 +0000

Article URL: https://minutes.substack.com/p/tool-shaped-objects

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46983900

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by jph00 in "Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS"

jph00 — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:57:40 +0000

They rarely are IO constrained.

New comment by jph00 in "Why is the sky blue?"

jph00 — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:36:48 +0000

No, your job is to help your reader get to the end of the text. That means writing in a way that most of your audience finds compelling, readable, and not intimidating.

Not all readers are the same, so you will fail at your job for some readers.

But few readers are emotionless automatons that need nothing but dry technical content, unless it’s a topic they are very motivated to understand.

New comment by jph00 in "Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS"

jph00 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:51:28 +0000

This is not due to slowness of the file system. Native ntfs tools are much faster than Unix ones in some situations. The issue is that running Unix software on windows will naturally have a performance impact. You see the same thing in reverse using Wine on Linux. Windows uses a different design for IO so requires software to be written with that design in mind.

New comment by jph00 in "2025 was the third hottest year on record"

jph00 — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:04:25 +0000

Obviously what matters is how much of the world’s products they produce - especially products that require high energy input. I can’t imagine why you think per capita is the appropriate statistic to compare.

This has already been pointed out to you in this discussion, so it seems you are not actually engaging with the information you’re being provided with for some reason.

New comment by jph00 in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

jph00 — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 18:55:30 +0000

I got one of these stupid emails too. I’m guessing it spammed a lot of people. I’m not mad at AI, but at the people at this organisation who irresponsibly chose to connect a model to the internet and allow it to do dumb shit like this.

New comment by jph00 in "Using LLMs at Oxide"

jph00 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 06:09:02 +0000

It reads exactly like all his writing over many years afaict. Which is to say - it reads well. Just because someone is clear, thoughtful, and thorough, does not make them an AI. AI writing is actually quite different to this.

New comment by jph00 in "Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?"

jph00 — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 01:03:02 +0000

Your request to read charitably is not supported by your followup of cartoonish straw man questions.

You are using rhetorical trickery to make a point rather than engaging in honest dialog.

New comment by jph00 in "Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?"

jph00 — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 01:00:39 +0000

You misunderstand how neurodivergence is be handled in education. It isn't a single diagnosis, and does not have a single accommodation. We use a catch-all word because it makes it easier to talk about as a collection of issues, but that's not how it's diagnosed or treated.

If you would find wearing noise blocking ear muffs, or sitting on a bouncy chair, or using a typing instrument instead of writing, improves your performance on a test, then yes that should be permitted.

(I do also think it would be a good idea if people had longer for many tests or tests had less on them. That kind of speed is rarely an important part of real world workplaces so those tests are rewarding low-value skills.)

New comment by jph00 in "Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?"

jph00 — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 22:18:03 +0000

You incorrectly drew an implication. The authors words only actually imply that some accommodations are still needed, not that they are the same accommodations.

This conclusion is obvious given that the underlying condition is not curable.