Hacker News: keeganpoppen

New comment by keeganpoppen in "Coursera Bets $100M That Andrew Ng Can Do What Coursera Can't"

keeganpoppen — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:46:17 +0000

ng is a prodigious talent (and was a great professor in my experience), but… this is really quite, quite smelly.

New comment by keeganpoppen in "Supply and Demand Is Not What Most People Think"

keeganpoppen — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:42:06 +0000

i read this before the article and thought “alright it can’t be that bad”… honestly, you are letting them off easy. it’s like pedantry, but the dunning-kreuger kind.

New comment by keeganpoppen in "OpenAI’s amazing — but vastly oversold — new model Astra"

keeganpoppen — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:35:35 +0000

people who throw out “x is a fallacy” very seldom have anything interesting to say, and this point is no different. the thing is not released yet. there does not exist any easy way to communicate how strong any particular llm model is en toto, so people inevitably look for stories, metaphors, and the like to help explain the story. saying that it is “vastly oversold” is comically absurd for a model that has not been released yet, especially through the lens of a completely unfalsifiable framework for contextualizing it. here, i’ve got a “fallacy” for you: this whole post reeks of “no true scotsman”: it is bold to claim that the model is oversold in its abilities when it has racked up this many novel proofs before even being released widely, but hiding behind “that doesn’t mean it is good at ‘math, generally’” is absolute weasel language— it invites proof-by-example in a way more flagrant and devastating than anything the author points out about the discourse around the model itself.

New comment by keeganpoppen in "The myth of Snow Leopard"

keeganpoppen — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:29:23 +0000

i blinked. did i miss the part where this post had any content beyond the title calling it a “myth”?

New comment by keeganpoppen in "When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)"

keeganpoppen — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:04:37 +0000

wow those passes are absolutely gorgeous. no wonder to ias frere-jones is keen on them.

New comment by keeganpoppen in "Diátaxis"

keeganpoppen — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 01:50:12 +0000

yeah, the urge to turn this page into a skill and then just let it run loose on all my random vibe-coded side projects is very, very strong. seems great for that kind of thing.

New comment by keeganpoppen in "The session you cannot take with you"

keeganpoppen — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:57:59 +0000

wow this is such an excellent framing of something that i have not managed to think about or come across in the vast ocean of discourse about LLMs. i had not really thought about how explicitly they are designed to not have histories that are user-interpretable. it is really quite not unlike how Apple locks down iOS and MacOS-- there are UI/UX reasons for the choices the frontier models make, but that really is only part of the story, and these choices undeniably do conspire to make the resource more locked-down than it absolutely has to be. and the analogy to "people don't switch OSes every day, but the ability to switch OSes changes your relationship with the provider" is extremely apt.

New comment by keeganpoppen in "Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6"

keeganpoppen — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:34:25 +0000

ya im partial to oracle.ts xD

New comment by keeganpoppen in "Solving poker in custom WebGPU kernels"

keeganpoppen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 22:24:15 +0000

"LLMs are just fancy autocomplete" xD

New comment by keeganpoppen in "Why DNA damage from smoking and UV rays cause cancer in some but not others"

keeganpoppen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 22:23:29 +0000

trying to get off vaping, myself, and it is both "not that hard" and... a very sticky habit. good for you. was never a smoker, but that doesn't make it a good habit.

New comment by keeganpoppen in "We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447"

keeganpoppen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 22:20:48 +0000

yeah, they say stuff like this to humans all the time to motivate them xD

New comment by keeganpoppen in "Man seeks millions after being shot by police in game-related swatting incident"

keeganpoppen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:21:30 +0000

whoa. feel bad for the people of tuscon, because they didn't do anything wrong, but holy shit this case looks absolutely awful for the city and i hope they lose. big.

New comment by keeganpoppen in "Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub"

keeganpoppen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:09:20 +0000

hahahah yeah my company had sooooo many issues with this stuff and merge queue lately

New comment by keeganpoppen in "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making"

keeganpoppen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:08:05 +0000

ah, so the soft implication that you are simply smarter than me. fine. there's at least a 1/100,000 chance of that. no one forced you to be that smug and dismissive, though-- seems like a few traits that are fairly antithetical to learning. but i guess you don't need to learn, since you have already ascended to Enlightenment.

New comment by keeganpoppen in "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making"

keeganpoppen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:06:26 +0000

surely this is closer to the common experience with LLMs... i don't know how people don't see it for the miracle it is. it's like if God himself came down from the heavens and said "no one will ever die of hunger ever again, but you have to run 5 miles a week" and we all got bogged down in how hard it is to run 5 miles...

god, that analogy was awful. sorry. xD

New comment by keeganpoppen in "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making"

keeganpoppen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:04:42 +0000

well, they were 0x productive before, so they are technically inifinitely x more productive now. i guess. hah.

New comment by keeganpoppen in "AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making"

keeganpoppen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:03:22 +0000

that's a great point. i personally am toward the "i go to sleep and it does my work for me" side, but share the same confusion about how we went from 100x-0.1x programmers to 100000x-0.0001x ... vibe coders. to be clear: i am aware of what my side of the fence vs the other looks like, and i don't find anything about "meh iono it doesn't work that great for me" unreasonable at all.

New comment by keeganpoppen in "Making Postgres queues scale"

keeganpoppen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 21:00:25 +0000

everyone sure acts like postgres is some sort of thing that we discovered next to the antikythera mechanism on the sunken isle of atlantis. the "just get one big machine to do all of the stuff" scaling strategy remains undefeated, though. even if it is presented like it is anything but.

New comment by keeganpoppen in "The Economic Benefit of Refactoring"

keeganpoppen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:57:04 +0000

i can't wait for that one haha

New comment by keeganpoppen in "2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026"

keeganpoppen — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:55:40 +0000

that and 2x is "i'm 5'10" and i round up to 6'" low.