Hacker News: kenjackson

New comment by kenjackson in "The Download: why AI's latest breakthroughs and fears may be more hype than rea"

kenjackson — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:33:11 +0000

She isn’t as big on P(DOOM), but she does worry about things like biological weapons or autonomous war vehicles. Her take is that they are worse than useless, but can be actively harmful.

New comment by kenjackson in "The Download: why AI's latest breakthroughs and fears may be more hype than rea"

kenjackson — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:21:55 +0000

It’s seems Timnit more thinks it’s dangerous (and she may be right). Emily may more be caught up in years of linguistic domain expertise that AIs seem to have just leaped over.

New comment by kenjackson in "Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence"

kenjackson — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:17:47 +0000

In fairness this is the boring stuff for a lot of people. :-)

New comment by kenjackson in "GPT-6 Astra Solves a WWI German Radio Cipher"

kenjackson — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:24:28 +0000

Turns out that humans aren’t great at comprehensively consistently searching known search spaces.

New comment by kenjackson in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

kenjackson — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:20:31 +0000

Can someone post an event poster that they think is incredible? These posters all look fine to me, but the comments seem to know much better ones - but at least in my memory I can’t recall any much better.

New comment by kenjackson in "Microsoft exec called AI scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history'"

kenjackson — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:08:00 +0000

"How do people not understand that some laws only make sense at a certain scale? "

Honestly, this is because its something that is basically never discussed or reasoned about. The closest I can think of is "personal use vs commercial use". But I'd love to see more about how to reason about how laws change at scale.

New comment by kenjackson in "Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter"

kenjackson — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:50:19 +0000

> this is ABSOLUTELY not how actual mathematicians see their field

While this might be true, I think this is the big pivot that will need to happen. Math, as a human endeavor, will all be applied. We will use LLMs to do the math and discover the math, and humans will apply it to whatever problem they are working on (likely using another LLM to integrate it).

New comment by kenjackson in "I Don't Like LLMs"

kenjackson — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:44:20 +0000

How does 1password get replaced with a Google search? I assume he built his own 1password system...

New comment by kenjackson in "I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea"

kenjackson — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:18:32 +0000

There's a key phrase you may have missed.

"So the plants crossed over and started moving east along the coast and up into the interior. Beyond that point, there were no merchants. But when a woman married into the next clan over, she took cuttings from her family’s garden with her."

The key phrase is "Beyond that point", where that point is up into the interior where there were no merchants. That's when marriage took over.

New comment by kenjackson in "A beginning for mathematics"

kenjackson — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:13:20 +0000

If the point of math is understanding then maybe our incentive structure is wrong. Maybe it should be teaching the concepts to as many people as possible rather than just continuing to write papers that 10 people in the world understand, which is the current state of a lot of math.

New comment by kenjackson in "A Beginning for Mathematics"

kenjackson — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 19:47:16 +0000

But one of the things AI also excels in is summarizing and can do so hierarchically. One of my favorite things to do with a concept I'm new at is "ELI5" then "explain like I'm a high school student" then "explain like a bright undergrad in XYZ" then "explain to a working professional in this domain". It's a lot of steps, but I've found it very effective (for me) to learn with -- and I've done something similar with code and math (although not math proofs -- I'm not a mathematician). But my point is that I think we can use AI to also teach us these proofs they're building in a way that I don't understand today about human proofs.

If we use AI well here we could actually understand math much better than we do now.

New comment by kenjackson in "Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher"

kenjackson — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 14:34:28 +0000

Best is a relative statement of quality. And in this case reflects the lack of alternatives more than anything else. But if there are better please let me know.

New comment by kenjackson in "Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout"

kenjackson — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 14:32:47 +0000

Maybe I have been. And how was Jaguar impacted? I haven’t seen a Jaguar ad in a decade, and almost as long one of their cars.

New comment by kenjackson in "Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher"

kenjackson — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:55:50 +0000

It does appear there have been some people who have looked at this before but it’s unclear how many(here’s an example of a request from readers in 1927 https://toebes.com/Flynns/Flynns-19270813.htm).

That said there is another controversy brewing with this that is best summarized here: https://vera-wren.github.io/posts/2026-09-11-the-key-is-a-pr...

New comment by kenjackson in "Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout"

kenjackson — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 11:57:18 +0000

Honestly, I suspect most people will have no idea about these ads. I know I don’t.

New comment by kenjackson in "Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout"

kenjackson — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 11:43:33 +0000

Yes the Sketcher slip ons have been a game changer. Also their shoe laces seem to be constructed so that the knot doesn’t untie over time. I had a single knot lace that stayed intact over four months of daily wear.

Most comfortable shoes ever? Maybe not. But probably top 5-10 in my lifetime.

New comment by kenjackson in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

kenjackson — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 20:05:41 +0000

Yes. I forgot about that section. That is probably the one thing that the AI companies can and should do better on.

New comment by kenjackson in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

kenjackson — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:13:58 +0000

I didn't know this article was about that issue at all. Yeah, if the issue is properly citing work then yes, OpenAI needs to do that. But the article read like it was tackling a completely different issue.

New comment by kenjackson in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

kenjackson — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:48:51 +0000

"how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place."

That sounds like an "us problem", not an AI or OpenAI/Anthropic problem.

New comment by kenjackson in "Feeling Sad about AI"

kenjackson — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:24:30 +0000

Good essay. The author seems to recognize his hypocrisy and why there won't be a lot of sympathy from society.

As someone who wrote his first program in 1980, I've actually been really excited about AI. This morning I already wrote two web apps for my kids. I was never a web developer, so I most of the dev work I did was in the service of backends or low level stuff -- but I rarely ever connected it to anything I could use day to day.

Now I write programs daily that I use. An example from this morning, my son is working through a workbook, but the answers are all on one page, but its hard to look at an answer and not see other answers. So I made a simple web page where you give the problem number and it gives you the answer. Super simple, but ended up being exactly what he needed. I'm finding that I'm just crafting up these 5 minute to 60 minute projects several times per day. Things where in the past I'd just say, "too bad" -- now I'm like... "hmm... what does a solution to this look like?!"

So I'm not writing much code any more, but I don't know if I'm having any less fun.