Hacker News: laichzeit0

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Wit, unker, Git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy"

laichzeit0 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 03:21:13 +0000

I must have missed the brief somewhere, but there was/is a very clear trend to replace the default male pronoun for gender neutrality with the female pronoun she. Just recently I noticed this in Judea Pearl’s Book of Why. When and why did this start happening? It feels so forced and unnatural. You can sense he’s trying to kiss someone’s ass or appease an authority. At least mix it up a bit at best if you truly give a crap.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Are We Idiocracy Yet?"

laichzeit0 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:34:47 +0000

I feel like there are clear signs, but either people have cognitive blind spots or are just obstinate. For example, you hear people complain that they've been for a bajillion interviews and still don't get hired (hint: the problem is you), or they're always single even though they go on countless dates (hint: the problem is you) or they're overweight and can't lose weight no matter what they try (hint: the problem is you). Maybe an inability to introspect yourself in an objective way? Maybe a deep seated belief that the problem cannot actually be _you_, it must be an external factor, so you seek that. Maybe you're not being gaslit, maybe the ever-present smell of shit really does emanate from under your shoe.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "The revenge of the data scientist"

laichzeit0 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 03:35:34 +0000

I don’t actually even know what people are hinting at when they say that LLMs replace the need for building custom models. Regression models? People are using LLMs instead of say building a Bayesian hierarchical model? That’s not possible. Time series modeling using an LLM? Also ridiculous. Recommender systems? Ok maybe, still utterly ridiculous and abysmally slow.

For anything NLP sure, it definitely wins. However, I’ve just recently used some big fancy OpenAI model to actually just label thousands of text data for me, just so I could build a classifier with CatBoost. Guess what, inference speed is at a guaranteed sub 100ms and it costs $0 in tokens. The”AI Engineer” solution here would be just run every classification request through an LLM.

AI Engineering is going to have the same problem we had when Data Science as a term arrived and you had every Statistician saying they’re just re-inventing everything that exists in statistics, poorly.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Autoresearch: Agents researching on single-GPU nanochat training automatically"

laichzeit0 — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 04:37:40 +0000

Well, not if you have AI reviewers…

It’s LLMs all the way down.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "GPT-5.4"

laichzeit0 — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 03:43:39 +0000

Like, bro, do you think 5.x is a drop in replacement for 4.1? No it obviously wasn’t, since it had reasoning effort and verbosity and no more temperature setting, etc.

There’s no way you can switch model versions without testing and tweaking prompts, even the outputs usually look different. You pin it on a very specific version like gpt-5.2-20250308 in prod.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "The Popper Principle"

laichzeit0 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:29:47 +0000

In The Laws you find: strict supervision of marriage age, mandatory procreation windows, state monitoring of reproduction, penalties for bachelors, public scrutiny of household conduct, drinking regulation, limits on wealth and inheritance, formal theology enforced by law, criminal penalties for impiety, special prisons for “atheists”, etc. it goes on and on. The Laws makes The Republic look like Disneyland to be honest.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton"

laichzeit0 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 13:08:07 +0000

Absolutely nuts, I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe. I could list several anecdotes here where Claude has solved issues for me in an autonomous way that (for someone with 17 years of software development, from embedded devices to enterprise software) would have taken me hours if not days.

To the nay sayers... good luck. No group of people's opinions matter at all. The market will decide.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "I'm not worried about AI job loss"

laichzeit0 — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 07:08:35 +0000

All these so-called safe jobs still depend on someone being able to afford those services. If I don't have a job, I can't go see the vet, the fact that no one else can do the vets job is irrelevant at such a point.

I would like to know if there's some kind of inflection point, like the so-called Laffer curve for taxes, where once an economy has X% unemployment, it effectively collapses. I'd imagine it goes: recession -> depression -> systemic crisis and appears to be somewhere between 30-40% unemployment based on history.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back"

laichzeit0 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 17:35:50 +0000

I’m sure programmers who wrote their code on punch cards felt the same. Then programmers who wrote in assembler felt the same about high-level languages and optimising compilers.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality"

laichzeit0 — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:57:05 +0000

Unfortunately, this is an observational study and when you get to the confounding part, they kind of shrug their shoulders and say “well, we included a bunch of covariates that should reduce make the bias go away”, but there’s no causal diagram so we have no idea how they reasoned about this. If you’ve read even something layman friendly like Pearl’s Book of Why you should be feeling nervous about this.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Ilya Sutskever, Yann LeCun and the End of “Just Add GPUs”"

laichzeit0 — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 03:55:37 +0000

It’s also weird to think that if there is extraterrestrial contact, it will most definitely happen in the specific land mass known as the United States and only the US government will be collecting said technology and hiding it. Out of the entire planet, contact is possible only in the USA.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Is Matrix Multiplication Ugly?"

laichzeit0 — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:40:26 +0000

Well function composition f(g(x)) is not the same as g(f(x)) and when you represent f and g as matrices relative to some suitable set of basis functions then obviously AB and BA should be different. If the multiplication was defined any different, that wouldn’t work.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Short Little Difficult Books"

laichzeit0 — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 04:12:02 +0000

Rudin’s Principles of Mathematical Analysis aka Baby Rudin. Small, short, terse yet has brought many undergraduates to tears.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Iceland reports the presence of mosquitoes as climate warms"

laichzeit0 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 03:47:31 +0000

There were similar such comments during Covid where people were saddened that people were still debating whether it was a lab-leak or not. Dogmatism, on which ever side, unless maybe in a field like mathematics which is entirely deductive, is not good.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Vijaye Raji to become CTO of Applications with acquisition of Statsig"

laichzeit0 — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 06:01:23 +0000

Tell me you've never used Statsig without telling me you've never used Statsig. It's an online controlled experiment platform. You know like when you want to figure out if a blue button gets more clicks than a red button or a green button, and you want to avoid the situation of some tech-bro calculating the average clicks on all 3 groups and going "this one is higher, so it must be better" because they have zero background in statistics and don't know how to correct for multiple comparisons or what power analysis is, etc.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "IQ tests results for AI"

laichzeit0 — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 14:06:02 +0000

I read the book Bell Curve years ago, but I remember the analysis being that the found statistically significant differences between race and IQ. The authors argued that individual differences in IQ within a population are strongly influenced by genetics (heritability estimates around 40–80%). They emphasized that this doesn’t mean IQ is fixed, but that genes play a large role in explaining why individuals differ. Their ultimate policy argument was less about race per se, and more about what society can realistically do. They argued that large-scale social programs (e.g., Head Start, income redistribution, affirmative action) had limited power to reduce cognitive inequality or close gaps, because much of IQ variation was resistant to environmental manipulation. On the genetic vs. environmental debate about group differences, their ultimate claim was: we don’t know, but genetics might contribute, and pretending otherwise could be harmful to honest policy discussion.

But really, if you can't go about doing more studies on race and IQ, we'll never really know. It's a valid and legitimate scientific question

New comment by laichzeit0 in "IQ tests results for AI"

laichzeit0 — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 15:06:59 +0000

So were their claims falsified?

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Python performance myths and fairy tales"

laichzeit0 — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 06:14:01 +0000

I use Python 90% of my day and I can't say I like it or hate it or care about it at all. I use it because it has all the libraries I need, and LLMs seem to know it pretty well too. It's a great language for people that don't actually care about programming languages and just want to get stuff done.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Writing an LLM from scratch, part 13 – attention heads are dumb"

laichzeit0 — Mon, 12 May 2025 03:54:10 +0000

Neither are most functions, but locally, at a point, a linear approximation works just fine in practice.

New comment by laichzeit0 in "Derivation and Intuition behind Poisson distribution"

laichzeit0 — Sat, 03 May 2025 12:34:52 +0000

But this just gives the definition of the distribution. No intuition about where it might have come from, it just appears magically out of thin air and shows some properties it has in the limit.