Hacker News: lancebeet

New comment by lancebeet in "Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation"

lancebeet — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:50:25 +0000

I think his train of thought is "young graduates generally aren't anti-immigration, so if I insinuate they're anti-immigration if they disagree with me they will be convinced by my argument". I don't think we need to read much more than that into it.

New comment by lancebeet in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% workforce"

lancebeet — Fri, 08 May 2026 09:33:42 +0000

I don't think the mistakes in themselves are damaging. What seems damaging to me is that cf has, on multiple occasions, repeated the same or similar mistakes right after they made major mistakes. This makes it seem like they're not learning from mistakes. Regarding the success of their business model, I can't make a meaningful statement about it, but is that really a convincing argument? If a business is successful, does that automatically mean their product is good?

New comment by lancebeet in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce"

lancebeet — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:22:54 +0000

I think GPs point is that this is how they're trying to spin it, but they're not explicitly saying it, and there are doubts whether it's actually true. For outside observers it's difficult to simply ignore all the embarrassing outages that cf has experienced recently and just accept that the company has suddenly solved all their issues by using AI and firing people.

New comment by lancebeet in "California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws"

lancebeet — Sun, 03 May 2026 07:02:32 +0000

Maybe I expressed myself poorly. Generally, higher speed is associated with higher fatality rates, all else being equal. So, one would assume a highway without speed limits would cause lots of fatalities. Most people would probably be surprised to learn that this is not the case.

New comment by lancebeet in "California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws"

lancebeet — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:48:40 +0000

Hm, it's only something like 10% of German traffic fatalities that occur on the autobahn. And according to wikipedia, Germany doesn't rank high in terms of traffic fatalities, even by European standards. France has a similar number of highway deaths. I'm personally not a fan of the autobahn and especially not the unrestricted speed. It seems obvious that it should cause lots of fatalities, but the evidence for it just doesn't seem to be there.

New comment by lancebeet in "Sal Khan's AI revolution hasn't happened yet"

lancebeet — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 06:43:54 +0000

>In my interactions with my kids public school and their teachers, they're goal is ram content down their throat and test for retention, not foster an environment open to questions

Is that actually true though? Average American students (especially those in the public school system) are not excellent test takers, and they're even worse at rote memorization. If this is actually the goal they're not achieving that either.

New comment by lancebeet in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

lancebeet — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:14:29 +0000

I would "just" do C-B PgUp and then use vi-like movement keys like hj, gg/G etc., and q to escape the pager, but I realize now that I say it that it doesn't sound very convenient or discoverable.

New comment by lancebeet in "Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables"

lancebeet — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 14:14:01 +0000

Sorry, what are you implying here? That people burn lumber from Canada to heat their homes?

New comment by lancebeet in "Iran oil revenue soars as it's the only exporter out of Hormuz"

lancebeet — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 23:02:52 +0000

Blocking them would further increase the global oil price which is probably contrary to the administration's wishes.

New comment by lancebeet in "What 81,000 people want from AI"

lancebeet — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:15:32 +0000

This has to be intentional, right? To reassure people that front-end developers still have a job? The data is interesting but the site itself is a complete embarrassment for several reasons.

New comment by lancebeet in "The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ"

lancebeet — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 10:41:40 +0000

I think what you're describing is what people working with recommender systems call serendipity. Maximizing serendipity, while maintaining relatively high relevance/recommendation success rate, is supposedly a pretty difficult problem to solve. I'm not sure if LLMs have changed that.

New comment by lancebeet in "Google to Provide Pentagon with AI Agents"

lancebeet — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:50:18 +0000

This will sound snarky, so forgive me, but I honestly don't know the answer. Is this actually true? Is there a reliable source containing statistics on LLM compute usage that includes training vs inference for the whole market?

New comment by lancebeet in "How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?"

lancebeet — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 10:05:18 +0000

You obviously don't believe that AGI is coming in two release cycles, and you also don't seem to have much faith in the new models containing massive improvements over the last ones. So the answer to who is going to pay for these custom chips seems to be you.

New comment by lancebeet in "Nvidia and OpenAI abandon unfinished $100B deal in favour of $30B investment"

lancebeet — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:16:49 +0000

If benchmarks are fishy, it seems their bias would be to produce better scores than expected for proprietary models, since they have more incentives to game the benchmarks.

New comment by lancebeet in "Dario Amodei – "We are near the end of the exponential" [video]"

lancebeet — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 08:52:21 +0000

Well, he says

>To me, it is absolutely wild that you have people — within the bubble and outside the bubble — talking about the same tired, old hot-button political issues, when we are near the end of the exponential.

My interpretation is "It's pointless to discuss the old political issues, because they're not going to be relevant once AGI is achieved". So if he does believe in a plateau, it either contradicts his other prediction (that AGI will be reached in a year or two), or he believes it will plateau after AGI is already reached, which means it's kind of a pointless statement. The important thing w.r.t. all our problems being solved would the advent of AGI, not the plateau.

New comment by lancebeet in "Dario Amodei – "We are near the end of the exponential" [video]"

lancebeet — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:31:27 +0000

Is "the end of the exponential" an established expression? There's no singularity in an exponential so the expression doesn't make sense to me. To me, it sounds like "the end of the exponential part", meaning it's a sigmoid, but that's obviously not what he means.

New comment by lancebeet in "Case study: Creative math – How AI fakes proofs"

lancebeet — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 13:11:04 +0000

>Maybe what surprised me most is that the mistakes NanoBananna made are simple enough that I'm absolutely positive Karpathy could have caught them. Even if his physics is very rusty. I'm often left wondering if people really are true believers and becoming blind to the mistakes or if they don't care.

I've seen this interesting phenomenon many times. I think it's a kind of subconscious bias. I call it "GeLLMann amnesia".

New comment by lancebeet in "End of Japanese community"

lancebeet — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 06:58:17 +0000

Given the abysmal market share of Firefox today I think a large percentage of the remaining users do actually care.

New comment by lancebeet in "AI tools I wish existed"

lancebeet — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 07:17:04 +0000

This is really striking, isn't it? We've all certainly seen demos of things on this list or very similar things, and there are startups that have spent years and billions of dollars attempting to exploit existing LLMs to develop useful products. Yet most of the products don't seem to exist. The ones that you see in everyday life never seem to work nearly as well as the demos suggest.

So what's going on here? Do the products exist but nobody (or very few) uses them? Is it too expensive to use the models that work sufficiently well to produce a useful product? Is it much easier to create a convincing demo than it is to develop a useful product?

New comment by lancebeet in "Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash"

lancebeet — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 11:08:11 +0000

I'm not entirely convinced by the artists' argument, but this argument is also unconvincing to me. If someone steals from you, but it's a negligible amount, or you don't even notice it, does that make it not stealing? If the thief then starts selling the things they stole from you, directly competing with you, are your grievances less valid now since you didn't complain about the theft before?