Hacker News: lancebeet

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?

New comment by lancebeet in "China tells its AI leaders to avoid U.S. travel over security concerns"

lancebeet — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 07:21:08 +0000

I hear this type of statement often, but people rarely mention the scope or who the brain drainees are. In my experience, it's exceptionally rare that American talent comes to Europe compared to the opposite, and I see little reason why that would change in the near future. When it comes to Chinese individuals returning to China from the US, this isn't exactly traditional brain drain, and it's also something China has actively, sometimes aggressively, been pursuing the past decade or so.

New comment by lancebeet in "400 reasons to not use Microsoft Azure"

lancebeet — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 06:56:42 +0000

I'm a little confused by this post. Obviously it's easier to maintain a plain VM than managed services. That's why people are paying a lot more money to the cloud providers for managed services, so they don't have to do it themselves. What you're saying is that this is essentially a pointless endeavor? I don't think this statement is entirely uncontroversial, since managed services are the main reason for many companies to migrate to cloud.

New comment by lancebeet in "Sweden Investigates New Cable Break Under Baltic Sea"

lancebeet — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:15:35 +0000

Global connect (the company that owns and operates most data cables in the Baltic sea) is running tests with tamper detecting cables. They say they will be able to detect a whale at a distance of 80 kilometers. I assume the whale is just used as an example to demonstrate its sensitivity, since whales haven't been implicated in any of the previous cable breaks.

Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/ljusstrale-genom-kablar-k...

New comment by lancebeet in "Advent of Code 2024"

lancebeet — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 14:36:37 +0000

I might be mistaken but I believe the final day has only one puzzle, but the 50th star (a.k.a., the second star of December 25th) is given for having solved everything else. I don't think any puzzles are "locked".

New comment by lancebeet in "Why don't you move abroad?"

lancebeet — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 09:25:02 +0000

>Though secretly, it was to give hope to the students who were defeated by the education system and told “You can’t study Computer Science, because you didn’t know Carbon has a radioactive isotope.”

Forgive me if I'm being elitist here, but this seems like a strange example of outrageous admission requirements. I would have thought knowing about radiocarbon dating (which I'm assuming this is a reference to) is common knowledge (I believe it's in the standard curriculum for grades 7-9 in my country), so it doesn't seem like a completely unreasonable test question. If this is an example that the author uses from his or her own experience, it seems stranger still.

>Every evening, my brother and I would sit in front of an oil lamp and study, mostly maths and science.

New comment by lancebeet in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

lancebeet — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 09:19:57 +0000

It's interesting how bad the democrats seem to be at the game of winning elections. They continuously seem to pick bad candidates and poor strategies resulting in them losing the election when they seem to have had the general conditions for winning. This time, the elephant in the room is of course the late ousting of Joe Biden, but there were similar issues that (in hindsight at least) were obvious in the Clinton 2016 campaign. This pattern can be seen in other countries as well, where it's clear that one group knows how to play the game while other groups don't, but it's surprising to me that a massive organization like the democratic party wouldn't have streamlined this process.

It would be interesting to hear from someone more familiar with the inner workings of the democratic party why this is. I.e., if it's a cultural issue in the party, if it's economical, or if my view on this is completely off.