Hacker News: leoc

New comment by leoc in "AI, "Humanity", and Dr. Manhattan Syndrome: A Communications Intervention"

leoc — Tue, 19 May 2026 22:16:08 +0000

> A lover of men is very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of the Greek word carries something like a satire on itself. A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids.

G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi

New comment by leoc in "The sigmoids won't save you"

leoc — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:35:20 +0000

Hmm. What’s the general belief about Toby Ord’s “Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially?” https://www.tobyord.com/writing/hourly-costs-for-ai-agents among those who are well-equipped to judge? Is it seen as wrong or disproven or unlikely? Because if not—if indeed recent LLM capability advances have likely relied on increases in inference cost per run which can’t be much further sustained—then it seems remiss not to mention that if you point to those advances to claim that the exponential trend remains on track.

New comment by leoc in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

leoc — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:09:44 +0000

> Purely AI written systems will scale to a point of complexity that no human can ever understand and the defect close rate will taper down and the token burn per defect rate scale up and eventually AI changes will cause on average more defects than they close and the whole system will be unstable.

Wow, it’s true, AI really is set to match human performance on large, complex software systems! ;)

New comment by leoc in "Steve Jobs in Exile – New book on Steve Jobs’s years at NeXT Computer"

leoc — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:59:35 +0000

My "presumably" is whether the book recognises the extent to which NeXT was founded basically as an attempt to complete/reboot Apple's "Big Mac" project. The usual story you get is "something something '3M', and post-Apple Jobs decided it would be nice to do a workstation aimed at the educational market". In fact it's pretty clear that Jobs was persuaded to start NeXT after Rich Page (p. 195 in Isaacson), and IIRC also other people on the Big Mac team, begged him to provide a lifeboat for Big Mac.

New comment by leoc in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

leoc — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:26:03 +0000

(I am not an expert on anything.) One happy circumstance here is that while the RAM cartel is chasing Big AI's money today, in the medium term its self-interest probably makes it a supporter of local AI. A new, compelling reason to have 128GiB, 256GiB or more of VRAM on all your devices? You can be sure that the dollar signs are glowing in their eyes already. The less efficient use of VRAM by personal devies (any given device's VRAM will be mostly idle much of the time) tends to make it more attractive, all else being equal (though of course it isn't) compared to the centralised systems run by engineers and accountants striving all day to maximise ROI; and in any case, since the short-run supply constraints on RAM go away in the longer term, the RAM manufacturers will be able to supply both. My guess is that you can probably also also explain Apple's AI strategy (sit tight and wait for Moore's Law to make local AI more viable) and maybe even nVidia's (lay the groundwork for a gradual switch from selling shovels to the army to selling shovels at Home Depot over time, at least as a Plan B) in similar terms.

New comment by leoc in "Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated"

leoc — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:55:08 +0000

To be fair, there actually is an exception specifically for just this kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:BLPSELF... .

New comment by leoc in "Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged"

leoc — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:21:56 +0000

But remember: once again, don't simply get angry at Google the institution. Get angry at Page and Brin personally. They have the power to prevent this, a power they were careful to preserve when they gave Google its IPO. They are fully responsible for Google's choices here. But, partly because they aren't constantly jumping up and down drawing attention to themselves on social media, they've tended to escape the same personal scrutiny given to eg. Elon Musk. That needs to end.

New comment by leoc in "CARA 2.0 – “I Built a Better Robot Dog”"

leoc — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:04:54 +0000

As it so happens 'cara' https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cara#Irish is the Irish [Gaelic] word for 'friend' (probably related to words like Italian 'caro' etc.) so CARA is not a bad name for a robot dog!

New comment by leoc in "The 'Hidden' Costs of Great Abstractions"

leoc — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:36:53 +0000

I think you have misunderstood what I was saying. I didn't compare total productivity with high-touch manual work from a recruiting agency in the actually-existing 2026 to total productivity without that same manual work in the actually-existing 2026. I agree (or certainly find it plausible) that in our actually-existing 2026 total productivity is likely higher with the extra manual work from recruiters than without it. What I compared was total productivity with high-touch manual work from a recruiting agency in the actually-existing 2026 to total productivity, without that same extra manual work, in a hypothetical 2026 where modern (GPT-4-or-better) LLMs don't exist (or at least don't exist yet). That's the relevant comparison when it comes to asking the question "what impact have LLMs had on productivity?" The actually-having-existed 2019 or 2022 are probably a decent proxy for the hypothetical 2026 here.

New comment by leoc in "The 'Hidden' Costs of Great Abstractions"

leoc — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:18:49 +0000

All else being equal, the return of high-touch recruiting work is of course a reduction in industrial productivity and a negative contribution to economic growth. But it does generate more jobs! Put that in your predictions of AI’s economic impact and smoke it …

New comment by leoc in "Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser"

leoc — Sun, 03 May 2026 18:50:12 +0000

Some pages with more PostScript book recommendations and sometimes links (I'm no authority myself):

https://luc.devroye.org/lucbps.html

https://hepunx.rl.ac.uk/~adye/psdocs/Books.html

https://gist.github.com/jpluimers/9a50d0ba14fe975906ea8788a3...

New comment by leoc in "Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser"

leoc — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:43:14 +0000

For anyone who wants to type or paste into the Code textarea:

* https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~hayward/papers/BLUEBOOK.pdf The PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook (the "Blue Book") (principally) by Linda Gass and John Deubert, 1986 (ISBN 0-201-10179-3)

* https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf The PostScript Language Reference (third ed.—a later edition of the "Red Book") (principally) by Ed Taft, Steve Chernicoff and Caroline Rose, 1999 (ISBN 0-201-27922-8)

* https://connor.zip/resources/pdfs/adobe-green-book.pdf PostScript Language Program Design (the "Green Book") by (principally) by Glenn Reid, 1988 (ISBN 0-201-14396-8). A zipfile with Green Book code files: https://web.archive.org/web/20110613223722/http://partners.a...

(At first my retro-ps tab got itself into a state in which it would not run any code entered into the Code textarea, instead timing out and returning an error; and since page reload is soft-disabled you'll have to either force a reload or open a new tab. Also, since the Abobe sample code uses indentation extensively—for example the Blue Book's official "hello world" program is

  newpath
    144 72 moveto
    144 432 lineto
  stroke
  showpage

—it would be nice if the Code textarea handled Tab keyboard inputs. )

New comment by leoc in "Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey"

leoc — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:06:56 +0000

> I'd say all of those people have significantly different styles so I think Opus is relying heavily on topic and skewing towards very prolific writers in its guesses

In other words, that there's a bit of Akinator to how Claude is doing so well at identifying famous or somewhat-famous online writers. And of course it's not surprising that a machine-learning system will take every opportunity left open to it to "cheat". OTOH there are things like the "Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs" paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800 which seem to show that current LLMs really can deanonymise many or most ordinary posters based on prose style, though I'm not able to evaluate those claims myself. Do we know whether the LLM providers have actively tried to steer their (easily-accessible) systems away from being able or being willing to do mass deanonymisation?

New comment by leoc in "What async promised and what it delivered"

leoc — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:47:24 +0000

Thank you. So it's more or less running (certain specified) function calls in parallel? Sounds nice, but what happens to upward funargs? I assume first-class continuations are right out ...

New comment by leoc in "Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained"

leoc — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:14:40 +0000

The Apache Foundation used to step in in this kind of situation, didn't it? Thugh maybe pgbackrest isn't quite big and official enough to be the kind of software which Apache takes on, and one certainly hears (increasing?) grumbles about Apache's stewardship.

New comment by leoc in "Pgbackrest is no longer being maintained"

leoc — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:13:47 +0000

The Apache Foundation used to help with this sort of governance problem didn't it? Thugh maybe pgbackrest isn't quite big and official enough to be the kind of software which Apache takes on, and one certainly hears (increasing?) grumbles about Apache's stewardship.

New comment by leoc in "What async promised and what it delivered"

leoc — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 21:42:55 +0000

What should people read to learn about structured concurrency?

New comment by leoc in "There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning"

leoc — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 07:46:38 +0000

(‘Minimum’ is the singular of ‘minima’.)

New comment by leoc in "Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages"

leoc — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:11:11 +0000

Mind you, that suggests that the sentence is at least half-true even if "much more complex" is a big overstatement, since Rust, "modern" C++ and the later evolutions of C# are all relatively recent. (What would have compared to Ada in complexity back in the day? Common Lisp, Algol 68?)

As a matter of general interest, what features or elements of Ada make it particularly hard to compile, or compile well? (And are there parts which look like they might be difficult to manage but aren't?)

New comment by leoc in "Bring Back Idiomatic Design (2023)"

leoc — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:59:36 +0000

> First, what he calls "the desktop era" wasn't so much a desktop era as a Windows era - Windows ran the vast majority of desktops (and furthermore, there were plenty of inconsistencies between Windows and Mac).

That's overemphasising the differences considerably: on the whole Windows really did copy the Macintosh UI with great attention to detail and considerable faithfulness, the fact that MS had its own PARC people notwithstanding. MS was among other things an early, successful and enthusiastic Macintosh ISV, and it was led by people who were appropriately impressed by the Mac:

> This Mac influence would show up even when Gates expressed dissatisfaction at Windows’ early development. The Microsoft CEO would complain: “That’s not what a Mac does. I want Mac on the PC, I want a Mac on the PC”.

https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0184/ch6.x... It probably wouldn't be exaggerating all that wildly to say that '80s-'90s Microsoft was at the core of its mentality a Mac ISV, a good and quite orthodox Mac ISV, with a DOS cash-cow and big ambitions. (It's probably also not a coincidence that pre-8 Windows diverges more freely from the Mac model on the desktop and filesystem UI side than in regards to the application user interface.) And where Windows did diverge from the Mac those differences often ended up being integrated into the Macintosh side of the "desktop era": viz. the right-click context menu and (to a lesser extent) the old, 1990s Office toolbar. And MS wasn't the only important application-software house which came to Windows development with a Mac sensibility (or a Mac OS codebase).