Hacker News: mannykannot

New comment by mannykannot in "Microscale Thermite Reaction"

mannykannot — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:39:01 +0000

I have something I want to remove rust from, so I have been thinking about sand blasting. Thus, this thought popped into my head: how spectacular would it be to use aluminum powder? (To be clear, I am not going to try this.)

My wife’s reaction to this was “You guys…” but I know she would absolutely want to watch if someone was going to try it.

New comment by mannykannot in "Microscale Thermite Reaction"

mannykannot — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:26:20 +0000

I would guess you need something rigid and dense to generate enough pressure, though I don’t know if that rules out your suggestion. It does not have to be a ball.

New comment by mannykannot in "Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants"

mannykannot — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:37:12 +0000

The claim made in your first sentence is actually a reason to be concerned.

New comment by mannykannot in "Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants"

mannykannot — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 14:32:38 +0000

The claim that disasters happen to older plants is not refuted by the observation that lessons learned are applied to the whole fleet.

One might object that there is selection bias in the original claim, due to the slowdown in construction of recent plants, but that is a separate issue. A more thorough investigation of the causes of all events leading to a significant degradation of safety margins would be needed to determine whether and how older designs are inherently more risky and whether that risk can be adequately mitigated given the constraints imposed by their design.

The fact that, prior to Chernobyl, there were several foreshadowing incidents with RBMKs which should have raised serious concerns, suggests that 'lessons learned' isn't much of a reason to be satisfied with the status quo.

New comment by mannykannot in "Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write"

mannykannot — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 03:08:44 +0000

Yes - a point supported the Vera benchmark: https://github.com/aallan/vera-bench

New comment by mannykannot in "Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write"

mannykannot — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 03:05:16 +0000

This will serve as an interesting empirical test, then: will LLMs do better with Vera than with Go or other languages? The testing so far seems inconclusive (https://github.com/aallan/vera-bench), but the authors make this interesting observation:

"No LLM has ever been trained on Vera. There are no Vera examples on GitHub, no Stack Overflow answers, no tutorials — the language was created after these models' training cutoffs. Every token of Vera code in these results was written by a model that learned the language entirely from a single document (SKILL.md [https://veralang.dev/SKILL.md]) provided in the prompt at evaluation time."

If LLMs do much better with Vera (or something like it) than with traditional languages, we may be entering a time when most machine-written code will be difficult for humans to review - but maybe that ship has already sailed.

New comment by mannykannot in "The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness"

mannykannot — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 02:47:34 +0000

Full disclosure: I didn't figure this out myself, I got it from Ms. Vale's review.

I agree that the term "welfare trap" is a loaded one. This looks to me to be a case of refusing to look through the telescope in case they might see something they do not want to.

New comment by mannykannot in "The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness"

mannykannot — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:33:31 +0000

On the other hand, an accurate digital simulation of a mechanical calculator really does calculate. The "a simulation is not the real thing" objection breaks down when the function is information processing, on account of information's substrate independence.

New comment by mannykannot in "The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness"

mannykannot — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 18:25:43 +0000

There's interesting commentary on this paper from Maggie Vale here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-194580145

One of her points is that there are various pesky consequences for AI companies if AI becomes to be seen as conscious, such as what the paper calls the "welfare trap": if AI systems are widely regarded as being conscious or sentient, they will be seen as "moral patients", reinforcing existing concerns over whether they are being treated appropriately. This paper explicitly says that its conclusion "pulls the field of AI safety out of the welfare trap, [allowing] us to focus entirely on the concrete risks of anthropomorphism [by] treating AGI as a powerful but inherently non-sentient tool."

New comment by mannykannot in "Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930"

mannykannot — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:14:59 +0000

I would guess that Ada Lovelace was completely written out of the story in 1930.

New comment by mannykannot in "Nobody Got Fired for Uber's $8M Ledger Mistake?"

mannykannot — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:09:39 +0000

I cannot, of course, speak about this particular incident, but a person inclined to skip procedures expressly implemented to avoid the problem which occurred, or who ignores clear warnings that a problem is developing, is a liability, not a trained asset.

New comment by mannykannot in "Bird brains (2023)"

mannykannot — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 02:14:34 +0000

I reckon that’s right (though maybe its mostly instinct rather than explicit worry), and I imagine there’s also the risk of being kicked out by a larger species looking for a nesting site.

New comment by mannykannot in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

mannykannot — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:54:54 +0000

The controller was not guilty of malfeasance, but clearing the trucks onto the runway with an airliner on short final was a mistake, no matter whatever else one could say about it.

New comment by mannykannot in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

mannykannot — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:08:18 +0000

"...routinely considered feasible..."

What we are seeing here is the normalization of deviance.

Death of a Strawman: The Epistemology of a Language Model

mannykannot — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:40:31 +0000

Article URL: https://mvaleadvocate.substack.com/p/death-of-a-strawman-the-epistemology

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47412532

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mannykannot in "Wikipedia was in read-only mode following mass admin account compromise"

mannykannot — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 18:03:15 +0000

People who use tools badly inflict bad results on other people, quite often far more so than they do so on themselves.

New comment by mannykannot in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

mannykannot — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 02:29:11 +0000

I find that physical activity promotes sound sleep.

Photons that are not there influence superconductivity

mannykannot — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 14:24:47 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/02/photons-that-arent-actually-there-influence-superconductivity/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47195744

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by mannykannot in "The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers"

mannykannot — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 13:51:43 +0000

With the consequence that disambiguation may be needed.

New comment by mannykannot in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

mannykannot — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 05:33:57 +0000

It might have been contingency planning: you don't need a weatherman...