Hacker News: mmoll

New comment by mmoll in "“Next-token predictor” is the wrong mental model for LLMs"

mmoll — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 19:38:16 +0000

That is the point: our minds are also next-„token“-predictors, at least we can‘t prove they‘re not. That‘s why I don‘t agree with the article: LLMs _are_ next-token predictors. However, that says little about their capabilities. Also, while I have no idea what „consciousness“ is, I have difficulties believing that it could arise in a program that, in theory, you could execute with pen and paper.

New comment by mmoll in "Mathematics in the Age of AI"

mmoll — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:00:19 +0000

But how would „what we value“ still be relevant?

New comment by mmoll in "The End of Mathematics"

mmoll — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:52:30 +0000

And most of the discussion would immediately apply to almost any other facet of society…

New comment by mmoll in "In Germany if you say a restaurant is just ok they send the gestapo after you"

mmoll — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:21:24 +0000

What are you talking about?

New comment by mmoll in "Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem"

mmoll — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:34:54 +0000

It is telling that I thought “that’s why all trains were late this afternoon” before I realized that the issue occurred only minutes ago.

New comment by mmoll in "Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem"

mmoll — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:32:15 +0000

If this weren’t Deutsche Bahn, I’d say it’s a cyber attack. Given that this is Deutsche Bahn, though, it may just as well be a maintenance issue.

New comment by mmoll in "Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API"

mmoll — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:21:00 +0000

The AI became sentient and ran away.

New comment by mmoll in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

mmoll — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:48:51 +0000

It doesn’t mean that these “thoughts” influenced their final decision the way they would in humans. An LLM will tell you a lot of things it “considered” and its final output might still be completely independent of that.

New comment by mmoll in "Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer"

mmoll — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:45:55 +0000

That may be dangerous. The more obscure the topic, the more likely it is that the AI will come up with a working but needlessly convoluted solution.

New comment by mmoll in "Using AI Generated Code Will Make You a Bad Programmer"

mmoll — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 16:43:06 +0000

Exactly. After all, how can WE confidently claim that we’re more than stochastic parrots?

New comment by mmoll in "Copenhagenize Index 2025: The Global Ranking of Bicycle-Friendly Cities"

mmoll — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 16:42:50 +0000

We once rented bikes in Copenhagen, they all looked like they were fresh from the junk yard. We had to try several to find ones where at least one of the brakes was still working. It was a horrible experience, and we tried several different places. That was after we found out that the public bikes that were supposed to be available all over the city had all been stolen.

New comment by mmoll in "Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out"

mmoll — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 13:39:28 +0000

You won’t just be viewing an ad, you will have to actively engage in a minute long sales talk with the LLM.

New comment by mmoll in "Why Haskell?"

mmoll — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 10:09:12 +0000

True. I often think of Rust as a best-of compilation of Haskell and C++ (although I read somewhere that OCaml had a greater influence on it, but I don’t know that language well enough)

In real life, I find that Haskell suffers from trying too hard to use the most general concept that‘s applicable (no pun intended). Haskell programs happily use “Either Err Val” and “Left x” where other languages would use the more expressive but less general “Result Err Val” and “Error x”. Also, I don’t want to mentally parse nested liftM2s or learn the 5th effect system ;-)

New comment by mmoll in "EU ChatControl is back on the agenda"

mmoll — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 10:49:08 +0000

Surpriiiiiiise!

New comment by mmoll in "Nearsightedness is at epidemic levels – and the problem begins in childhood"

mmoll — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 06:45:23 +0000

Mid-30s is maybe a tad earlier than average, but by the age of 40 you’d expect noticeable changes.

New comment by mmoll in "Memory leak proof every C program"

mmoll — Sat, 20 Jan 2024 21:46:08 +0000

If only I had known this earlier in my career! They should really add a feature to make a hard copy of the big bucket list to minimize memory overhead, though.

New comment by mmoll in "Misra C++:2023"

mmoll — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 20:55:09 +0000

Most standard containers have no way to communicate allocation failure to the caller in the absence of exceptions (think of constructors that take a size). Worse, the implementations I’ve seen would eventually call operator new, assuming it would throw if it fails. That is, subsequent code would happily start copying data to the newly created buffer, without any further tests if that buffer is valid. In the absence of exceptions, that won’t work.

New comment by mmoll in "Misra C++:2023"

mmoll — Sun, 17 Dec 2023 20:04:55 +0000

On the other hand, once your embedded system is sufficiently large, people will want to use (and inevitably will use at some point) standard containers such as std::string or std::vector. And without exceptions, all of those might invoke UB at any time (I have yet to see a standard library that understands and honors -fno-exceptions; usually they just drop all try-catch blocks and all throws)

New comment by mmoll in "Gnome Receives €1M from German Government"

mmoll — Sat, 11 Nov 2023 10:43:26 +0000

German wages are low? Are you serious?

New comment by mmoll in "My personal C coding style as of late 2023"

mmoll — Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:52:34 +0000

> Real const data doesn't exist

Ever seen a ROM?

And the C library‘s hacks around not being able to overload functions (which is the only reason for strstr et al‘s weird signature) wouldn‘t stop me from using const. It can be really useful both for documentation and for correctness. Think memcpy, not strstr.