Hacker News: mordymoop

New comment by mordymoop in "LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents"

mordymoop — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 18:10:36 +0000

I looked up his achievements to double check my understanding before writing my comment. Convnets are regarded as his headline achievement. Everything else is basically incremental. Note that I am not calling him some kind of fraud or moron. He is “just” a normal academic, a pretty smart guy who did research in his field for decades. Many thousands of people have similarly impressive resumes. This does not mean they should be deferred to.

New comment by mordymoop in "LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents"

mordymoop — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 17:48:05 +0000

See sibling comments: Modern AI is AGI according to any reasonable definition from prior to 2016.

AGI doesn’t mean superintelligence.

New comment by mordymoop in "LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents"

mordymoop — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 17:46:51 +0000

Modern AI is AGI according to any reasonable definition from prior to 2016.

New comment by mordymoop in "LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents"

mordymoop — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 17:46:03 +0000

Most problems are actually not that hard; most everything is actually mainly a result of right place, right time. If I hadn’t been the one to do my PhD research, someone else would have. Very few people are actually paradigm-shifting geniuses. This is fine. Good, even. But it does imply that people who are early to a field shouldn’t generally be deferred to. If anything, they’re more likely to have outmoded opinions.

New comment by mordymoop in "LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents"

mordymoop — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 17:43:14 +0000

Modern AI would be considered AGI by anyone having this conversation in 2016.

New comment by mordymoop in "LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents"

mordymoop — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 17:24:11 +0000

I think it’s time to consider that maybe being a venerable graybeard of AI just means you happened to be early to the party. Most of the “breathtaking” innovations of the early pioneers of the field are obvious solutions that anyone would have thought of when faced with the problems they encountered. LeCun’s primary contribution was Convnets, which is almost literally just “what if we organized ANNs in a way similar to how animal visual neurons are organized?”

In other words, I’m kind of tired of having to hear the opinions of dudes whose claim to fame was being at the right place at the right time. I’d rather hear from people who correctly predicted 10 years ago that AGI would arrive by 2027 (of which there are many) than people who continue to insist that it somehow won’t.

New comment by mordymoop in "Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats"

mordymoop — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:24:28 +0000

I would phrase it slightly differently.

The companies who control the compute resources will ~always control the greatest "amount" of intelligence. They can lease that intelligence out, or they can use it themselves. Currently the "total amount of intelligence" or perhaps "total amount of ability-to-do-stuff" is split between humans and machines at a ratio that means it still makes sense to lease the machine intelligence to the human intelligence - plus there are things that humans are still better at. In maybe 2 more years that will stop being true, due to the availability of more physical compute resources, and far greater model intelligence per unit compute. At that point, the point at which the substantial majority of ability-to-do-stuff is controlled by machine intelligence, then the entities who control all the compute will control all the ability-to-do-stuff, i.e. "the economy."

So I agree that the core product is not long-term sustainable as a product but this is because the whole world will look so different in the near future that the framing of intelligence as a "product" breaks down.

Open-Weight models, of course, are fine and useful, but if you have one million times less compute than your competitor (the lab), then you're not really playing the same game. You can only tackle the problems that they have decided they're not interested in.

New comment by mordymoop in "OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems"

mordymoop — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 04:30:00 +0000

I don’t see how assuming they made a normal kind of dumb mistake, instead of pursuing a criminal conspiracy, is giving them the benefit of the doubt. It’s just using reason.

New comment by mordymoop in "OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems"

mordymoop — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:45:29 +0000

I keep seeing this take, but it’s more likely that they just underestimated their models’ capabilities and/or overestimated their own safeguards.

Ever single person who uses LLMs on a daily basis has a fun story about their agent “taking the initiative” to do something beyond what was asked for. Looking for shortcuts to solve the problem is commonplace LLM behavior. It’s what you would expect to happen if you have an agent a hard task and unlimited runway. No need to suppose a conspiracy, this outcome was predictable the whole time.

New comment by mordymoop in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

mordymoop — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:55:21 +0000

In my callow youth I was responsible for a couple of fender benders and the cause was always a highly imperfect understanding of the appropriate stopping distance of my car. This obviously gets worse, the worse the conditions are. My Tesla never makes this kind of mistake.

New comment by mordymoop in "Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)"

mordymoop — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:48:56 +0000

Does this mean the Galactic Empire and the Imperium of Man are also not empires?

New comment by mordymoop in "Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence"

mordymoop — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:01:06 +0000

To your last point, it can’t possibly be sustainable, so it reads to me more as a short term FUD attack on American dominance in this space. It might have cost them half a billion dollars to train this model, and they’re going to make nothing off it. How many more times can they afford to do that? It’s going to get more expensive to train AI going forward, not less.

I also have a suspicion that the benchmark numbers are not real.

New comment by mordymoop in "Claude Tag"

mordymoop — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 18:07:39 +0000

This happened at Google because there aren’t enough engineers to maintain all these services. This situation may not apply to Anthropic, as they can set up features to be maintained in perpetuity by Claude.

New comment by mordymoop in "But yak shaving is fun (2019)"

mordymoop — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:29:51 +0000

Personally, I find it difficult to competently reason about a system unless I've built my own version of that system. So if you make a practice of building your own versions of things, you end up with a more robust mental library of how stuff works. For this reason, I've never seen yak shaving as a waste of time. The yak shaving was at least 50% about loading the abstractions into my brain fully.

New comment by mordymoop in "Claude Fable 5: mid-tier results on coding tasks"

mordymoop — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 05:14:17 +0000

This seems like the obvious correct frame of mind with which to approach these tools. If it works for three hours on a task that would have taken me three work weeks, and 20% of the time it gets the task wrong, then I can just ask it to do it again with adjusted instructions. It will be much more likely to get it right the same time, and I’m still ahead of where I would have been by 14 days and 2 hours.

New comment by mordymoop in "Project Glasswing: An Initial Update"

mordymoop — Sat, 23 May 2026 02:29:46 +0000

This also describes the work of software engineers.

New comment by mordymoop in "Open source Kanban desktop app that runs parallel agents on every card"

mordymoop — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:17:41 +0000

https://github.com/moridinamael/platespinner

New comment by mordymoop in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

mordymoop — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:38:01 +0000

Over time I've found that by far the highest ROI move in a consciousness debate is to simply ask "Oh, interesting. How do you know that?" and watch everyone on all sides flounder. It's one of the few places where otherwise smart people make confident statements that they don't even realize they can't support until they're asked to try. The intuitions are so strong that they seem to swamp reason.

This has caused my own position, over time, to be a deep agnosticism about what's actually going on.

New comment by mordymoop in "Oil is near a price that hurts the economy"

mordymoop — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:37:10 +0000

This only works up to a certain volume. The world economy requires about 38 billion barrels of oil per year. If you processed 100% of all grain, sugar crop, tuber and oilseed on Earth into liquid fuel, leaving zero for food, you'd get about 6 billion barrels of oil-equivalent in liquid fuels. Since it has to compete with food, the actual number would be much lower. It's not even close to being able to sustain our civilization.

New comment by mordymoop in "Oil is near a price that hurts the economy"

mordymoop — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 18:53:51 +0000

Interestingly, in inflation-adjusted terms, oil is currently at a price level lower than the price level that was maintained from 2006-2014.