Hacker News: mppm

New comment by mppm in "AI use leads UC Berkeley math professor to see 'no point' in grading homework"

mppm — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 22:01:54 +0000

Only if you were planning to scrape by. If you actually know the material (the thing the exam is supposed to determine), you should do fine, and any good or bad luck will tend to average out by the time you graduate. Besides, there really aren't any alternatives left. Completed homework had some weak-ish signal for a while, but now it doesn't.

New comment by mppm in "Kimi K3.1 scores 55 on Artificial Analysis, placed on the Pareto line"

mppm — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 20:19:17 +0000

It's been suggested elsewhere that the AA-Omniscience benchmark [1] is more representative than the rest. It puts K3.1 about 6 months behind the frontier and the new version of DS 4.1-flash about 12 months. That roughly lines up with my gut feeling as well, at least when it comes to the trickier problems. Still rather impressive, but not quite frontier.

1. https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience

New comment by mppm in "Tesla Roadster"

mppm — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:59:22 +0000

The inspiration from the F35 seems to be quite literal. Spent a lot of time and money making vertical takeoff happen, but forgot to give the vehicle any useful capability once it's actually in the air.

New comment by mppm in "How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments"

mppm — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 09:36:17 +0000

I've had the same experience, and likewise I have no idea what to do.

Or rather, I do have ideas, but they do require substantial restructuring. E.g.:

1) Strict, in-person (no exceptions), electronics-free exams with written and oral portion.

2) Transition to guided independent learning: students are given written materials and recommended exercises to study. They are shown how to use AI assistants productively. Instead of lectures, there are scheduled discussions, where students can ask questions and listen to additional explanations from the lecturer. They can also seek feedback for completed exercises. However, none of this contributes to grades in any way.

With such an incentive realignment, I think it's possible that higher education could be salvaged. But... apart from general institutional inertia, there is also the political angle standing in the way. Everybody needs a degree in the "developed economy", and the above changes are basically the opposite of the nobody left behind policy that enables half the population to attain one...

New comment by mppm in "Apple Watch Series 12"

mppm — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 06:20:12 +0000

> On what legal footing does this recap feature stand?

It's not a crime if you do it with AI.

New comment by mppm in "How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?"

mppm — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 07:13:49 +0000

I have stopped reading Ed Zitron quite a while ago because of his long-winded and polemic style. But counting his failed predictions is maybe not that useful, in the sense that his core thesis is really just the AI Bubble. While it hasn't burst, all of his predictions remain wrong; when (if) it does, he'll have been right. Trying to guess the exact time or failure mode (whether it's open models or corporate sticker shock or a bond crisis) is a fool's errand when there are so many powerful actors all-in on keeping up appearances. Exposing the financial and corporate shenanigans of the AI world is nonetheless useful. I just wish someone would do it in a more level-headed way.

New comment by mppm in "Over 5,200 Ebola cases recorded in Congo"

mppm — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 11:03:50 +0000

Note to self and others who have read Richard Preston's "Hot Zone": The 1989 Reston (US) incident was NOT caused by a single-base mutation of Ebola, but by a distinct monkey virus. Preston seems to have made that up to dramatize events.

New comment by mppm in "The Benchmarkpocalypse"

mppm — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:44:22 +0000

Cheating and overfitting, as discussed in the article, are the most obvious problems with benchmarking LLMs. But there is also the aspect that, at least for closed models, the tokens still have to be sent to the provider's servers for inference. This makes the holdout set not as held out as it may appear. OpenAI and Antropic probably don't care about your private set of regex benchmarks, but for the headline "closed" benchmarks, I'd be surprised if they haven't collected a nice representative set of "holdout" problems to be examined at leisure.

New comment by mppm in "OpenAI loses trademark dispute at EU court"

mppm — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 20:52:32 +0000

> OpenAI had argued that the word "open" has multiple possible meanings and that "OPENAI" is a coined term without a fixed meaning.

Duh. The open in OpenAI isn't supposed to mean open. We've all been complaining about nothing.

New comment by mppm in "The bottleneck might be the air in the room"

mppm — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 12:55:44 +0000

... which is entirely unsurprising given that exhaled air is about 50.000 ppm CO2 and can vary by several 10.000s depending on depth and rate of breathing. I actually consider the recent wave of findings that CO2 levels as low as 500-1000 ppm measurably affect cognitive performance and well-being to be a great example of how you can prove literally anything with statistics and a sufficiently small sample size.

New comment by mppm in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

mppm — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 07:12:54 +0000

This is cute, but here is the result I got by always clicking the longest answer, or the first one if two seemed equal:

Scientific Estimate: 71,650 words

"Unbelievable. Are you actually Stephen Fry in disguise?"

Core Basics: 16/20

Intermediate: 15/20

Advanced: 19/20

Expert: 18/20

Grandmaster: 16/20

This is significant beyond this particular app, because biases like this are found all over the place in popular LLM benchmarks.

New comment by mppm in "Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion"

mppm — Sun, 31 May 2026 06:39:06 +0000

> I remember when Microsoft was the new darling not many years ago, because of VS Code and WSL

I was genuinely puzzled by that, actually. I thought it quite obvious from the start that Nadella is no longer interested in Windows and other Microsoft software as products and will be moving them to thin cloud wrappers, but for some reason people were really optimistic about the "New Microsoft".

New comment by mppm in "My Google Workspace account suspension"

mppm — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:22:32 +0000

"A guy on HN told me one time, 'Don't let yourself get attached to any cloud services you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner.'" -- Robert de Niro

New comment by mppm in "German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad"

mppm — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:07:23 +0000

Theoretically yes, practically no. The ECJ can order the revision of national laws, but the country in question is responsible for implementation, and can send plaintiffs on a multi-decade merry chase. Several countries have also taken the view that they can refuse changes to their constitutions. This stands on shaky ground legally, but there is no real enforcement mechanism anyway.

New comment by mppm in "Hormuz Minesweeper – Are you tired of winning?"

mppm — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 12:24:57 +0000

Thank you for Making Minesweeper Great Again!

New comment by mppm in "An ode to bzip"

mppm — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 09:04:20 +0000

What you are seeing here is probably the effect of window size. BZip has to perform the BWT strictly block-wise and is quite memory-hungry, so `bzip2 -9` uses a window size of 900KB, if I recall correctly. Dictionary-based algorithms are more flexible in this regard, and can gain a substantial advantage on very large and repetitive files. The article kind of forgets to mention this. Not that BZip isn't remarkably efficient for its simplicity, but it's not without limitations.

New comment by mppm in "Many lung cancers are now in nonsmokers"

mppm — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:29:30 +0000

> Every time you look up something related to Radon, it's always cited as "the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking"

> I wonder if that's really true.

That claim is in fact based on extremely poor research methodology. It is made by combining the linear no-threshold model of radiation damage (which contradicts everything we know about cellular repair and hormesis) with evidence from "case-control studies", a kind of retroactive hand-waving that has nothing whatsoever to do with a "controlled trial", despite the name.

New comment by mppm in "The patterns of elites who conceal their assets offshore"

mppm — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 06:41:21 +0000

Maybe a bit late to comment, but for what it's worth: There is no primer that could be actually useful, because the "tax optimization" landscape is fragmented and constantly shifting. Everything depends on where you live, where you do business, how much much money is involved, etc.

But there is a central driving force behind it all: governments constantly fight for "tax justice" with one hand and create various "incentives" and exceptions with the other, in an effort to briefly gain the upper hand over other countries in the zero-sum game of attracting international capital. The former tends to plug all possible loopholes for the "ordinary wealthy", while the latter always leaves options for the truly big fish, they just don't stay the same decade-over-decade.

New comment by mppm in "Grok 4 Launch [video]"

mppm — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 13:59:29 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by mppm in "Trump Organization announces mobile plan, $499 smartphone"

mppm — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 20:55:15 +0000

At the risk of stating the blatantly obvious, this will be a rebranded Chinese phone, if it happens at all. The photo on their website [1] is a quick and sloppy Photoshop job (note identical lenses and lack of flash), and the specs and pricing are totally implausible for a US-made phone. Compare that to the 2000$ Purism charges for their comically under-powered Liberty phone [2] that is mostly US-made.

1. https://trumpmobile.com/t1-phone 2. https://puri.sm/products/liberty-phone/