Hacker News: mquander

New comment by mquander in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

mquander — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:09:23 +0000

It doesn't exclude people who attend high schools and colleges that have a computer lab.

New comment by mquander in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

mquander — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 07:48:01 +0000

Your comment is framed like "giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them" is unrealistic, but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute to download and operate exactly that for free, with performance perhaps a year behind the state of the art.

New comment by mquander in "We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do"

mquander — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 02:20:39 +0000

This comment would make more sense if it were before the new wave of prediction markets, which are high-profile gambling products clearly largely made and popularized by true believers who think they are making the world a better place.

New comment by mquander in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

mquander — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:21:38 +0000

I think it's slightly less ridiculous than it sounds, because governments have much more power over their own citizens. As an American I would dramatically prefer the Chinese government to spy on me than the American government, because the Chinese government probably isn't going to do anything about whatever they find out.

(That logic breaks down somewhat in the case of explicitly negotiated surveillance sharing agreements.)

New comment by mquander in "Rathbun's Operator"

mquander — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 02:05:52 +0000

> I don’t know who operates this agent, and I’m not going to speculate about why they did what they did.

New comment by mquander in "Contra "Grandmaster-level chess without search" (2024)"

mquander — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 01:23:38 +0000

I don't really understand the criticism. The authors aren't claiming to have the strongest chess engine without search. They are just showing that they got a chess engine to a respectable level with their process, which is somewhat different from LC0. They do in fact explain that explicitly:

> Leela Chess Zero’s networks, which are trained with self-play and RL, achieve higher Elo ratings without using explicit search at test time than our transformers, which we trained via supervised learning. However, in contrast to our work, very strong chess performance (at low computational cost) is the explicit goal of this open source project (which they have clearly achieved via domain-specific adaptations). We refer interested readers to [https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12272] (which was published concurrently to our work) for details on the current state-of-the-art and a comparison against our network.

And I don't think the criticism of their writing is on point either. I don't think they are secretly implying that their engine is better than Stockfish. And it's 100% plausible for human masters to rigorously analyze many positions with engine assistance and correctly establish whether Stockfish's evaluation is right or not.

New comment by mquander in "`satisfies` is my favorite TypeScript keyword (2024)"

mquander — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 03:32:34 +0000

That's great, I'm going to use that one in the future.

New comment by mquander in "Gemini 3"

mquander — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:45:42 +0000

I recommend Matthew Sadler's Game Changer and The Silicon Road To Chess Improvement.

New comment by mquander in "Backpropagation is a leaky abstraction (2016)"

mquander — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 08:36:59 +0000

Karpathy talking for 2 hours about how he uses LLMs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWvNQjAaOHw

New comment by mquander in "Why "everyone dies" gets AGI all wrong"

mquander — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 03:22:29 +0000

I don't know if this matters to you, but Eliezer doesn't think LLMs will kill us. He thinks LLMs are a stepping stone to the ASI that will kill us.

New comment by mquander in "I almost got hacked by a 'job interview'"

mquander — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 22:36:26 +0000

This is fascinating, thanks so much for posting it!

New comment by mquander in "How to sequence your DNA for <$2k"

mquander — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 01:00:18 +0000

Actually, the main reason I used Nebula was that they advertised a credible-to-me promise that you could download and permanently delete your data upon request. That was some years ago, so I don't know if I would trust them today. But that was their claim, and I have no reason to believe they didn't delete my data.

New comment by mquander in "How to sequence your DNA for <$2k"

mquander — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 22:44:24 +0000

I was interested to read this because some time ago I had my genome sequenced by Nebula. If you look at the lawsuit you can see that what Nebula did was use off-the-shelf third-party analytics products on their website, including recording analytics pings when users buy a kit, and pings when users use the Nebula website to browse Nebula's high-level analysis of their traits (leaking that the user has those traits to the analytics provider.)

This behavior represents a contemptible lack of respect for users' privacy, but it's important to distinguish it from Nebula selling access to users' genomes.

https://www.classaction.org/media/portillov-nebula-genomics-...

New comment by mquander in "[dead]"

mquander — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 20:25:06 +0000

Content appears largely LLM-generated, which is weird for someone's personal blog.

New comment by mquander in "US High school students' scores fall in reading and math"

mquander — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 04:57:01 +0000

If kids could do math they would be able to divide the yearly American military aid to Israel ($18b last year) by the American population (340m), so they probably wouldn't conclude that fifty bucks per year per person was the main reason why their classmates are poor or their parents can't afford healthcare.

New comment by mquander in "Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver"

mquander — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 07:37:43 +0000

I guess this is probably what Lucifer said to God about why it was stupid to give humans free will.

New comment by mquander in "Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts"

mquander — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 07:03:46 +0000

I sympathize with how annoying it must be to have other people messing up your work, but also, if your name is at the top of the page, and there's not really any other way for readers to know anyone in particular that is taking responsibility for any specific detail on that page, it's obviously going to be your reputation on the line to some extent.

New comment by mquander in "In Search of AI Psychosis"

mquander — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 23:16:25 +0000

You said it yourself. That's really not an appropriate response to a specific criticism.

New comment by mquander in "The First 1k Days"

mquander — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 01:25:55 +0000

It's very stylistically visible. For example, it's covered in `it's not just X -- it's Y" phrasings that are default LLM house style.

New comment by mquander in "The First 1k Days"

mquander — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 01:18:27 +0000

When you rely on an LLM to write for you and then present a melange of your work and the LLM's work without attribution, it makes it impossible for others to usefully interpret what you published.

Are you saying that e.g. securely attached children perform better in school, because you know that in your capacity as a educated psychologist? Or did an LLM write that based on its best guess? None of your readers can tell. So how should they know whether it's true?