New comment by mrarson in "Grieving the loss of details"

mrarson — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:19:33 +0000

Now consider the case where I send you a message (in a language that's not english) and it doesn't render as text on your screen. Reasonably, because I understand how network protocols work, I can assume that it's not a little/big endian mixup between our systems - the HTTP request would not have worked, then, as utf-8 and utf-16 are incompatible (unlike the weird utf-8 ascii mix). With HN, I can open up developer tools see what encoding it is sent as over-the-wire, and then I can ask you to look at the encoding on your end. I can say "the vibecoded browser you use is trying to interpret this as utf-16 but hackernews only sends utf-8". I can dial down the root cause of the problem and then address it.

Contrast that to a situation where I ask an LLM to use a tool and it can only do it like 98% of the time. How do you root cause that. How do you fix it such that that doesn't happen again?

Also consider: occasionally your support agent gives people free plane tickets.

Yes, we've made a lot of progress towards LLMs being fairly good, and adversarial systems and such do work, but it is asymptotic approach to 100%, never actually 100%

New comment by mrarson in "Quantum battery upends the rules of charging"

mrarson — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 12:04:17 +0000

This is true. Additionally, configuring them in series, they can all charge at the same time, it just requires a higher voltage charger.

Hacker News: mrarson

New comment by mrarson in "Grieving the loss of details"

New comment by mrarson in "Quantum battery upends the rules of charging"