Hacker News: n4r9

New comment by n4r9 in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

n4r9 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:02:03 +0000

Let's say a given B2B system deployment typically requires 100 custom behaviours/scripts and 3 years worth of effort. A team of ten people can execute such a deployment in 3-4 months. The team has the capacity to fix up issues caused by small human errors as they arise, since they show up roughly once a week.

With the advent of LLMs, a new deployment now takes 3 days. Consequently, errors requiring human attention crop up several times a day.

New comment by n4r9 in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

n4r9 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:20:55 +0000

Could you give some examples? It'd have to be pretty bad to get close to the reports about Altman.

New comment by n4r9 in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

n4r9 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:16:49 +0000

> any such galactic intelligence would probably recognize that its predecessor were meat

Perhaps it's predecessor was just advanced enough to build self-modifying replicators and fire them out into space. Eventually it hits a planet or asteroid and gradually becomes sentient and intelligent. No trace of how it originated.

New comment by n4r9 in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

n4r9 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:26:37 +0000

The concern for me about LLMs confabulating is not that humans don't do it. It's that the massive scale at which LLMs will inevitably be deployed makes even the smallest confabulation extremely risky.

New comment by n4r9 in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

n4r9 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:30:51 +0000

The problem with Altman isn't that he's "furthering his own interests". It's the deceitful behaviour he employs in the process.

New comment by n4r9 in "Running out of disk space in production"

n4r9 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:19:57 +0000

Surely there are pitfalls either way. A ballast file can be deleted too readily, or someone could forget to re-add it.

New comment by n4r9 in "Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)"

n4r9 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 12:07:48 +0000

I don't know about you, but as soon as a car starts I'm pretty sure I know whether it's an EV or combustion engine.

New comment by n4r9 in "Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)"

n4r9 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 08:34:33 +0000

Is there not a big image factor? Like, people don't want to be seen as the type of person who'd drive an electric.

New comment by n4r9 in "The Oxford Comma – Why and Why Not (2024)"

n4r9 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:21:22 +0000

Wikipedia has an interesting example where it's still ambiguous:

  They went to Oregon with Betty, a maid, and a cook.

It's not clear whether Betty is the maid. But tbh removing the comma doesn't help either.

Personally if I wanted to indicate that Betty was the maid I would put "a maid" between brackets or hyphens.

New comment by n4r9 in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

n4r9 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 19:39:57 +0000

Is there not an option to have inclusion at grassroots level and fair play as the level of competition gets higher?

New comment by n4r9 in "Thoughts on LLMs – Psychological Complications"

n4r9 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:22:15 +0000

Good vs bad is an orthogonal spectrum to true vs false. LLMs are trained to be convincing, not correct.

New comment by n4r9 in "White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit"

n4r9 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 10:22:32 +0000

I think it's to do with the bottleneck shifting away from code generation and towards specifying and reviewing and integrating code. The process of working with AI agents to produce specs, tech specs, code, and reviews lends itself more to a flow-based structure (like kanban).

Bear in mind this is a B2B enterprise company with a mix of legacy and greenfield. And management has invested heavily into designing a robust spec/context-based workflow for using agents. Might be different elsewhere.

Personally I don't think scrums, planning, retros etc were better than kanban even before AI, at least if you have switched-on, motivated and smart people on your team. They actually made things less agile, and story-points give a false sense of predictability. Imo the crucial factor may be that AI agents are smart and switched-on (with the right context).

New comment by n4r9 in "White-collar AI apocalypse narrative is just another bullshit"

n4r9 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:44:58 +0000

At a recent AI workshop management made clear that they see AI as rendering sprints and scrums obsolete, that Kanban makes a lot more sense, and that estimating effort/story-points is also becoming meaningless. Which is a strong silver lining if you ask me.

New comment by n4r9 in "Flash-KMeans: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact K-Means"

n4r9 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 19:13:41 +0000

The abstract suggests they're proposing speed-up techniques for the assignment and centroid update stages of the classic k-means algorithm. Which would therefore also apply to k-means++.

New comment by n4r9 in "If you thought the code writing speed was your problem; you have bigger problems"

n4r9 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:07:21 +0000

Can agents write good assembly code?

New comment by n4r9 in "A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era"

n4r9 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:12:33 +0000

There are big differences between the historical notion of a courtesan and the underage women trafficked by Epstein. The main one being that courtesans played an established and visible (if unwritten) role in society.

New comment by n4r9 in "Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line"

n4r9 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:52:03 +0000

> Lentils, beans, quinoa, chickpeas, mushrooms, nuts & seeds, etc. All of those have much more flexibility

With that flexibility comes inconvenience. With fake meat burgers or sausages I just have to whack the oven on and boil some veg to go alongside. That's family dinner. With lentils I have to s think more about how to make it tasty for everyone.

New comment by n4r9 in "Elevated errors on login with Claude Code"

n4r9 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:57:37 +0000

It depends how convenient it is for you to constantly be carrying devices that have 2fa software or the correct SIM card installed. I might prefer to simply access my email account, which I know how to do anywhere.

New comment by n4r9 in "Elevated errors on login with Claude Code"

n4r9 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:55:58 +0000

Not if you don't happen to have a device on you with that app installed.

New comment by n4r9 in "A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era"

n4r9 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 07:59:16 +0000

I think if 20 years ago you claimed that there was a global sex trafficking ring that procured young girls for elites, politicians, celebrities, and royalty, you'd be laughed off as a David Icke level conspiracist. These days it just seems obvious that that was going on.