Hacker News: naasking

New comment by naasking in "Engineers will do anything to avoid learning from history"

naasking — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 03:59:55 +0000

You'd need hundreds, if not thousands, of parts to justify a mold for casting. And even then, by the time you got the mold made you could have already printed hundreds of parts on a print farm, so you're losing time too.

New comment by naasking in "Qwen 3.8 27B"

naasking — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:07:51 +0000

Can anyone confirm whether this new Qwen release is any more concise when thinking? Overthinking was the biggest (only?) downside of the Qwen models.

New comment by naasking in "Qwen 3.8 27B"

naasking — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 17:03:08 +0000

You know free LLMs can help you understand that command line or design your own...

New comment by naasking in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

naasking — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:14:07 +0000

You need to do some reading:

"Is raising mental health awareness causing more harm than good?", https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/analyst-comment/is-raisi...

"Are We Overdoing Mental Health Awareness?", https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/silicon-psyche/20250...

New comment by naasking in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

naasking — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:06:42 +0000

No, in the past you just had the possibility of childhood illness and death, the death of siblings, war, famine, drought, none of which are real problems for university students these days.

New comment by naasking in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

naasking — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:32:18 +0000

What's less certain about modern environments compared to past ones?

New comment by naasking in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

naasking — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:31:01 +0000

The coddling is a big problem these days, and this focus on mental health is itself unhealthy. The assessment that "they would otherwise do well" is speculative, at best.

New comment by naasking in "Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows"

naasking — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:53:43 +0000

People say Qwen overthinks because they analyzed the thinking traces, and Qwen finds the answer relatively quickly but then second guesses itself multiple times for another 20,000+ tokens. Regardless of what other models do, that's clearly overthinking.

New comment by naasking in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"

naasking — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:16:32 +0000

The continued vagueness suggests this isn't going anywhere, so I'll just conclude by saying that you've given nobody any real reason to believe this.

New comment by naasking in "Position: LLMs Can't Jump"

naasking — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:03:02 +0000

No such thing has been shown.

New comment by naasking in "Position: LLMs Can't Jump"

naasking — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:55:43 +0000

Typical LLM pretraining is very inefficient with data. NanoGPT slowrun shows that data can be used much more efficiently.

New comment by naasking in "Position: LLMs Can't Jump"

naasking — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:11:12 +0000

I don't understand all this dismissal of Einstein. What you just described is that he published a unified theory of Brownian motion, developed a new way of conceptualizing scientific theories via principles with which he derived special and general relativity, contributed foundational work to quantum mechanics, and more, but no, he was not one of humanities' greatest scientists.

New comment by naasking in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"

naasking — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:07:59 +0000

I use LLMs regularly for real work. I understand the current limitations, but you're talking about existing limitations that will never be overcome, because they cannot be overcome. I'm just asking for a couple of specific examples, and your evasions are increasingly suspicious.

New comment by naasking in "GNU Hurd News 2026-Q2"

naasking — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 08:14:39 +0000

Yes, it's worse because processors clocks are much faster than memory clocks.

New comment by naasking in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"

naasking — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:54:45 +0000

Yes. That's why law is a different discipline from linguistics requiring its own rules of analysis, pedagogy, etc.

New comment by naasking in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"

naasking — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:54:08 +0000

That's just vibes then. How is that supposed to be convincing?

New comment by naasking in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"

naasking — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:10:21 +0000

> but there are many things which they are not good at which it is not cost effective or meaningful to improve

Can you name a few such things so I can keep an eye on them in the coming years?

New comment by naasking in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"

naasking — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:08:31 +0000

> We know exactly how attention layers work and how they produce the next word as well as draw them from larger feature spaces.

This is not what's meant by the statements that we don't know how LLMs work. Explain why LLMs are so good at programming, finding bugs, and developing mathematical proofs. Like, way better than all prior tools specifically designed to be bug finding tools, despite being merely "language models".

New comment by naasking in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"

naasking — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:05:55 +0000

The search space is far too large for a mere order of magnitude to make any difference at all.

New comment by naasking in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"

naasking — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:04:03 +0000

> we know everything about how LLMs work

No we don't. That we understand the low level mechanics of a system doesn't mean we understand how any high level phenomena emerge from those low level mechanics.

This is as true for quantum mechanics as it is for LLMs.