Hacker News: notpachet

New comment by notpachet in "The Decoherence Trap"

notpachet — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:39:55 +0000

> The central argument is that AIs, living inside datacenters, won't be able to evaluate the "coherence" of software "beyond the human ceiling"

Actually, the article states that AI will easily be able to handle increases beyond the human ceiling as long as those increases follow a linear curve, not an exponential curve.

So your whole critique dissolves. Sorry!

New comment by notpachet in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

notpachet — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:32:48 +0000

You're tying together some pretty far-flung strands of argument there.

Regarding children and selfishness: some of the most selfish people I know have kids. They're selfish in the sense that they only care about their family, even to the detriment of everyone else.

New comment by notpachet in "QGIS bans AI assisted contributions"

notpachet — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:34:41 +0000

> - Any (super)intelligence caches work > - Any (super)intelligence _wants to create stable abstractions_

This is a higher-order rephrasing of the "intelligence is compression" argument.

New comment by notpachet in "The Mathocalypse"

notpachet — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:42:09 +0000

"What I cannot create, I do not understand"

- Feynman

New comment by notpachet in "How much oil-market buffer is left?"

notpachet — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 01:50:19 +0000

> Let's be better please.

That rhetorical horse left the allegorical barn a long time ago.

New comment by notpachet in "Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely"

notpachet — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:27:14 +0000

> if you can do the worst “bad” thing possible, you can also do the best “good” thing possible

You say this like it's a truism, but I don't think it is. The bad things may be categorically easier than the good things. It's easier to destabilize a delicate system than to stabilize it. It's easier to break something than to fix it.

New comment by notpachet in "Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher"

notpachet — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 11:06:22 +0000

I did bother to read it, and that isn't what I meant. I wasn't referring to one-off errors that you can fix after successfully decoding a cipher into something that produces a majority-correct answer. I meant something more akin to what schoen's answer touched on: whether there are any closed-form mathematical/statistical analyses that can be performed ahead of time to assess the structural legitimacy of any ciphertext before you spend a lot of cycles trying to decode it.

Thanks for the driveby snark though!

New comment by notpachet in "Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher"

notpachet — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 01:55:07 +0000

That's pretty good.

New comment by notpachet in "Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher"

notpachet — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:06:22 +0000

> It spun for 52 seconds so maybe some Python was involved.

Come for the AI doom, stay for the programming languages (remember those?) catching strays

New comment by notpachet in "Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher"

notpachet — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 23:49:36 +0000

Cipher noob question: is there any check that can be done to ensure a cipher is actually decodable? What if the author made a flaw when encoding it, so that it's not actually solvable?

New comment by notpachet in "Feeling Sad about AI"

notpachet — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:54:01 +0000

"My dosimeter only reads 3.6 roentgen / hour!"

New comment by notpachet in "Feeling Sad about AI"

notpachet — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:40:59 +0000

Not the parent, but pointing out a couple of problems in your analysis:

First, arctic temperatures: this is a widely misunderstood point. Notice that in the graph, the non-summer months are noticeably warmer. The summer months are going to be effectively capped at around 0 degrees until all the ice is gone, so holding up this graph and saying "look, the temperature never got above freezing!" is misleading, because the "warming" is actually happening as a function of melting ice, not air temperature.

Sea ice extent: the last 18 years were the lowest 18 minimums on record. Also, ice extent != ice volume. March 2026 recorded a record-low ice volume. An extent chart reads the same regardless of whether the underlying ice is thin or thick.

Greenland mass balance: here you're just plain wrong. You linked to the surface mass balance page, in other words, snowfall minus surface melt + runoff. This does not account for glacial calving and basal melt. The page you linked says this directly. Total mass balance is a grimmer picture: an average loss of about 252 km³ of water per year over 2003-2025, contributing 0.69 mm/yr to sea level rise.

New comment by notpachet in "Feeling Sad about AI"

notpachet — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:30:17 +0000

There's a mythological story about the hubris of flying; I'm sure Claude can pull it up for you.

New comment by notpachet in "Feeling Sad about AI"

notpachet — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:20:59 +0000

Moreover who’s actually getting exterminated?

The species whose value was questionable.

The good ones remain.

New comment by notpachet in "Feeling Sad about AI"

notpachet — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:58:17 +0000

There's a larger existential crisis still in store for you. Our global civilization is collapsing. We are choking to death on the unchecked negative externalities of our own progress. It is our species' Achilles heel. Whether or not an individual developer adapts to this temporary capability blip (agentic coding) will not matter in the long run. The systems necessary for supporting these capabilities are too brittle to survive the century.

New comment by notpachet in "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026"

notpachet — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 01:03:28 +0000

Instead we just get good, hard slop

New comment by notpachet in "iPhone Duo"

notpachet — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:49:19 +0000

Because they're addicted to online content consumption. See also: sports betting, cigarettes, fast food.

New comment by notpachet in "Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit"

notpachet — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:44:20 +0000

> the way they'd go after a very inconvenient activist

FTFY

New comment by notpachet in "Ask HN: Why were OpenAI, Claude, and Grok simultaneously down?"

notpachet — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:06:55 +0000

New comment by notpachet in "The Post-AI Internet Doesn't Look Great"

notpachet — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:12:00 +0000

You've hit on something important, and it's real, not cosmetic.