Hacker News: nphardon

New comment by nphardon in "Claude Code is unusable for complex engineering tasks with the Feb updates"

nphardon — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:08:07 +0000

I also havent noticed the degradation and I'm not on Claude Code. I'm on week 4 of a continuous, large engineering project, C, massive industrial semiconductor codebase, with Opus, and while it's the biggest engagement I've had, its a single agent flow, and it's tiny on the scale of the use case in the post, so I wonder if they are just stressing the system to the point of failure.

New comment by nphardon in "[dead]"

nphardon — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 20:30:25 +0000

I agree. The LLM writing turned me off to the article, and the ELI5 style is off putting.

New comment by nphardon in "Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions"

nphardon — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:29:25 +0000

Seems like my co is shedding US jobs and moving them to Taiwan, and paying up to 75% less in salary.

New comment by nphardon in "Iran War Cost Tracker"

nphardon — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:04:31 +0000

Where does this money go? I see that some is lost value, like in the downed aircraft, but what groups are profiting off this crazy flow?

New comment by nphardon in "Claude's Cycles [pdf]"

nphardon — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:02:15 +0000

Must be a fun time to work on open problems. I published my graduate research close to a decade ago, often find myself fantasizing about tackling open problems with Claude.

New comment by nphardon in "/e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem"

nphardon — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:37:24 +0000

Yes! Also shopping is an insidious thing. Now it's no longer a shopping tool. For me a common flow would be like, 1) think about some thing 2) instantly I'm scroll shopping somewhere 3) remember I'm too frugal to buy things 4) 10 minutes lost to the void. It's been really nice for me to break that particular cycle.

New comment by nphardon in "/e/OS is a complete, fully “deGoogled” mobile ecosystem"

nphardon — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:08:03 +0000

I went *browserless on my device and it has solved my screen compulsion issues with very little downside. It has been the most effective step I've ever taken. I realized I really love msg'ing friends, having access to maps and navigation, banking, just a handful of apps (no google apps), and that all along it was the browser.

*ios doesnt let you delete Safari so I set a 10 minute timer on it, and i dont have any adblock or content filtering enabled, so it's essentially only good for brief checks (auto-shop phone number, quick news check, etc.) but is useless for anything beyond that.

New comment by nphardon in "Banned in California"

nphardon — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:56:06 +0000

honestly, you couldn't even build your own house.

New comment by nphardon in "Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems"

nphardon — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 01:46:03 +0000

I knew about this but never attended, so cool!

New comment by nphardon in "Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems"

nphardon — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:31:08 +0000

There's a great discussion with Stephen Wolfram on the Sean Carroll podcast. Listening to it made me think very highly of Wolfram. He's a free thinking, eccentric, mathematician, scientist; who got started doing serious work at a very young age. He still has a youthful creative approach to thought and science. I hope LLMs do pair well with his tools.

New comment by nphardon in "AIs can generate near-verbatim copies of novels from training data"

nphardon — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:23:18 +0000

Recently I went back to The Ecstasy of Communication by Jean Baudrillard which I couldn't get through back in the day when I first picked it up. I used Haiku to walk me through the first chapter, and Haiku would not state anything verbatim due to copyright, but if I referenced a sentence it knew it exactly.

New comment by nphardon in "Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging"

nphardon — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:21:06 +0000

If you tell your doctor that a parent had polyps removed (say, recently), that will give you your best chance of getting one. Most likely, if you're in an even remotely progressive area, your doc wants you to have one, but their hands are tied by the insurance company. Afaik you dont have to provide any proof of your claim re parental polyps.

New comment by nphardon in "I'm not worried about AI job loss"

nphardon — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:45:38 +0000

Unfortunately, one of the struggles in old high tech (thats the only thing i know, are you also experiencing this?) is that the C-level people don't look at Ai and say LLM's can make an individual 10x more productive therefore (and this is the part they miss) we can make our tool 10x better. They think: therefore we can lay off 9 people.

New comment by nphardon in "I'm not worried about AI job loss"

nphardon — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:49:56 +0000

(In the semiconductor industry) We experienced brutal layoffs arguably due to over-investment into Ai products that produce no revenue. So we've had brutal job loss due to Ai, just not in the way people expected.

Having said that, it's hard to imagine jobs like mine (working on np-complete problems) existing if the LLMs continue advancing at the current rate, and its hard to imagine they wont continue to accelerate since they're writing themselves now, so the limitations of human ability are no longer a bottleneck.

New comment by nphardon in "Gemini 3 Deep Think"

nphardon — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:26:24 +0000

I think I'm finally realizing that my job probably won't exist in 3-5. Things are moving so fast now that the LLMs are basically writing themselves. I think the earlier iterations moved slower because they were limited by human ability and productivity limitations.

New comment by nphardon in "Why vampires live forever"

nphardon — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 23:28:05 +0000

That quip(?) on Attia is darrrrrrrk. It's saying you must exchange your soul.

New comment by nphardon in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

nphardon — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:59:19 +0000

My Claude uses that exact phrase rather frequently. I actually like it too! Not saying it's bad.

New comment by nphardon in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

nphardon — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 23:57:33 +0000

Got it. Amazing prescience by the Watchowski's. I'm blown away on rewatches how spot on they were for 1999.

New comment by nphardon in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

nphardon — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:39:21 +0000

Kind of, I mean you have to verify things experimentally but thought can go a very long way, no? And we're not talking about humans thinking about things, we're talking about an agent with internet access existing in a digital space, so what experiments it would do within that space are hard for us to imagine. Of course my post isn't meant to be taken seriously, it's more of a fun sci-fi idea. Also I'm implying not necessarily reaching the limits of the things you mentioned, but rather, just taking a massive step in a very short time window. Like, the time window from the discovery of fire to the discoveries of Quantum Mechanics but in a flash.

New comment by nphardon in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

nphardon — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:50:49 +0000

Iirc in the Matrix Morpheus says something like "... no one knows when exactly the singularity occurred, we think some time in the 2020s". I always loved that little line. I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds, and of course time will stop.

Also: > As t→ts−t→ts− , the denominator goes to zero. x(t)→∞x(t)→∞. Not a bug. The feature.

Classic LLM lingo in the end there.