Hacker News: petters

New comment by petters in "Artificial intelligence is not conscious"

petters — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:23:29 +0000

> If we give an LLM a prompt that reads “The following is a conversation between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan,” it will generate a coherent dialogue between the two historical figures. But no matter how detailed the responses are, no matter how vividly they recount their respective historical accomplishments, we would never conclude that the LLM has conjured up digital re-creations of Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan, nor would we suggest that the historical figures are conscious

They might be in principle. It could be that the best way to generate a plausible dialogue is to bring up re-creations of the characters and have them act it out. LLMs definitely have been demonstrated to have world models in some cases. That helps generating text.

New comment by petters in "The Last Technical Interview"

petters — Sat, 30 May 2026 19:21:34 +0000

It also means you'll have to onboard a lot of new employees all the time. That sounds exhausting.

New comment by petters in "England Runestones"

petters — Sat, 16 May 2026 07:29:40 +0000

Wikipedia is amazing. The Swedish articles are even longer.

New comment by petters in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

petters — Sun, 03 May 2026 20:18:15 +0000

Karpathy replied to IS with ”agree” at the time

New comment by petters in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

petters — Sun, 03 May 2026 07:44:32 +0000

Many dismiss Dawkins here but Ilya Sutskever wrote in 2022: “it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious.”

New comment by petters in "When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?"

petters — Sun, 03 May 2026 07:41:01 +0000

We have a very good idea of all math behind chemistry. But the equations are very difficult to solve.

New comment by petters in "MuJoCo – Advanced Physics Simulation"

petters — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:24:08 +0000

He is much better at building hardware than he is writing software.

New comment by petters in "4-bit floating point FP4"

petters — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:01:20 +0000

That's a good idea and it exists: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/04/18/qlora/

It seems quite wastful to have two zeros when you only have 4 bits it total

New comment by petters in "Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals"

petters — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 07:16:23 +0000

You could add a feature where it will compute the global optimum of any function of a small number of variables. Branch and bound with interval arithmetic works well for a small number of variables.

Disjoint unions of intervals seems like a nice thing to have

New comment by petters in "Not all elementary functions can be expressed with exp-minus-log"

petters — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 05:07:44 +0000

Yes, that blog post could have been much shorter….

New comment by petters in "Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found"

petters — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 20:00:43 +0000

They have found a large number in OpenSSl

New comment by petters in "Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division"

petters — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:38:11 +0000

Dungeon Crawler Carl is not science fiction. At least I would not recommend it to someone looking for science fiction with “interesting ideas.” It’s a comedy about an RPG with magic.

But if that’s what you’re looking for, it’s pretty good

New comment by petters in "Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs"

petters — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 07:44:57 +0000

> the GPU is limited by the Thunderbolt port

Not everything is limited by the transfer speed to/from the GPU. LLM inference, for example.

New comment by petters in "Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor"

petters — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 09:49:51 +0000

> On a 34" ultrawide monitor, it was too easy to put YouTube running on the left side, and whatever else on the right.

Yes, if you were doing that, almost any change to your environment that stops that will be good. I don't think you'd have to give up your monitor.

New comment by petters in "Meta acquires Moltbook"

petters — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 07:23:28 +0000

That challenge was pretty stupid. I could read the question and I’m not even a native speaker. We can of course easily come up with much better challenges

New comment by petters in "Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]"

petters — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:39:31 +0000

As a TA, I've seen adults try to pass initial college calculus many times (and failing - you were allowed to try several times) with enormous effort. It's not a small multiplier

And this was still people selected from the small subset of the population choosing an engineering major. Human are much, much more different than you seem to think

New comment by petters in "ai;dr"

petters — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 22:21:44 +0000

I think that bias is not due to the proportion of books and more due to how they are fine-tuned after the pretraining.

New comment by petters in "Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)"

petters — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:03:01 +0000

We identify the real number 2 with the rational number 2 with the integer 2 with the natural number 2. It does not seem so strange to also identify the complex number 2 with those.

New comment by petters in "I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)"

petters — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 12:26:48 +0000

Going from 220 to 450 ms would be a disaster in my project. It has many thousands of files. Recompilation of almost everything happens from time to time.

If those made-up numbers were true, they would be very significant and an argument in favor of keeping the code in C

New comment by petters in "I write games in C (yes, C) (2016)"

petters — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 12:23:22 +0000

That's fair. I'm unable to provide more information though so we'll have to disagree.