Hacker News: pevansgreenwood

New comment by pevansgreenwood in "If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort"

pevansgreenwood — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:36:34 +0000

Was it Blaise Pascal who wrote:

I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

The argument that "using AI to generate text is disrespectful because it took no effort to write" misses the point. Respect for the recipient is measured by whether the message serves the recipient's needs, not how it is produced. Similarly, any errors are the senders responsibility, and not the fault of the tools they used.

New comment by pevansgreenwood in "The QMA Singularity"

pevansgreenwood — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 23:36:29 +0000

This post about GPT-5 helping with quantum complexity theory highlights how we're still thinking about these systems wrong.

The AI suggested using Tr[(I-E(θ))^-1] to analyze eigenvalue behavior—a clever combination of existing mathematical techniques, not some mystical breakthrough.

This is exactly what you'd expect from a system trained on mathematical literature: sophisticated pattern matching across formal languages, combining known approaches in useful ways.

The real question isn't "how did AI get so smart?" but "why do we keep being surprised when language models excel at manipulating structured formal languages?"

Mathematics is linguistics. Of course these systems are good at it.

New comment by pevansgreenwood in "Lyon Is Replacing Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and OnlyOffice"

pevansgreenwood — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 23:11:26 +0000

Is the shift to open source etc inevitable due to the enshitification of commercial products as their owners slide into low margin low growth?

New comment by pevansgreenwood in "Australians to face age checks from search engines"

pevansgreenwood — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 01:16:34 +0000

With search moving from Google & MS to TikTok ET al, is this shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted?

New comment by pevansgreenwood in "There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets"

pevansgreenwood — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 01:07:54 +0000

That's putting the cart before the horse. Thermodynamics came after the steam engine was made practical. Flight came before aerodynamics. Metallurgy before materials science. Radio before electromagnetic theory took hold. Even LLMs are the result of a lot of tinkering rather than scientific insight. It’s the successful tinkering that creates the puzzle science later formalises.