Hacker News: placebo

New comment by placebo in "Solving Fermat: Andrew Wiles"

placebo — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:15:10 +0000

Agreed. I bought it at the airport for a transatlantic flight the year it came out and started reading before lift off. Completed it before landing. Best flight ever.

New comment by placebo in "Advertise in ChatGPT"

placebo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 10:47:59 +0000

Isn't society made up of everyday people? While I agree that the public being informed is a mutual responsibility, placing that responsibility on the government (which in many cases has plenty of incentive to keeping people ignorant) will not work either.

New comment by placebo in "Advertise in ChatGPT"

placebo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 08:44:05 +0000

If you are implying that this is the case because this is also how leaders are selected in a democracy, then of course the sarcasm is noted - but here's my real unpopular opinion: Democracy only has value when the majority of voters are not morons. Unfortunately, I can't come up with a better solution - maybe create a model for which there is a wide agreement on and let it rule?

New comment by placebo in "The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams"

placebo — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 17:16:34 +0000

I have no doubt it plays on the same fears - whether it was deliberately done so, I don't claim to know. My assumption was that in a discussion on AI, the comment about the terminator was not alluding to a literary metaphor but to a fear from the actual thing. There was no intent in downplaying the fear of AI - just adding a new perspective. I'm am curious to know what you think self-awareness has to do with any of this.

New comment by placebo in "The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams"

placebo — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 06:43:34 +0000

The terminator you talk about is a movie character. It might be built one day, it might not. It is also totally irrelevant considering there is a real terminator which can be described with the same adjectives and built in to every personal life that ever existed or will exist. Knowing how to deal with that seems more important than worrying about some specific scenario.

New comment by placebo in "VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO"

placebo — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:24:27 +0000

>Even the most basic questions such as put a ball in a cup and place it on a table upside down then pick up the cup and put it in a box.

That reminds me - this used to be my go-to question for smaller models and on which they would always fail miserably on:

A small strawberry is placed in a large cup. The cup is placed upside down on the kitchen table. Someone then lifts the cup as-is and puts it in the microwave. Where is the strawberry when the cup is in the microwave?

Here's what the 1.9GB VibeThinker-3B-GGUF:Q4_K_M answered:

Answer: The strawberry is still on the kitchen table – it fell out when the cup was turned upside‑down, and the subsequent lift‑and‑microwave move doesn’t change that.

So it seems there is definite progress here. Both specialized and yet improved common sense on things outside its domain of specialization.

New comment by placebo in "Show HN: I Derived a Pancake"

placebo — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:44:49 +0000

Wow, that was. impressive :-) A few random thoughts I had while reading this, in more or less the order they appeared: 1. The relation/connection between optimization and the hedonistic treadmill 2. That this combination of enthusiasm, curiosity, intelligence, rigor and inventiveness/creativity would be exactly what I would look for in a technical co-founder 3. What other parameters that we don't know about or are in a different dimension than those mentioned here (ingredients, amount, time etc.) would also push the needle? 4. This is why we can have nice things :-)

New comment by placebo in "AI should elevate your thinking, not replace it"

placebo — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 02:00:07 +0000

I think the great advantage of AI in software is that it enables you to create code faster. I think that the great disadvantage is that it tempts you to create code incredibly faster.

New comment by placebo in "Archive of Byte magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975"

placebo — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 16:26:35 +0000

I think that is a valid opinion, but don't think there is any conclusive evidence to make it a valid fact (while of course not disagreeing with "fun toy, useful technology and dangerous new problem" part). Would be happy to learn otherwise.

New comment by placebo in "Archive of BYTE magazine, starting with issue #1 in 1975"

placebo — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:16:13 +0000

If you're old, I guess that makes me ancient. Byte is what got me hooked on the path I walk to this day, though back then it would be far beyond my wildest dreams to believe that in my lifetime it would be possible to hold an intelligent conversation with software, and everything that entails

New comment by placebo in "The Importance of Being Idle"

placebo — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 05:35:40 +0000

and the problem with always needing something to show is that you can never find peace...

New comment by placebo in "When do we become adults, really?"

placebo — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 08:55:56 +0000

I think what the parent comment was hinting at is that there is no absolute separator between a non-adult and an adult. It is a thousand different things and the type of game you enjoy playing is not necessarily a good indicator on its own.

New comment by placebo in "Thinking Fast, Slow, and Artificial: How AI Is Reshaping Human Reasoning"

placebo — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 09:46:00 +0000

You already stated the reason you think why so many people are in total denial. If indeed the reason is indeed a sense of threat to what people take themselves to be then I would be very surprised if the response would have been any different. Whether this indeed is the case is what remains to be seen. I for one do believe there is something different going on here than yet another technological advancement, but again - time will tell

New comment by placebo in "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War"

placebo — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 07:05:48 +0000

Grok's thoughts on the matter:

"In an ideal world, I'd want xAI to emulate the maturity Anthropic showed here: affirm willingness to help defend democracies (including via classified/intel/defense tools), sacrifice short-term revenue if needed to block adversarial access, but stand firm on refusing to enable the most civilizationally corrosive misuses when the tech simply isn't ready or the societal cost is too high. Saying "no" to powerful customers—even the DoD—when the ask undermines core principles is hard, but it's the kind of spine that builds long-term trust and credibility."

It also acknowledged that this is not what is happening...

New comment by placebo in "Ask HN: How did you learn to code?"

placebo — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:17:39 +0000

Basic on a RadioShack TRS-80. Guess I'm one of the older dinosaurs here.

New comment by placebo in "Believe the Checkbook"

placebo — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 07:53:42 +0000

The very fact that people are arguing with a non-existent author signals that whatever generated the content did a good enough job to fool them today. Tomorrow it will do a good enough job to fool you. I think the more important question is what this means in terms of what is really important and what we should invest in to remain anchored in what matters.

New comment by placebo in "Please just try HTMX"

placebo — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 19:30:49 +0000

This got me thinking: I am not about to fight windmills and the future will unfold as it will, but I think the idea of "LLM as a compiler of ideas to high-level languages" can turn out to be quite dangerous. It is one thing to rely on and not to be able to understand the assembly output of a deterministic compiler of a C++ program. It is quite another to rely on but not fully understand (whether due to lazyness or complexity) what is in the C++ code that a giant nondeterministic intractable neural network generated. what is guaranteed is that the future will be interesting...

New comment by placebo in "The AI bubble is 17 times bigger than the dot-com bust"

placebo — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 20:32:54 +0000

Even if this is true, a possible takeaway is that after the bubble bursts and the dust settles, AI's effect will be 17 times stronger than that of the Internet... Personally, I think it will end up being much higher, but that doesn't mean I'm going to invest in it any time soon

New comment by placebo in "RFCs: Blueprints of the Internet"

placebo — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 20:19:26 +0000

I actually did exactly that for a product back in the days when there was no open implementation. IRC, SMTP, POP3, DNS. Good times :)

New comment by placebo in "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work"

placebo — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 09:28:51 +0000

Really surprised there in no mention of William of Ockham - you know, the guy that made razors...