Hacker News: qnleigh

New comment by qnleigh in "Ask HN: GitHub employees what's going on? Why?"

qnleigh — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 07:15:16 +0000

This is no excuse. Prioritizing new features so far above reliability is exactly what makes most Microsoft products infuriating to use.

New comment by qnleigh in "How I use LLMs to learn complex topics"

qnleigh — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:06:35 +0000

Learning is an unproductive use of your time??? No one knows how LLMs will change things, but that sounds like terrible advice.

New comment by qnleigh in "How I use LLMs to learn complex topics"

qnleigh — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:59:04 +0000

> Another one is having the LLM quiz you on your topics of interest

This is a great idea. I'm going to try it.

New comment by qnleigh in "How I use LLMs to learn complex topics"

qnleigh — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:53:47 +0000

Well everyone needs some downtime, and then I think it's important to acknowledge that there is a range of quality within the category of "educational entertainment." You can learn a lot of interesting things from 3BlueOneBrown and Veritasium, even though neither compares to working through a textbook.

New comment by qnleigh in "How I use LLMs to learn complex topics"

qnleigh — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:41:08 +0000

100% agree. They are not good teachers. Nevertheless I've been using LLMs more and more to learn complex topics, but my learning is always anchored in something else:

- Getting through textbooks and lecture notes. LLMs have gotten very good at answering basic questions on quite advanced material (e.g. representation theory and quantum field theory). By asking a very specific question or even giving the LLM a screenshot, I can get unstuck a lot faster.

- Learning e.g. new python packages. Instead of hunting for examples on Stack Exchange, now I ask an LLM to write a minimal working example and then build off of that. By writing most of the remaining code myself and only using the LLM to answer questions, I've been able to learn new packages significantly faster.

In both cases, the LLM isn't providing the curriculum or guiding what I learn. The textbooks, papers and coding tasks are. But now I can pick these things up much more efficiently.

New comment by qnleigh in "Artificial Intelligence used to design new viruses"

qnleigh — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 08:24:34 +0000

What you say would make sense if phages designed from scratch with generative AI were the only solution to antibiotic resistance. That's obviously not the case.

New comment by qnleigh in "Artificial Intelligence used to design new viruses"

qnleigh — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:19:22 +0000

This specific study sounds relatively benign, but generative models for DNA sequences sounds like an incredibly dangerous technology to develop. If someone were to reproduce their study while including animal viruses in the training data, what would it be capable of? And what about after a few years of progress?

Their phages have only 5400 base pairs, but the hepatitis virus has around 3000, and ebola only had ~19,000. That doesn't mean making a novel lethal virus is easy, but if anyone pulls it off, it would make Covid look like a picnic.

New comment by qnleigh in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

qnleigh — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 06:50:45 +0000

Found some discussion here [1] from someone who actually worked on a few of these problems.

[1] https://x.com/henryquantum/status/2083623695436623915?s=20

New comment by qnleigh in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

qnleigh — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 23:46:01 +0000

Can anyone comment on the significance of any of these results for their respective fields? Or what impact they might have? Presumably none are quite at the level of the Jacobian conjecture, but some of the results on group theory and sphere packing sound pretty important at first glance.

New comment by qnleigh in "Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots"

qnleigh — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 08:18:48 +0000

Wow, I know what my next nightmare will be about.

New comment by qnleigh in "Our position on open-weights models"

qnleigh — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 06:22:14 +0000

I'm not talking about what the AI labs are saying and it. I don't know what they have been saying and I don't care. I care whether LLMs a few generations from now will be about to bring these dangerous capabilities to the masses. Right now, given the progress of open and closed-source models, it seems inevitable.

New comment by qnleigh in "Our position on open-weights models"

qnleigh — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:55:44 +0000

So many commenters are asserting this but no one is giving an argument or references. Cults have been able to make sarin. The DNA sequence for smallpox is pubicly available. Where are you getting your confidence that LLM-assisted bioweapons are of no concern?

New comment by qnleigh in "Our position on open-weights models"

qnleigh — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:51:25 +0000

If you are optimistic about this given your expertise, I am very glad to hear it. As someone scientific but with little background in biology, I've been concerned about the bioweapons angle for a long time (and not because AI companies tell me to worry about it). Can you please explain a bit more about why you are not concerned? Between standard bioweapons like sarin and gain-of-function research on viruses, it's not obviously implausible to me that LLMs a few generations from now won't be able to guide a determined layperson through the steps needed to make something very destructive.

New comment by qnleigh in "Our position on open-weights models"

qnleigh — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:40:11 +0000

I'm dismayed that I had to scroll past so many cynical cheap shots to find a comment that actually addresses the core point. I have yet to hear a single compelling plan for how we will prevent bioweapon development or massive hacking campaigns. For those who are skeptical of Dario's motives here, it's not enough to call out apparent hypocrisy, you need to suggest an alternative plan that addresses these concerns.

New comment by qnleigh in "GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization"

qnleigh — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 19:05:57 +0000

I have absolutely no problem with people disliking or fearing AI. It's energy consumption, effects on education and potential for displacing good jobs are all quite disturbing. But "stochastic parrot" means that "all it does is randomly repeat things that it has seen before without understanding them." It's infuriating to see this written about an instance of an AI solving an open math probably. Do you think the models are just randomly repeating facts until they accidentally emit a proof? If so, then how do they synthesize that knowledge into something logically coherent?

Alternatively, if you think that even Maxwell was a stochastic parrot, then presumably almost every human who has ever lived was also a stochastic parrot except a few rare examples like Einstein. Not sure what definition you are using but it seems too broad to be useful.

New comment by qnleigh in "GPT-5.6 used a prompt to close a 30-year gap in convex optimization"

qnleigh — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:45:00 +0000

I won't touch creativity, but if this and other results like it do not demonstrate intelligence, what does? How was it able to solve problems that specialist mathematicians have tried and failed to solve for years?

New comment by qnleigh in "$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol"

qnleigh — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:50:35 +0000

These are funny the first time you see them, but I guarantee if you watch a few you will start picking up how similar they all are and it will all start to feel like slop.

New comment by qnleigh in "$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol"

qnleigh — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:30:52 +0000

I would love to see an example of this! Can you link anything?

New comment by qnleigh in "$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol"

qnleigh — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:14:26 +0000

Art is kind of unique though, because it inherits a lot of it's value from scarcity, both of the art itself and of the rare talent that can make quality art. If an artistic style or product becomes too common, it tends to lose its luster.

An app is still useful even when it's cheap for anyone to make it. But art that anyone can make for cheap becomes, by definition, slop.

New comment by qnleigh in "$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol"

qnleigh — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 08:01:36 +0000

I would really love to see examples of creatives using modern AI/LLMs to make quality art, and it feels like this should be happening, but I can't think of any examples yet. Maybe there's so much low-effort slop that the good works are lost in the noise. Or maybe most artists don't use AI on principle.

I would love to see examples if anyone has any. I saw a few things on r/AIVideos that I sort of liked, but I wouldn't go as far as to call them quality art.