Hacker News: robwwilliams

New comment by robwwilliams in "Claude Opus 5"

robwwilliams — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 00:14:02 +0000

Easy enough to change. I have a Stylometry Skill fit to my preferred style—a mix of me and Terry Winograd. Give Opus 10 of your best paper thst you wrote and tell it to build a model of your style. hHard to distinguish except I make way more typos.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Codex Resets"

robwwilliams — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:52:27 +0000

You patent and protect (as best you can) the missing ingredients needed to get to AGI. Only half joking and also scary to contemplate. Qualcomm’s CDMA patent is on example. ARM and Texas Instruments two other examples.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol on an NP-Hard Problem: Does /goal help?"

robwwilliams — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:03:34 +0000

There is no one-size-fits-all, even for programming.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol on an NP-Hard Problem: Does /goal help?"

robwwilliams — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 15:52:16 +0000

For my quirky workflows I need 100K even to prep Opus 4.8 or higher to begin good work. Not programming, but a complex synthetic architecture for implementing more attentional autonomy for machines.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Governments, companies, nonprofits should invest in free, open source AI [pdf]"

robwwilliams — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 03:12:32 +0000

Not how I view it as a 74 yo. Patients get what their doctors want as part of a culture of minimal preventive care (it does not pay) and massive medical care (procedures pay handsomely).

Try to get a unilateral diagnostic mammogram. Sorry in the system I am in there is no code for a unilateral diagnostic, only bilateral, even if only one side actually requires diagnosis.

Why? Because 2X the charge and income fir little extra care cost. And who would ever complain about such “excellent” care? Recent experience.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Good Tools Are Invisible"

robwwilliams — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:21:41 +0000

Funny: This title is a classic statement of Martin Heidegger’s. Go programmers!

New comment by robwwilliams in "From brain waves to words: a new path to communication without surgery"

robwwilliams — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 02:05:19 +0000

Share your concern.

One point is that this is not “mind reading”. This is “motor command reading”. This is really no different than placing recording electrodes near motor neurons that direct vocalization. Or in terminal nerve fibers that move finger and wrist muscles.

For Meta this is a PR stunt of the type that I saw staged at a Human Brain Project demo in Budapest in 2012 in with an EEG-instrumented operator tried to move a robot around the stage with HBP leaders trying to narrate the “wonders of it all”. Sadly it was one of those classic demo failures in front of 200 neuroscientists and EU science bureaucrats. Didn’t stop the EU from funding the application the next year. About 1 billion euros not well spent.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Elastic lays off 7% of employees"

robwwilliams — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:51:13 +0000

In academic research I have seen this same trend, particularly intensely in IT and security. Lock it down, lock it up, and slow down research. A hierarchy of admins and techs taught to cover their asses.

New comment by robwwilliams in "For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward"

robwwilliams — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:43:35 +0000

I initial thought this was a great tongue-in-cheek comment. I still think it is a joke.

New comment by robwwilliams in "For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward"

robwwilliams — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:30:59 +0000

Not how I see it. And I have seen Europe close up for 60 years. It is wealthier and happier than it was even 15 years ago. Visit Spain, Portugal, Greece, and of course the other larger northern states; no comparison. Immigration has served them well in wealth and health. Compare Europe to the hollowed out core of the USA and you will shudder. Visit rural America.

The European “problem” is they live to have a life whereas in the USA we seem to live to work.

New comment by robwwilliams in "For Most of the World, Open-Source AI Is the Only Way Forward"

robwwilliams — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:16:58 +0000

Yes, sure, but not efficiently. Even Pops will not want to run four hair dyer GPUs 24-7 in the garage.

New comment by robwwilliams in "For Most of the World, Open-Source AI Is the Only Way Forward"

robwwilliams — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:14:07 +0000

I think you are right when you factor in the much more efficient newer high end GPU. That is what may make the current GPu investments obsolete in 2-4 years.

New comment by robwwilliams in "For most of the world, open-source AI is the only way forward"

robwwilliams — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:20:48 +0000

Yann is on the mark. Almost amusing to see the EU along with its many former “subjects” realize they are at great risk of joint Chinese-American hegemony in AI. We should all be more terrified of a few nation states defining the agendas and policies of AI use than current Ai variants that a inherently without purpose or autonomy.

Great analogy to the fear of the printing press being really bad news in that it enabled the rabble to get aroused.

New comment by robwwilliams in "What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]"

robwwilliams — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:29:35 +0000

Completely agree. This is what Hofstadter means by a strange loop. Our current LLMs have no attentional autonomy by design. The recursion is superficial and without its own Now. Adding attentional autonomy is The frightening alignment issue.

New comment by robwwilliams in "What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]"

robwwilliams — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:04:55 +0000

You nailed it. Asking the question is asking to define from the outside what is an inner recursive process. The question is a simple confusion of domains. This is Humbert Maturana’s main point in Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980, now reissued). Recommend the whole book, as does Terry Winograd. The most intense part is the appendix specifically about the nervous system. Nagel and others knew no neuroscience and are clueless about recursion.

New comment by robwwilliams in "How LLMs work"

robwwilliams — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 14:32:47 +0000

Great, and won’t we all be just as surprised when human self-attentional control turns out to be just as simple or just as complex! Our minds as a strange fabric built of threads of recursions without the benefit of any explicit clock.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Nabokov's pale fire: the lost 'father of all hypertext demos'? (2011)"

robwwilliams — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:48:39 +0000

Diderot’s Jacque, The Fatalist is a great example. Perhaps even moreso of endless recursion to the end.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Erin Brockovich made a map to track data centers around the country"

robwwilliams — Wed, 27 May 2026 03:36:11 +0000

Living downwind of Colossus I and Colossus II in Memphis has orders of magnitude more weight than even a convention large data center. On par with a large cargo airport like MEM (FedEx hub).

New comment by robwwilliams in "Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200"

robwwilliams — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:44:28 +0000

What was the specific mathematical or factual error? It is not theoretical for me.

New comment by robwwilliams in "Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200"

robwwilliams — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:21:17 +0000

The newer location is about 3 miles southwest of the Memphis Airport (MEM), one of the world’s largest cargo airports and the center of FedEx operations (500 take-off and landings per day most concentrated in a 6 h FedEx window with lots of engines running on ramps and that produces about 2000 tons of NOx per year).

I live about 18 miles downwind of the new Colossus sites, the airport, and lots of truck logistics sites, and a large refinery.

I definitely will be getting 2x exposure to ozone and particulates from both Colossi when they are running full bore. Plus an extra dose of ultrafine particulate with my morning fresh air.

Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to be in Nashville instead with HCA, Oracle, many insurance and financial institutions, and the joy of country music.

As an avid Opus user I am in an ethical Nimby bind. We do need almost any investments we can get in Shelby County TN. I’ll take Anthropic in preference to Grok NOx. And it will be my NOx.