Hacker News: romanows

New comment by romanows in "Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face"

romanows — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 15:41:10 +0000

This may portend big things in the future, but this specific hack didn't do a lot of damage. These are both AI companies, and I'm sure part of Huggingface finds it a fascinating object of study. It's great that not every indiscretion is met with lawsuits and jail time.

New comment by romanows in "Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds"

romanows — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 12:51:21 +0000

75.6% die is right, it's just that the other 24.4% do too.

New comment by romanows in "Anthropic researcher says more than 10% chance AI "could kill all humans""

romanows — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 16:47:04 +0000

The probability calculator doesn't really help, since the core question for me is how one arrives at its "Probability that misalignment leads to an unrecoverable global catastrophe.".

New comment by romanows in "Anthropic researcher says more than 10% chance AI "could kill all humans""

romanows — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:33:08 +0000

I'd like to know how these people arrive at their estimates. Why 10% and not 1% or 50%?

New comment by romanows in "Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business"

romanows — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 23:37:28 +0000

I don't think it's particularly unusual for a company to spin off another company?

New comment by romanows in "OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining"

romanows — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 01:25:12 +0000

I wonder if the better approach would have been to lead engineering with a similar reliance on bending rules and "what you can get away with". This is where multiplying estimates by PI comes in, I think. And possibly some creative division of responsibilities to make it harder for a CEO to officially bully engineering. Totally different job than most engineers would (or could) want to perform- the guy probably wouldn't have taken the promotion in this case!

New comment by romanows in "OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining"

romanows — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:06:26 +0000

I find this anecdote fascinating because, while I identify completely with the new head of engineering, his requirement really only makes sense if you interpret it as a commitment to build at a certain level of quality, business be damned. Which is fine, but then he folds at the first test of this principle! Didn't even let the business sweat for a day!

This could be a lesson for us engineers to be a little less glib and a little more introspective, especially as you gain more power and influence in an org.

New comment by romanows in "Unions Can Save Tech Workers and Tech Work"

romanows — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:59:55 +0000

I agree in general, but this article claims that the unionized tech workers now have pay increases, cheaper health benefits, and layoff protections. There is also a discussion about the process. This article at least is not just "unions good" (waves hands).

New comment by romanows in "Iowa-led states ask OpenAI to keep their bots on a leash"

romanows — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:28:43 +0000

"own" in the sense of "be responsible for the consequences". Not in the sense of "be able to grant reproduction rights".

New comment by romanows in "A Rant About “Technology” (2005)"

romanows — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 21:20:02 +0000

Your link talks about how hard it is to define science fiction, so in some ways, I'm just putting my opinion out here on the internet as a data point. I'd say the Left Hand of Darkness is more science fiction than Little Women, but it's also more like the Hobbit than it is like Foundation, Ender's Game, Snow Crash, or even 1984.

New comment by romanows in "A Rant About “Technology” (2005)"

romanows — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 17:18:59 +0000

Having something like another planet or alien biology is necessary but not sufficient to make something science fiction. There is some fuzzy amount of focus on science/technology, style, and tropes that are needed to make something more science fiction than fantasy or speculative fiction. The Left Hand of Darkness read more like fantasy to me, and I don't think it would have been any different at all if the setting was Middle Earth and the ambisexual species were Hobbits. I think I wouldn't have blinked if it had been described as "science fantasy" to me rather than "science fiction".

I'll bump up Chiang on my reading list, I have heard a lot of good things!

New comment by romanows in "A Rant About “Technology” (2005)"

romanows — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:13:13 +0000

It's great that works for you but there is a reason we have these labels. I've definitely had the experience where I want to escape into some hard sci-fi, and so there's a reason I pick a book from that genre over Anna Karenina. And if someone told me that Anna Karenina was hard sci-fi, it'd color my experience with that book.

New comment by romanows in "A Rant About “Technology” (2005)"

romanows — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:55:47 +0000

I've only read "The Left Hand of Darkness". It's a very well written book, but it didn't emphasize enough technology/science/engineering for me to consider it even soft science fiction. I guess she's doing the work of expanding the scope of what technology could be used in science fiction. I'm not sure that's super useful, since by her definition, almost every work of fiction will involve technology.

Now I want to write a science fiction story where the core technology is never written about explicitly and can only be inferred from its effect on the characters :P

New comment by romanows in "I think I have LLM burnout"

romanows — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 04:51:00 +0000

Excessive amounts of emojis in generated README.md and sometimes in printed/logging outputs. I don't whether this is still an issue because I have a "Never use emojis" instruction in the context.

New comment by romanows in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

romanows — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:28:20 +0000

I'm actually pretty thankful that the GP 5000 is a solid consensus recommendation for general road racing. I see some others being mentioned though, I think Pirelli Zeros?

Contrast that with gravel tires, where there is zero consensus. The conditions vary and the sport is evolving quite a bit over time as well, so it's understandable. But it's a huge time suck to try and puzzle out a near-optimal decision. I wish there was a "good-enough" consensus.

New comment by romanows in "Making the news available at no cost is a victory"

romanows — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:12:34 +0000

NPR/public radio has been doing a decent job without much obtrusive third-party advertising.

New comment by romanows in "A web page that shows you everything the browser told it without asking"

romanows — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:35:26 +0000

Lol, the description text is so dramatic.

New comment by romanows in "I learned Unity the wrong way"

romanows — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:57:31 +0000

It also really bugs me when I've put more time into reporting an issue or setting someone up for success than they've spent working on a solution.

You would know best, but it struck me that one reason to skip parts of a take-home interview assignment is that it was taking far longer than it "should". A sufficiently senior candidate should have noted this but (I'm feeling charitable towards junior candidates this lazy Sunday afternoon) maybe that's something that's a reasonable thing for them to learn in a real job.

New comment by romanows in "Gemini 3 Deep Think"

romanows — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 02:35:47 +0000

I had it process a photo of my D&D character sheet and help me debug it as I'm a n00b at the game. Also did a decent, although not perfect, job of adding up a handwritten bowling score sheet.

New comment by romanows in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me"

romanows — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:15:02 +0000

Obviously. The point is that settling a lawsuit in this way is also a worthless indicator of wrongdoing.