Hacker News: sdenton4

New comment by sdenton4 in "Delta"

sdenton4 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 02:16:23 +0000

If Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are wrong, I don't want to be right.

New comment by sdenton4 in "What sort of maths are LLMs good at?"

sdenton4 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:52:19 +0000

This is really the point: We build systems and processes which help ensure that we get reliable outputs (bridges) from unreliable actors (human workers). The point is not that we will one day replace all of these processes with AGI. The point is that we will still want processes and systems in place to ensure reliability.

The importance of safety process is largely a function of the risk of failure (ie, how unreliable the production process is) and the cost of failure. If you've got a very reliable production process, perhaps you need less safety process. But if the cost of failure is measured in lives, you're still going to want to have checks in place, regardless of who/what is responsible for designing the bridge.

New comment by sdenton4 in "What sort of maths are LLMs good at?"

sdenton4 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:07:20 +0000

Would you trust a bridge built by a single human? In reality, we have lots of guardrails to ensure that we don't screw up and kill a lot of people by deploying defective bridges (or cars to drive on them). Those guardrails often are written in blood, and still occasionally fail.

New comment by sdenton4 in "Compression is prediction"

sdenton4 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:03:18 +0000

Let alone a sack of wet, self replicating protein! Just endless copying... How could it ever do anything more?

New comment by sdenton4 in "Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone"

sdenton4 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 03:47:19 +0000

It was still completely encrusted in crap, however.

New comment by sdenton4 in "Tom Stanton's supersonic trebuchet breaks sound barrier with gravity alone"

sdenton4 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 17:48:01 +0000

Here's a direct link to the video, to avoid the blogspam cruft...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co57SfcT-h0

New comment by sdenton4 in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"

sdenton4 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:22:01 +0000

Baseball is also non-deterministic, and yet some players are apparently worth a lot more than others.

New comment by sdenton4 in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

sdenton4 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:02:33 +0000

I stated that boring bounds improvement problems exist, not that all bounds problems are boring... Sigh.

New comment by sdenton4 in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

sdenton4 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:46:00 +0000

Five (maybe six?) of the results are improvements on bounds. These kinds of problems tend to have some initial advances, and then stall out as the complexity of the bound skyrockets... until some grad student is bored enough to push the boundary. The big-O complexity of matrix multiplication is a good example of how this works: yeah, it's a useful problem, but the solutions are galactic algorithms, and increasingly convoluted.

As someone with a PhD in combinatorics, I believe that I'm qualified to say that, yes, there are problems as useless as calculating more digits of pi.

New comment by sdenton4 in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

sdenton4 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 19:28:30 +0000

Some of them...

The two places were seeing lots of movement are:

* Updates to lower/upper bounds. In many cases, these kinds of problems are the deep-math equivalent of calculating more digits of pi. Yes, if you throw time at it you'll break the record, but it may not be terribly worthwhile.

* Finding counter examples which disprove conjectures. This is really useful, and helps offset some positivity bias on the human side, often bringing together known tools from distant silos.

If you read the list of ten results, almost all fall into one of these buckets.

New comment by sdenton4 in "Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers"

sdenton4 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:36:26 +0000

I got an obviously-AI voice agent spam call yesterday. Had a bit of fun getting it to answer trivia questions (when was the treaty of westphalia ratified? answer in a rhyming couplet) as a precondition to handing over the keys to my bank accounts.

New comment by sdenton4 in "So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂"

sdenton4 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:47:20 +0000

I did some of the napkin math on algae a couple years ago... The fun realization is that the physical carbon has to go somewhere. So if we're trying to sequester the average american's 14 tons a year of carbon or whatever it is these days, that means you're going to have at least 14 tons of dead algae to deal with. (And a lot more weight if the algae isn't dehydrated.). That's a lot of dead algae, which demonstrates the difficulty of the problem...

In other news, have you considered ditching your car and becoming a vegetarian? Not emitting the carbon in the first place is much easier!

New comment by sdenton4 in "Forth"

sdenton4 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 01:07:48 +0000

I doubt yoda speak is actually strict enough, but I do enjoy the idea that Yoda comes from a reverse Polish civilization.

New comment by sdenton4 in "Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake"

sdenton4 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 23:32:04 +0000

... But are those CEOs ready to admit that those skills are needed?

New comment by sdenton4 in "Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake"

sdenton4 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:50:12 +0000

"succeeding despite Elon musk" is, however, a skill set applicable at only a (strike)small number of companies (/strike) single company.

New comment by sdenton4 in "Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude"

sdenton4 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:44:32 +0000

I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of that knowledge speed on your brain? No, because that's not what copyright is about.

Learning from and building on previous work is civilization. Copyright maximalism is a plague.

New comment by sdenton4 in "Detecting LLM-Generated Texts with “Classical” Machine Learning"

sdenton4 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 06:25:01 +0000

but.... the LLMs are actually all trained on approximately the same stuff, and tend to have similar quirks. In the human world, writers develop recognizable voices, which are detectable and classifiable (as in the article we have all supposedly read). Furthermore, we don't necessarily care about telling one LLM from another, just that they aren't human. That's different from trying to identify one human amongst a sea o fhumans, or one bot form within a sea of bots.

New comment by sdenton4 in "How to hide from killer drones"

sdenton4 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 03:01:05 +0000

The way the US military works, throwing rolls of toilet paper at the drone from the deck of the shop is likely more expensive than the drone said toilet paper is hurling towards.

New comment by sdenton4 in "Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software"

sdenton4 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:27:56 +0000

Why is that? Companies still need employees, and ai makes it more obvious than ever that workers need to organize together for their rights.

New comment by sdenton4 in "New AI tutor achieves 0.71-1.30 SD effect size in Dartmouth course [pdf]"

sdenton4 — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 03:42:55 +0000

Education research is hard hard hard. Getting clean studies, especially at large sample sizes, is extremely difficult, leading to a lot of ambiguity in results.