Hacker News: sempron64

New comment by sempron64 in "Claude Fable 5"

sempron64 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:44:12 +0000

The pelican has looked very same-y across all frontier models, same color bike, same camera angle, etc. I suspect this challenge is already too embedded in the training data to be a good signal when it succeeds, and maybe even when it fails in pathological ways mirroring existing AI pelicans on the internet.

New comment by sempron64 in "How the AI Bubble Bursts"

sempron64 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:46:03 +0000

It's ridiculous to call this tulips, in the sense of a speculative asset whose price depends on resale. A more similar recent example is the dotcom boom and bust based on building internet infrastructure, or the 2008 crash which was based on cyclical infrastructure overinvestment. These crashes were characterized by demand growth not keeping up with investment because the target markets were tapped out. Not clear when we'll get there with AI. The consumer market seems saturated on chatbots but we're not even close to saturated for b2b or self driving for example. And this discounts other new technological offerings which may unlock larger consumer markets (products where people are willing to pay $100 a month instead of 10 or 20)

All that said the dotcom boom is extremely analogous and that crash was quite bad.

New comment by sempron64 in "Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model"

sempron64 — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:44:54 +0000

Diagrams! So much documentation lacks diagrams because they are hard to make

New comment by sempron64 in "Tesla's 45 Austin Robotaxis now have 14 crashes on the books since June 2025"

sempron64 — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 22:37:15 +0000

I think the discrepancy here is that almost all these crashes would not have resulted in an insurance claim, e.g. backing into a pole at 1 mph -- this is not enough damage to report for an average driver.

That said, really bad numbers for an autonomous system which is supposed to be way better than humans.

New comment by sempron64 in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

sempron64 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:51:37 +0000

I read TFA. They found a best fit to a hyperbola. Great. One more data point will break the fit. Because it's not modeling a process, it's assigning an arbitrary zero point. Bad model.

New comment by sempron64 in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

sempron64 — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:33:09 +0000

A hyperbolic curve doesn't have an underlying meaning modeling a process beyond being a curve which goes vertical at a chosen point. It's a bad curve to fit to a process. Exponentials make sense to model a compounding or self-improving process.

New comment by sempron64 in "The Singularity Is Always Near (2006)"

sempron64 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:40:53 +0000

This is an excellent example to illustrate an S-curve. There is a certain amount of energy in a photon. It cannot be emitted with less energy. There is 100% efficiency barrier that cannot be surpassed no matter how smart you are.

New comment by sempron64 in "The Singularity Is Always Near (2006)"

sempron64 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:12:28 +0000

I think the mistake here is that there is a certain rate of progress where humanity can no longer even collectively process the progress and it is equivalent to infinite progress. This point is the singularity and requires non-human driven progress. We may or may not reach that point but full automation is a requirement to reach it. We may hit a hard wall and devolve to an s-curve, hit a maximum linear progress rate, hit a progress rate bounded by population growth and human capability growth (a much slower exponential), or pass the 1/epsilon slope point where we throw up our hands (singularity). Or have a dark age where progress goes negative. Time will tell.

New comment by sempron64 in "2026: This is AGI"

sempron64 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:34 +0000

I think they're probably best known for making money.

New comment by sempron64 in "Word spacing"

sempron64 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 21:08:46 +0000

This is for Latin. The Dead Sea Scrolls have clear spacing between the words. https://www.imj.org.il/en/wings/shrine-book/dead-sea-scrolls

The Talmud discusses the spacing between the words of the Bible: https://www.bible-researcher.com/hebrewtext1.html

New comment by sempron64 in "How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack"

sempron64 — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 20:54:42 +0000

Hamachi and STUN were what I was thinking of when I referred to user-unfriendly NAT busting. It's true that these are not much harder to get working than a modem, but they don't match up with modern consumer expectations of ease-of-use and reliability on firewalled networks. It would be nice if Internet standards could keep up with industry so that these expectations could be met. It's totally understandable where we've landed due to modern security requirements, but I still feel something has been lost.

New comment by sempron64 in "How Quake.exe got its TCP/IP stack"

sempron64 — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:26:22 +0000

It's amusing to me that in the 90s you could easily play Quake or Doom with your friends by calling their phone number over the modem whereas now setting up any sort of multiplayer essentially requires a server unless you use some very user-unfriendly NAT busting.

New comment by sempron64 in "Atlassian is acquiring The Browser Company"

sempron64 — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:03:46 +0000

This is just not true. You can still write GTK2 or SDL apps, you just need to package your app for the target distro or open source it because it's an open-source-first ecosystem.

If you're looking for binary stability and to ship your app as a file, ELF is extremely stable. If your app accesses files, accesses the network through sockets, and use stable libraries like SDL or GTK it will work fine as a regular binary and be easy to ship. People just don't want to write their apps in C, when the operating system is designed for that.

Many native apps like Blender, Firefox, etc ship portable Linux x64 and arm64 binaries as tar gz files. This works fine. You can also use flatpak if you want automatic cross platform updates but yes, the format is unfortunately bloated.

It's not that easy to ship a JavaScript app on other OSes either and electron apps abound there too.

New comment by sempron64 in "Is chain-of-thought AI reasoning a mirage?"

sempron64 — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 15:03:54 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by sempron64 in "VPN use surges in UK as new online safety rules kick in"

sempron64 — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 15:06:35 +0000

Your post reads like a parody of itself. If you're being genuine, I encourage you to step out of your attachment to your own views and meditate on what you said here, and what it looks like to an outside observer who does not share your views.

New comment by sempron64 in "How does fentanyl get into the US?"

sempron64 — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 17:33:21 +0000

Obesity rates have been increasing globally for decades.

There is no example of a country that has reduced obesity through public policy, food policy (even in the EU with strong GMO regulations), or messaging.

From a government level a different approach is necessary. So far GLP-1 inhibitors are the only things that have worked at scale. Let's see if that holds up.

https://data.worldobesity.org/region/european-union-uk-1/#da...

New comment by sempron64 in "SQLook – A free online SQLite database manager with a Windows 2000 interface"

sempron64 — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 13:38:45 +0000

Re: losing focus: Maybe this a problem with tap to click on a touchpad? This happens to me and drives me crazy and it's invariably me inadvertently clicking with my palms. Disabling tap to click helps a lot.

New comment by sempron64 in "Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza"

sempron64 — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 23:24:37 +0000

It's called disputed territory. That's the nature of disputed territory. South Korea doesn't owe North Korean citizens any rights while they are at war (since the 50s), for example, and claims the whole Korean peninsula.

It is wrong to say the PA is not at war with Israel. They currently have a cooperation agreement they are holding to. The PA still compensates any terrorists committing attacks against Israel and disputes Israel's sovereignty. The issue is not resolved as the implementation of the agreements at the Camp David accords were interrupted by the second intifada.

This is what is called an unresolved conflict. It is true that Israel has full military control. The reason the conflict is unresolved is because the Palestinians refuse to capitulate under any circumstances, and because despite all the claims to the contrary, Israel is actually unwilling to destroy, oppressively occupy, or perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinians.

New comment by sempron64 in "Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza"

sempron64 — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 23:17:46 +0000

At question was whether Oct 7th was provoked. It was not. It was a full scale ground invasion with military attack plans. Sympathy with the invader doesn't change that. Think objectively.

New comment by sempron64 in "Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza"

sempron64 — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 23:11:37 +0000

I think you don't understand what a ghetto is? The ghetto is not the city center.