Hacker News: somewhereoutth

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Google Declaring War on the Web"

somewhereoutth — Wed, 20 May 2026 22:15:49 +0000

(sorry, nit pick, but I don't your usage of 'abrogate' is quite correct here, you can't abrogate to something)

New comment by somewhereoutth in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

somewhereoutth — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:52:06 +0000

The real test would be if an LLM makes an important conjecture.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Why I don’t vibe code"

somewhereoutth — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:53:00 +0000

But it is not a real economy is it? Vast sums of money are being spent subsidizing token processing with little to no tangible business benefit for the end user.

For those of us lucky enough to have the choice, the best bet is to sit it out for a year or so until it all comes crashing down, then re-engage with what's left of the software industry.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria"

somewhereoutth — Thu, 07 May 2026 16:56:34 +0000

I'm also glad they have the option - and it does seem that many will take up that option. They themselves have judged that factory work is less bad than 'house' work, might be worth listening to them.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "UK businesses brace for jet fuel rationing"

somewhereoutth — Thu, 07 May 2026 08:58:57 +0000

Right! I am currently living in a (relatively poor) Western European country that has recently experienced a tourism boom, and although the money pouring in has been nice for at least some, it has wrecked the existing social fabric in many ways - starting with housing.

On the flip side, at least the beaches are kept clean. In the UK (where I'm from) there is a big problem with sewage outflows. Meanwhile here an entire beach got washed away by the winter storms - so they are putting it all back! Maybe 100 000 m3 of sand!

New comment by somewhereoutth in "UK businesses brace for jet fuel rationing"

somewhereoutth — Wed, 06 May 2026 23:28:47 +0000

Right, however over-tourism is a real problem.

Tourism provides low quality, transitory jobs, with income flowing more to wealth holders (property owners etc) than to wealth creators. It distorts property markets and sucks the oxygen out of other kinds of business. About time the Med weaned itself off of it.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

somewhereoutth — Wed, 06 May 2026 23:13:30 +0000

Prior to the advent of LLMs, I had this concept of the 'complexity horizon' - essentially a [hand built] software system will naturally tend to get more and more complex until no-one can understand it - until it meets the complexity horizon. And there it stays, being essentially unmaintainable.

With LLMs, you can race right for that horizon, go right through, and continue far beyond! But then of course you find yourself in a place without reason (the real hell), with all the horror and madness that that entails.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"

somewhereoutth — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:31:54 +0000

The entire business proposition for LLMs is that they will replace whole armies of [expensive] humans, hence justifying the biblical amount of CapEx. So of course there is strong incentive from the LLM creators to anthropomorphize them as much as possible. Indeed, they would never provide a model that was less human-like than what they have currently, even if it was more often correct and useful.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "LLMs Are Not a Higher Level of Abstraction"

somewhereoutth — Mon, 04 May 2026 08:06:31 +0000

Gambling is right. And not just the dopamine, habitual gamblers remember the wins and forget the losses, so tend to believe they are 'ahead'. In time the bean counters will come and sober everyone up, the bottom line can't be argued with.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "LLMs Are Not a Higher Level of Abstraction"

somewhereoutth — Sun, 03 May 2026 21:54:23 +0000

Right, it was the perfect match: Humans for fuzzy touchy feely stuff, computers for hard edged correct calculations. How have we managed to screw this up so badly?

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Uber Torches 2026 AI Budget on Claude Code in Four Months"

somewhereoutth — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:45:47 +0000

> When developer productivity tools become so valuable that engineers blow the entire budget in four months, the issue isn't the tool but that the budget was invented too early to forecast this adoption curve.

Where oh where can I find clients like these??

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Ask HN: What Makes AI a Bubble?"

somewhereoutth — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:58:05 +0000

Tulips? NFTs? South Sea Bubble? Mortgage Backed Securities and derivative products (CDOs etc)? Beanie Babies?

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Generative AI Vegetarianism"

somewhereoutth — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:43:10 +0000

Anti-Genism? Antija for short.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Ask HN: What Makes AI a Bubble?"

somewhereoutth — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:29:45 +0000

Conversely, just because an invention causes a bubble doesn't mean it is useful and world changing.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Canada's first sovereign wealth fund"

somewhereoutth — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:29:48 +0000

I believe wealth taxes (really, wealth restitution) should go into sovereign wealth funds - not least as then the public can see how that money is working for them, and so support the continuance and expansion of such taxes.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal"

somewhereoutth — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:16:34 +0000

LLM proponents believe that these higher level encodings in latent space do in fact match the real world concepts described by our language(s).

However, a much simpler explanation for what we see with LLMs is that instead the higher level encodings in latent space match only the patterns of our language(s), and no deeper encoding/understanding is present.

It's Plato's Cave - the shadows on the wall are all an LLM ever sees, and somehow it is expected to derive the real reality behind them.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity"

somewhereoutth — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 22:49:07 +0000

depends if post-correction it is worth anyone's money to keep training new frontier models. It could be that it isn't, so we are left with models that were trained in the bubble, but are now increasingly out of date, or (open?) models that are trained much more cheaply somehow with consequent lack of utility.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work"

somewhereoutth — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:11:21 +0000

I like open note exams (and perhaps open book exams, as you need to know the book well to know which page to look at) - it forces you to condense the material to the salient points and operationalise it to solve what would be more challenging problems than a simple recall exam.

When I see 'cheat sheets' - designed to be hidden on the back of calculators or whatever - then I see true application of human ingenuity and intellect.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Opus 4.7 to 4.6 Inflation is ~45%"

somewhereoutth — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:35:14 +0000

My understanding is that the major part of the cost of a given model is the training - so open models depend on the training that was done for frontier models? I'm finding hard to imagine (e.g.) RLHF being fundable through a free software type arrangement.

New comment by somewhereoutth in "Category Theory Illustrated – Orders"

somewhereoutth — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:41:46 +0000

The first 90% of this is standard set theory.

I'm unclear what the last 10% of 'category theory' gives us.