Hacker News: sparsesignal

New comment by sparsesignal in "The first transatlantic telegraph cable was a bold, beautiful failure (2019)"

sparsesignal — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 06:58:47 +0000

Posted this because I saw a piece of the cable at the Science Museum in London years ago. It looks like it's still on display in the Information Age gallery:

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co33448...

New comment by sparsesignal in "The End of an Era"

sparsesignal — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:09:53 +0000

This assumes one-shot generation. I don't use it that way, and I don't think many people who find it useful do.

I use it as a colleague I'm drafting with. I'll ask how a sentence lands, tell it to make a paragraph more friendly or more dramatic, have it argue against a point I'm making. The piece comes together over many turns, and the information arriving in each turn is mine — it's not expanding one prompt, it's helping me converge on something.

The information-content framing also proves too much: a copy editor adds no information either. Neither does a translator, or a ghostwriter. What they add is form, and form is most of what makes writing good or bad.

The first transatlantic telegraph cable was a bold, beautiful failure (2019)

sparsesignal — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 11:59:10 +0000

Article URL: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-first-transatlantic-telegraph-cable-was-a-bold-beautiful-failure

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49096319

Points: 57

# Comments: 17

Jailbox: Network-Restricted, Hardened Linux VMs for AI Agents and Untrusted Code

sparsesignal — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 12:53:57 +0000

Article URL: https://karamatli.com/posts/network-isolated-kvm-sandbox-ai-agents/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49006016

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by sparsesignal in "Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? (2025)"

sparsesignal — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:30:58 +0000

It's still working for me, but only on the web (desktop) interface.

New comment by sparsesignal in "Why do AI company logos look like buttholes? (2025)"

sparsesignal — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:12:47 +0000

Have you tried clicking the Claude logo? https://x.com/ertug/status/2072339797708849398

New comment by sparsesignal in "Is Recursive Self-Improvement Here?"

sparsesignal — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:43:23 +0000

Frontier agents are already compressing the dev loop with humans in it, and as the article notes, compression alone can be exponential enough to matter. Walking vs. driving is a nice analogy.

New comment by sparsesignal in "Latent Programming Horizons in Coding Agents"

sparsesignal — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:24:02 +0000

Nice paper. They predict the outcome of edits up to ~25 steps before the agent makes them. Decodable doesn't mean causal, as the authors note, but a cheap probe that flags doomed trajectories early could save a lot of wasted agent compute. We clearly still have a lot to learn about what these models represent internally.