Hacker News: starlust2

New comment by starlust2 in "Show HN: I Built a Sandbox for Agents"

starlust2 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:16:21 +0000

One could theoretically use a prompt injection attack to exploit a privilege escalation vulnerability on the kernel.

New comment by starlust2 in "It's cheaper to buy a new printer every month"

starlust2 — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 22:51:14 +0000

Fixing the hole is easy. Few more steps than you described, but still easy. Texturing less so.

New comment by starlust2 in "MIT study finds AI can replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce"

starlust2 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 16:34:05 +0000

The joke about someone using chatGPT to write a lengthy email that the recipient will summarize with ChatGPT is the perfect example of how pretend much work is.

New comment by starlust2 in "California passes law to reduce volume of commercials on streaming services"

starlust2 — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 22:44:53 +0000

We also need that for brightness. The brightness on Amazon Prime TV ads is painful. I literally hide under a blanket until they are done.

New comment by starlust2 in "Denmark close to wiping out cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out"

starlust2 — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 15:00:31 +0000

Even if you're married, you might not be married forever, could be in an open relationship, or a partner may cheat. None of which is the pharmacist's business.

New comment by starlust2 in "Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City"

starlust2 — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 18:31:48 +0000

Maybe not immediately but gathering the data on those areas will eventually lead to their ability to drive there.

New comment by starlust2 in "Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City"

starlust2 — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 18:29:23 +0000

Sounds like it's a person actively monitoring but not driving. The point is minimizing risk until safety can be proven.

New comment by starlust2 in "Why LLMs can't really build software"

starlust2 — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 16:47:26 +0000

It's not that they can't build a mental model, it's that they don't attempt to build one. LLMs jump straight from text to code with little to no time spent trying to architect the system.

New comment by starlust2 in "LLM Daydreaming"

starlust2 — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 16:14:30 +0000

> through brute force

The same is true of humanity in aggregate. We attribute discoveries to an individual or group of researchers but to claim humans are efficient at novel research is a form of survivorship bias. We ignore the numerous researchers who failed to achieve the same discoveries.

New comment by starlust2 in "LLMs are mirrors of operator skill"

starlust2 — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:27:55 +0000

A thing people miss is that there are many different right ways to solve a problem. A legacy system might need the compatibility or it might be a greenfield. If you leave a technical requirement out of the prompt you are letting the LLM decide. Maybe that will agree with your nuanced view of things, but maybe not.

We're not yet at a point where LLM coders will learn all your idiosyncrasies automatically, but those feedback loops are well within our technical ability. LLM's are roughly a knowledgeable but naïve junior dev; you must train them!

Hint: add that requirement to your system/app prompt and be done with it.

New comment by starlust2 in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

starlust2 — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:13:13 +0000

Well I'm certainly not saying that AI should generate more corporate spam. That's part of them problem! And also a strawman argument!

New comment by starlust2 in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

starlust2 — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 17:59:32 +0000

A big challenge is that programmers all have unique ever changing personal style and vision that they've never had to communicate before. As well they generally "bikeshed" and add undefined unrequested requirements, because you know someday we might need to support 10000x more users than we have. This is all well and good when the programmer implements something themselves but falls apart when it must be communicated to an LLM. Most projects/systems/orgs don't have the necessary level of detail in their documentation, documentation is fragmented across git/jira/confluence/etc/etc/etc., and it's a hodge podge of technologies without a semblance of consistency.

I think we'll find that over the next few years the first really big win will be AI tearing down the mountain of tech & documentation debt. Bringing efficiency to corporate knowledge is likely a key element to AI working within them.

New comment by starlust2 in "Robin: A multi-agent system for automating scientific discovery"

starlust2 — Tue, 20 May 2025 17:57:19 +0000

Wouldn't the fact that another group researched ABCA1 validate that the assistant did find a reasonable topic to research?

Ultimately we want effective treatments but the goal of the assistant isn't to perfectly predict solutions. Rather it's to reduce the overall cost and time to a solution through automation.

New comment by starlust2 in "AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms"

starlust2 — Wed, 14 May 2025 17:15:22 +0000

The thing with vague requirements is that the real problem is that making decisions is hard. There are always tradeoffs and consequences. Rarely is there a truly clear and objective decision. In the end either you or the LLM are guessing what the best option is.

New comment by starlust2 in "The Northeast is becoming fire country"

starlust2 — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 20:48:31 +0000

I'm not sure about that but in that scenario polar regions would be 75-85F and life would be very harsh just about everywhere else. The one period in time where temperatures were that high, the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, diversity plummeted, mammals were smaller and migrated to higher latitudes.

New comment by starlust2 in "The Northeast is becoming fire country"

starlust2 — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 19:51:01 +0000

If climate change reaches the tipping point where clouds cannot form then we probably won't be seeing much rain anywhere.

New comment by starlust2 in "Sequence diagrams, the only good thing UML brought to software development"

starlust2 — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 23:35:02 +0000

> Maybe in the not-too-distant future we will have AI grokking large code bases and cranking out accurate, useful, UML diagrams out of it.

> All those diagrams, when they are complete, correct and up-to-date, do convey what they are supposed to convey.

I spent a bit of time prototyping this recently. It's definitely possible. Rational Rose also had the capability to generate diagrams from code though. I don't remember how good it was at the task though. Was Rational Rose just a very bad implementation?

I find the hate in this chat strange because diagrams are incredibly useful when working through complex problems* and then conveying that information to other engineers. My experience over 20+ years is that a huge portion of engineers can't grok complex problems from code alone.

*Most of my projects are optimizing billion+ row databases, micro-service architectures, and various other scaling challenges.

New comment by starlust2 in "Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI"

starlust2 — Tue, 16 May 2023 16:25:29 +0000

If you get to use a tool, then so does the LLM.

New comment by starlust2 in "Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI"

starlust2 — Tue, 16 May 2023 16:23:34 +0000

You're focusing too much on what the LLM can handle internally. No LLMs aren't good at math, but they understand mathematic concepts and can use a program or tool to perform calculations.

Your argument is the equivalent of saying humans can't do math because they rely on calculators.

In the end what matters is whether the problem is solved, not how it is solved.

(assuming that the how has reasonable costs)

New comment by starlust2 in "Together’s $20M seed funding to build open-source AI and cloud platform"

starlust2 — Mon, 15 May 2023 17:56:25 +0000

I've noticed a big trend by commercial entities claiming to be "Open Source" but actually charging for licenses. Just because your code is in a public repo on github doesn't mean it's open source. If it's not an open source license it's not open.

This is especially true of AI projects.