Hacker News: technocratius

New comment by technocratius in "Ask HN: Is GPT-5 a regression, or is it just me?"

technocratius — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 11:15:30 +0000

Ah yes, I've had similar experiences actually. Also the variant where I ask it to provide an alternate solution/answer to the one it gave, where it than proceeds to basically regurgitate its previous answer with slight stylistic (i.e. maintaining content parity) modifications.

Ask HN: Is GPT-5 a regression, or is it just me?

technocratius — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 10:38:57 +0000

Context: I have been using GPT5 since its release over a month ago, within my Plus subscription. Before this release, I heavily relied on gpt-o3 for most complex tasks, with 4o for simple question. I use it for a mix of scientific literature websearch for e.g. understanding health related topics, the occasional coding assistance and helping me out with *nix sysadmin related tasks. Note that I have not used its API or integration with an IDE.

Based on a month of GPT5 usage, this model feels like primarily like a regression:

1. It's slow: thinking mode can take ages, and sometimes gets downright stuck. It's auto-assessment of whether or not it needs to think feels poorly tuned to most tasks and defaults too easily to going into deep reasoning mode.

2. Hallucinations are in overdrive: I would assess that in 7/10 tasks, hallucinations continuously clutter the responses and warrant corrections and careful monitoring and steering back. It hallucinates list items from your prompt that weren't there, software package functionalities/capabilities and CLI parameters etc. Even thorough prompting with explicit linking to sources, e.g. also wihtin deep research frequently goes of the rails.

3. Not self critical: even in thinking mode, it frequently spews out incorrect stuff, that a blatant "this is not correct, check your answer" can directly correct.

Note: I am not a super advanced prompt engineer, and this above assessment is mainly wrt the previous generation of models. I would expect that with progression of model capabilities, the need for users to apply careful prompt engineering goes down, not up.

I am very curious to hear your experiences.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45238859

Points: 6

# Comments: 7

The AMD Open Ecosystem and Open Models [video]

technocratius — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 07:21:46 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgmVn7_bcgQ

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44909524

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by technocratius in "I want everything local – Building my offline AI workspace"

technocratius — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 07:34:34 +0000

I think you'd want things in RAM for performance reasons but would love to be corrected by people with more knowledge/experience on the subject

New comment by technocratius in "GLP-1s are breaking life insurance"

technocratius — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 21:11:34 +0000

They are very expensive

New comment by technocratius in "David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'"

technocratius — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 20:50:23 +0000

Yeah like that time before your were born, remember?

New comment by technocratius in "Mozilla launching “Thundermail” email service to take on Gmail, Microsoft 365"

technocratius — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 21:19:57 +0000

Just use Proton

New comment by technocratius in "U.S. bans noncompete agreements for nearly all jobs"

technocratius — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 21:18:30 +0000

Also surprised by this. Will the eu follow suit?

New comment by technocratius in "Shape typing in Python"

technocratius — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 04:10:34 +0000

Which language do you refer to when you speak of python's typed sibling?

New comment by technocratius in "Estimate your age of death"

technocratius — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 11:29:03 +0000

Interesting tool, especially the statistics relating to the chances of dying within 1 or 10 years are quite confronting. Memento Mori.

How fly neurons compute the direction of visual motion [video]

technocratius — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 08:07:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ukin_-5aLQ

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39689077

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by technocratius in "Pivotal Mental States (2020)"

technocratius — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 06:48:18 +0000

It's statistically significant because there is a difference in outcome between the group receiving treatment and the one that did not which could not be attributed to chance alone, but the difference isn't clinically significant because it was a very small difference (in statistics, this is sometimes also referred to as the _effect size_)

New comment by technocratius in "Pivotal Mental States (2020)"

technocratius — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 06:45:28 +0000

Thanks, we really need to bring a bit of balance and data to this topic like this. The hype is certainly real, while the data so far aren't backing this up.

I'm afraid that the public interest in legalisation of psychedelics, motivated by positive experiences in recreational use, leads to a skewed narrative around their health benefits, as a means to open the door for their gradual acceptance and legalisation. This happened to marijuana as well, where health benefits of marijuana were grossly exaggerated to open the door to its legalisation, with medical marijuana as a segway. Marijuana can be harmful and abused, so even though I'm all for legalisation, people should have a balanced view of the benefits and risks to make more informed decisions. Luckily the risk and abuse profile of psychedelics is (much) lower than that of marijuana.

New comment by technocratius in "Python 3.13 Gets a JIT"

technocratius — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 18:20:41 +0000

Well I think they even multiply, making it even better news!

New comment by technocratius in "Sit."

technocratius — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 22:59:21 +0000

This is a really cool idea, I will try out your app!

New comment by technocratius in "Vim users are encouraged to make a donation to ICCF"

technocratius — Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:53:46 +0000

I just donated. Thanks Bram, RIP <3

New comment by technocratius in "Ask HN: What is the best way to get into Physics as a coder?"

technocratius — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 22:19:58 +0000

Read a good textbook. I personally like the Feynman lectures of Physics, always very clearly explained.

New comment by technocratius in "OpenAI Announces $10M Superalignment Grants"

technocratius — Thu, 14 Dec 2023 18:57:54 +0000

> This leads to the fundamental challenge: how can humans steer and trust AI systems much smarter than them?

I think, as a first question to be answered prior to this one, the word "how" should be removed from this sentence.

New comment by technocratius in "Twelve billionaires' climate emissions outpollute 2.1M homes, analysis finds"

technocratius — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 17:15:47 +0000

>The carbon footprints of the investments were calculated by examining the equity stakes that the billionaires held in companies. Estimates of the carbon impact of their holdings was calculated using the company’s declarations on scope 1 emissions – direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by a company – and scope 2, indirect emissions.

Well, that seems a downright wrong way of assessing their "personal" footprint, don't you think?

New comment by technocratius in "Vocal fry register"

technocratius — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 03:15:28 +0000

Ah so _that's_ how Sam Altman talks.