Hacker News: tehnub

New comment by tehnub in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

tehnub — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 03:25:15 +0000

Hey, sorry. I was irritated reading all the idiotic, ugly comments piling on Tao and I mistakenly took yours to be another. Reading it again, I appreciate the sentiment.

New comment by tehnub in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

tehnub — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:56:33 +0000

Aside: Odd he's still using Opus 5...

New comment by tehnub in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

tehnub — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:53:21 +0000

Read his slide with "aligned applied problem" and such. The human understanding is what keeps all this stuff aligned to human goals. Perhaps soon enough that won't be necessary though and AIs will read minds or something (I'm serious).

New comment by tehnub in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

tehnub — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:49:11 +0000

>there may not be a future where his (and to some extent, my) skills are relevant and valued

What are your skills that will still be relevant post-ASI? Perhaps you're an NBA player?

New comment by tehnub in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

tehnub — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:44:40 +0000

>if you had a [sic] AI-created drug that tremendously improved cancer treatment outcomes

His whole point is that you wouldn't know if it improved outcomes — what if the AI faked the eval.

New comment by tehnub in "Grieving the loss of details"

tehnub — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 23:10:54 +0000

The background reads like a strong Caltech admissions essay. Just sharing my irrelevant observation.

New comment by tehnub in "Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU"

tehnub — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:52:31 +0000

I for one don't find it strange at all that he squashed the commit history. I suspect many feel similarly. You've demonstrated that you're quite taken aback by it, but without explaining anything wrong with it. It is not a "destruction of trust".

New comment by tehnub in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

tehnub — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:27:05 +0000

This one doesn't seem expressible in those terms:

    from functools import reduce

    df = reduce(DataFrame.union, dfs)

New comment by tehnub in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

tehnub — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 04:19:30 +0000

Came here to comment this. I work on a team of functional-adverse devs, but they all happily use this one.

New comment by tehnub in "iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max"

tehnub — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:35:05 +0000

>Also a phone already starts with very deep depth of field because again smaller sensor size thus smaller focal length etc. Most images at their lower f stop is already in focus. So the ability to reduce aperture or simulate shallow DOF is trying to give users more of the creative control that larger sensor cameras naturally have (need to manipulate because of their larger sensor size) and doesn't make much sense to me.

Totally agreed. I wonder if it will make 180-degree shutter angle video easier to achieve. The only way to achieve this on current iPhones during the day is using a pretty strong ND filter.

New comment by tehnub in "Anger, Anxiety and Agency"

tehnub — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 23:01:32 +0000

Neither this post nor the Sean Goedecke one gives an example of what being angry at work looks like. Anger is a pretty broad emotion. Without examples to base the discussion, it all seems kind of meaningless to me. I see a lot of frustration at work. At what point does it become anger?

New comment by tehnub in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

tehnub — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:36:03 +0000

If you're excited about AI, doesn't that mean you're actually less AI-pilled? You don't believe it will replace you fully.

New comment by tehnub in "Discovery Loop"

tehnub — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 03:51:17 +0000

That pic of the team... no swag to speak of

New comment by tehnub in "The Artist Who Colored Ghibli"

tehnub — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 21:40:21 +0000

Another film she did the colors on is Whisper of the Heart. It's a Ghibli film that was written by Miyazaki, but directed by Yoshifumi Kondō. The colors are truly outstanding. Scenes at dawn, lamplit rooms, overcast school days, and fantasy sequences all look just wonderful.

Example: https://www.sakugabooru.com/post/show/46202

New comment by tehnub in "If You Build It, They Will Come"

tehnub — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:30:36 +0000

Such excellent writing. I also read the linked post from 2018 near the bottom. When every other thing you see on here is Claude-inflected if not Claude-written, encountering a blog like this is an occasion to cherish.