Hacker News: tippytippytango

New comment by tippytippytango in "When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed"

tippytippytango — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:46:37 +0000

Above I was talking more generally about full autonomy. I agree the combined human + fsd system can be at least as safe as a human driver, perhaps more, if you have a good driver. As a frequent user of FSD, it's unreliability can be a feature, it constantly reminds me it can't be fully trusted, so I shadow drive and pay full attention. So it's like having a second pair of eyes on the road.

I worry that when it gets to 10,000 mile per incident reliability that it's going to be hard to remind myself I need to pay attention. At which point it becomes a de facto unsupervised system and its reliability falls to that of the autonomous system, rather than the reliability of human + autonomy, an enormous gap.

Of course, I could be wrong. Which is why we need some trusted third party validation of these ideas.

New comment by tippytippytango in "When Tesla's FSD works well, it gets credit. When it doesn't, you get blamed"

tippytippytango — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:15:23 +0000

Ultimately, anecdotes and testimonials of a product like this are irrelevant. But the public discourse hasn't caught up with it. People talk about it like it's a new game console or app, giving their positive or negative testimonials, as if this is the correct way to validate the product.

Only rigorous, continual, third party validation that the system is effective and safe would be relevant. It should be evaluated more like a medical treatment.

This gets especially relevant when it gets into an intermediate regime where it can go 10,000 miles without a catastrophic incident. At that level of reliability you can find lots of people who claim "it's driven me around for 2 years without any problem, what are you complaining about?"

10,000 mile per incident fault rate is actually catastrophic. That means the average driver has a serious, life threatening incident every year at an average driving rate. That would be a public safety crisis.

We run into the problem again in the 100,000 mile per incident range. This is still not safe. Yet, that's reliable enough where you can find many people who can potentially get lucky and live their whole life and not see the system cause a catastrophic incident. Yet, it's still 2-5x worse than the average driver.

New comment by tippytippytango in "'Attention is all you need' coauthor says he's 'sick' of transformers"

tippytippytango — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 20:25:21 +0000

It's difficult to do because of how well matched they are to the hardware we have. They were partially designed to solve the mismatch between RNNs and GPUs, and they are way too good at it. If you come up with something truly new, it's quite likely you have to influence hardware makers to help scale your idea. That makes any new idea fundamentally coupled to hardware, and that's the lesson we should be taking from this. Work on the idea as a simultaneous synthesis of hardware and software. But, it also means that fundamental change is measured in decade scales.

I get the impulse to do something new, to be radically different and stand out, especially when everyone is obsessing over it, but we are going to be stuck with transformers for a while.

New comment by tippytippytango in "Ex-Waymo engineers launch Bedrock Robotics to automate construction"

tippytippytango — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 22:38:54 +0000

We need a silver tongued LLM agent that can align all these forces (and a well provisioned MCP paypal tool for greasing palms)

New comment by tippytippytango in "François Chollet: The Arc Prize and How We Get to AGI [video]"

tippytippytango — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 17:57:45 +0000

He’s playing the game. You have to say AGI is your goal to get attention. It’s just like the YouTube thumbnail game. You can hate it, but you still have to play if you want people to pay attention.

New comment by tippytippytango in "There are no new ideas in AI, only new datasets"

tippytippytango — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 17:33:55 +0000

Sometimes we get confused by the difference between technological and scientific progress. When science makes progress it unlocks new S-curves that progress at an incredible pace until you get into the diminishing returns region. People complain of slowing progress but it was always slow, you just didn’t notice that nothing new was happening during the exponential take off of the S-curve, just furious optimization.

New comment by tippytippytango in "Live facial recognition cameras may become 'commonplace' as police use soars"

tippytippytango — Sat, 24 May 2025 22:10:02 +0000

False positives for this tech is absurdly high and law enforcement treats it like it’s perfect. That’s enough of a reason to make it illegal.

New comment by tippytippytango in "Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say"

tippytippytango — Fri, 23 May 2025 19:39:20 +0000

There will have to be a new IP framework to make sure people are properly incentivized to produce content in an AI first world.

New comment by tippytippytango in "Coding without a laptop: Two weeks with AR glasses and Linux on Android"

tippytippytango — Sat, 17 May 2025 21:26:53 +0000

I hope they can figure out why these give some people headaches and eye strain (like myself) I really want to use this, but can't stand the pain for more than a few minutes.

New comment by tippytippytango in "Perverse incentives of vibe coding"

tippytippytango — Wed, 14 May 2025 22:59:14 +0000

Sounds like you found a good problem for the students. Having the experience of failing to get the right answer out of the tool and then succeeding on your whits creates an opportunity to learn these tools benefit from disciplined usage.

New comment by tippytippytango in "Perverse incentives of vibe coding"

tippytippytango — Wed, 14 May 2025 22:26:33 +0000

Patronizing much?

New comment by tippytippytango in "Perverse incentives of vibe coding"

tippytippytango — Wed, 14 May 2025 20:10:15 +0000

This article captures a lot of the problem. It’s often frustrating how it tries to work around really simple issues with complex workarounds that don’t work at all. I tell it the secret simple thing it’s missing and it gets it. It always makes me think, god help the vibe coders that can’t read code. I actually feel bad for them.

New comment by tippytippytango in "I built a native Windows Todo app in pure C (278 KB, no frameworks)"

tippytippytango — Sun, 11 May 2025 19:14:31 +0000

The pedantry in the comments of a todo app is exquisite. HN never disappoints.

Very nostalgic OP, warms my heart 10/10

New comment by tippytippytango in "A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code"

tippytippytango — Fri, 09 May 2025 15:10:06 +0000

Sort of, but in a good way, if I’ve spent $15 on a problem and it’s not solved, it reminds me to stop wasting tokens and think of a better strategy. On net it makes me use less tokens, but more for efficiency. I mostly love that I don’t need to periodically do math on a subscription to see if I’m getting a good deal this month.

New comment by tippytippytango in "A flat pricing subscription for Claude Code"

tippytippytango — Fri, 09 May 2025 06:18:57 +0000

I prefer just paying for metered use on every request. I hope monthly fees don’t carry over from the last era of tech. It’s fine to charge consumers $10 per month. But once it’s over $50 let’s not pretend you are hoping I under utilize the service, and you want me to think I’m over utilizing it. These premium subscriptions are too much for me to pretend that math doesn’t exist.

New comment by tippytippytango in "Block Diffusion: Interpolating Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Models"

tippytippytango — Fri, 09 May 2025 06:11:16 +0000

I wouldn’t beat yourself up over it. Very few papers can be understood without reading a significant amount of the neighboring literature and the history of how that work came to be. There are norms and customs and a kind of academic language in every community that you won’t be able to see unless you’ve read a lot from that community. Even if you have the right math level it’s tricky.

A single paper is part of a conversation, not something that stands alone. Trying to read one random paper is like finding a 1000 page thread on an obscure topic that has been running for 10+ years and reading only the last page. It won’t make any sense without reading back a ways.

New comment by tippytippytango in "Inheritance was invented as a performance hack (2021)"

tippytippytango — Thu, 08 May 2025 05:18:56 +0000

If you pretend/imagine it was intentional, and insightful, you've created a nerd trap for amateur ontologists. Some of which decide to become professional ontologists and sell books on objected oriented design.

New comment by tippytippytango in "Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and entertaining"

tippytippytango — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 17:56:35 +0000

The python zoom in seems performative. A vision model already has access to all the data, how does zooming in help it? Still very cool that it can!

New comment by tippytippytango in "I ditched my laptop for a pocketable mini PC and a pair of AR glasses"

tippytippytango — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 05:49:59 +0000

These glasses give me an instant headache and 1080p is abysmal if you are used to 5K displays. I love the idea, hate the actual glasses.

New comment by tippytippytango in "The role of developer skills in agentic coding"

tippytippytango — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 16:11:13 +0000

It’s fascinating how the debate is going exactly as the car debate went. People were arguing for a whole spectrum of environment modifications for self driving cars.

I’ll take the other side of that bet. The software industry won’t make things easier for LLMs. A few will try, but will get burned by the tech changing too fast to target. Seeing this, people will by and large stay focused on designing their ecosystems for humans.