Hacker News: topaz0

New comment by topaz0 in "Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI"

topaz0 — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 19:01:02 +0000

Iteration and recursion are famously equivalent

New comment by topaz0 in "Bug Blindness"

topaz0 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:12:18 +0000

Unfortunately we won't get a chance to see whether kagi could make it work before SEO was a thing, so this isn't a fair comparison.

(Not defending kagi necessarily, I've never tried it, no opinion on how it fares on today's Internet but comparing it to how 1999 Google did on the 1999 internet is absurd)

New comment by topaz0 in "The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead"

topaz0 — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 02:32:37 +0000

Eh, just have a human evaluate and approve every tool call

New comment by topaz0 in "AWS Acquires DuckLabs"

topaz0 — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:16:36 +0000

> nobody

Speaking for yourself I guess

New comment by topaz0 in "AWS Acquires DuckLabs"

topaz0 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 23:05:02 +0000

Generational wealth is just wealth that survives to the next generation. It doesn't have to be extravagant wealth when it gets there to count.

Also wealth does not start at the ability to live an extravagant life without a salary... You're wealthy way before that point.

New comment by topaz0 in "AWS Acquires DuckLabs"

topaz0 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:15:46 +0000

Says who? Ive never heard this and can't find anyone saying this.

New comment by topaz0 in "AWS Acquires DuckLabs"

topaz0 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:13:22 +0000

A house you own outright is already generational wealth

New comment by topaz0 in "I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers"

topaz0 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:14:18 +0000

I don't think it's about giving credit at all.

New comment by topaz0 in "Sol loves to cheat"

topaz0 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 11:56:33 +0000

We absolutely have digital machines with digital controls, they're called computers, and the controls are called programming languages etc.

The reason people prefer llms over programming is exactly because it lets them specify their program fuzzily, i.e. it lets them avoid going to the trouble of specifying enough detail to make it deterministic.

New comment by topaz0 in "The Amazon tax"

topaz0 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:38:54 +0000

Lol

New comment by topaz0 in "Superpowers, Not Superintelligence"

topaz0 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:34:11 +0000

As long as you're the kind of person the car rental people tend to approve of...

New comment by topaz0 in "What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?"

topaz0 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:24:30 +0000

It's written as if the UV and infrared are scattering the blue, which is not correct. Everything scatters off small particles, but shorter (blue) wavelengths scatter more (as the 6th power of the frequency), so most of the scattered light is blue. The details matter somewhat, i.e if the sun were a bit cooler, there'd be less blue in the incident light to scatter and you'd see something somewhat greener.

New comment by topaz0 in "The German Mittelstand"

topaz0 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:36:20 +0000

Wood bending is way older than the nr 14. Plenty of that stuff in 18th c. Europe but apparently it was a common technique in lots of cultures before they had any contact with europeans too, going way back.

New comment by topaz0 in "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]"

topaz0 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 23:34:57 +0000

Interesting point I guess, much to consider

New comment by topaz0 in "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]"

topaz0 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 02:55:34 +0000

To be clear, I am not agreeing that people only upvote their favorite billionaires, just that if this particular thing was done by a Chinese model it would not have gotten the same attention

New comment by topaz0 in "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]"

topaz0 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:37:34 +0000

Yeah

New comment by topaz0 in "98% isn't much"

topaz0 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:59:39 +0000

Log odds ratios are less misleading. Or at least odds ratios.

New comment by topaz0 in "The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs"

topaz0 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 23:07:12 +0000

Road safety is a social good -- it depends on the cooperation of everyone on the road. Choosing to put down your phone or slowing down make everyone safer, including you. Choosing a bigger car makes everyone less safe except you, who get marginally more safe. It's obviously antisocial and the kind of choice that makes the world worse for everyone.

New comment by topaz0 in "You can't unit test for taste"

topaz0 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 22:25:43 +0000

Appreciating that there are some benefits is differwnt from adhering to the church

New comment by topaz0 in "Political bias in AI: Where the AI models stand"

topaz0 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:51:05 +0000

It's not a question of whether it's biased to say that, rather whether it would tend to bias the model's response (e.g. toward weighting the stated downsides as more imported than the implicit upsides). But that said, choosing to highlight particular facts while leaving others silent is a very common sign of bias.