Hacker News: turzmo

New comment by turzmo in "Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)"

turzmo — Tue, 26 May 2026 04:06:34 +0000

Not OP, but it has to be a walk with no headphones for me. As I walk, thoughts seem to bubble up from my subconscious and present themselves for consideration. This doesn’t happen as often if I’m listening to music.

New comment by turzmo in "Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify money spent on tokenmaxxing"

turzmo — Mon, 25 May 2026 17:52:43 +0000

Won’t be canned for going with the herd. I think it’s that simple, even if the herd is running off a cliff.

New comment by turzmo in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

turzmo — Sun, 24 May 2026 06:42:51 +0000

Yes, as some of these are being solved by the same person, I think my point is even more relevant: you try 1000 problems and solve a few, and only report the few, and it just seems like a matter of time until the rest are solved. But if you report that it didn’t work on the others, your conclusion is different.

I think it is important to temper expectations in light of the fact that these announcements are coming from a startup company with shady values looking to imminently IPO, and thus represent the most biased and misleading take of the situation possible.

New comment by turzmo in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

turzmo — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:40:00 +0000

This is true, but I still think the relevant question is, how many did they try before they found one that yielded to LLMs? The conclusion is very different if they tried 100 open problems and succeeded at one.

New comment by turzmo in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

turzmo — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:28:41 +0000

Not denying that these advances are impressive, but it is important to consider that this is a cherry-picked result. This doesn’t mean that AI can now be expected to do problems of similar or lower difficulty, but that it happened to work well on one problem. What you won’t see is how many others they had to try to get this result.

New comment by turzmo in "I’ve joined Anthropic"

turzmo — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:20:59 +0000

Genuine question: how is working for Anthropic selling your soul?

New comment by turzmo in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

turzmo — Thu, 14 May 2026 20:59:02 +0000

How do you mean politicizing and prioritizing foreigners?

New comment by turzmo in "Marc Andreessen is a philosophical zombie"

turzmo — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 02:22:04 +0000

Investors are rarely boycotted, deposed, or otherwise held accountable for their actions. It is advantageous to adopt whatever philosophical position absolves them of any guilt or responsibility since there is no benefit to having morals, or even signaling them. Of course he thinks this.

I also disagree with the other poster, the manifesto he wrote is remarkably repetitive and not insightful at all.

How much money would you need to stand to gain in exchange for your brain being atrophied this much? I don’t think there’s any amount where it makes sense…

New comment by turzmo in "Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package"

turzmo — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:04:20 +0000

Like I said originally, I think the rise of ChatGPT is a partly a consequence of this. It’s not that people are choosing a different search engine, they’re not searching at all because LLMs will give a better answer faster.

Also, whether it’s ChatGPT or something else, five years is really not that long. Time will tell, but does it really seem like decreasing quality in the name of profits is such a good long-term strategy?

New comment by turzmo in "Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package"

turzmo — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:36:34 +0000

Google has succeeded in enshittifying their search in a way that the vast majority of users (not customers -- those are the advertisers) have not noticed.

New comment by turzmo in "Google just gave Sundar Pichai a $692M pay package"

turzmo — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 19:05:50 +0000

I would argue that Google has had declining quality in search results, bordering on completely unusable in the past few years, and that has resulted in people using LLMs for things that they would have searched for years ago. Although they are competitive in AI, I think it is surprising that their product continues to frustrate people and that they are a distant second place.

New comment by turzmo in "How to stop being boring"

turzmo — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:05:46 +0000

"Be yourself" and "be polarizing" are the author's two suggestions to... avoid boring her, specifically? Or to avoid boring everybody? I'm not sure she quite understands what makes people tick.

New comment by turzmo in "GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics"

turzmo — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 22:50:17 +0000

I see, so no substance behind your argument.

New comment by turzmo in "GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics"

turzmo — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 18:44:13 +0000

Do you have any more substance behind your arguments? Feel free to open up the preprint and read it -- it doesn't bite.

New comment by turzmo in "GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics"

turzmo — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 13:16:13 +0000

I think you're misunderstanding my claim. There's no scandal here, just run-of-the-mill academic politicking. I fully believe that ChatGPT did the work they say it did, but that it deserves about as much credit as Mathematica does in "deriving a new result".

New comment by turzmo in "GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics"

turzmo — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 02:00:27 +0000

Physicist here. Did you guys actually read the paper? Am I missing something? The "key" AI-conjectured formula (39) is an obvious generalization of (35)-(38), and something a human would have guessed immediately.

(35)-(38) are the AI-simplified versions of (29)-(32). Those earlier formulae look formidable to simplify by hand, but they are also the sort of thing you'd try to use a computer algebra system for.

I'm willing to (begrudgingly) admit the possibility for AI to do novel work, but this particular result does not seem very impressive.

I picture ChatGPT as the rich kid whose parents privately donated to a lab to get their name on a paper for college admissions. In this case, I don't think I'm being too cynical in thinking that something similar is happening here and that the role of AI in this result is being well overplayed.

New comment by turzmo in "Ian's Shoelace Site"

turzmo — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 14:31:30 +0000

It always brings a smile to my face when it gets posted. I’ve used it to learn ways of lacing shoes, but it’s not even about that, it’s a reminder of what the internet used to be.

New comment by turzmo in "Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings"

turzmo — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 05:04:24 +0000

Love how the sign "Ulitsa" changes into something unintelligible but keeps different cyrillic characters.

New comment by turzmo in "Sampling at negative temperature"

turzmo — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 02:55:00 +0000

Negative temperatures are hotter than positive ones, in fact

New comment by turzmo in "LLMs Are Not Fun"

turzmo — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 20:00:42 +0000

Strongly agree. I've given up a job handcrafting chairs to be a foreman at the chair factory. Yes, more chairs are produced. That's not what I care about.

Coding for me was always about the understanding and craftsmanship. The associated output and pay came as an adult, but that was never the point.