Hacker News: ummonk

New comment by ummonk in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

ummonk — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 23:07:25 +0000

“Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing.”

I’d be curious whether the author composed this sentence himself or it was the output of AI. Personally I often find myself “it’s not X it’s Y” and then recoiling in disgust and rephrasing it simply because AI has made it so grating from overuse.

Disney's Films Used to Look Different

ummonk — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:36:26 +0000

Article URL: https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/disneys-films-used-to-look-different

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49720312

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by ummonk in "Another researcher says OpenAI trained on conversations, then claimed breakthrou"

ummonk — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 15:30:24 +0000

It could go into personalization / memory. Or they could be A/B testing some system prompt tuning and consider the thumbs up / thumbs down as statistical feedback on the particular flags that are enabled for your account.

New comment by ummonk in "What will our economic future look like?"

ummonk — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 23:26:41 +0000

Are you saying that instead of investing in training right now they'll get higher ROI by pausing training for a year, and investing their money into taking out long positions on the stock market, all on the hope that what they label the "Extreme scenario" comes to pass?

New comment by ummonk in "What will our economic future look like?"

ummonk — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 21:23:33 +0000

How would going leveraged on the S&P 500 because they expect long term rapid GDP growth help them with short term cash flow to invest in AI training that will enable that rapid GDP growth?

New comment by ummonk in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

ummonk — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:59:58 +0000

The other reply doesn't contradict what you're saying. Someone who was street racing is going to tell the cops / insurance company that they were lost in thought.

New comment by ummonk in "Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]"

ummonk — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 04:48:19 +0000

Especially because the data that gets fed into training is first anonymized, so they’d need to look for navier stokes related stuff in the anonymized training set and then get make some sort of ad hoc process (with Tristan’s permission and sign off from legal) to compare the training data against his chats / Codex sessions to check if anything matches up. And that assumes his chats / sessions are still there, and not deleted to compare against.

New comment by ummonk in "Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]"

ummonk — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:14:03 +0000

This is an excellent point...

New comment by ummonk in "Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]"

ummonk — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:10:18 +0000

My best guess is that from the perspective of the OpenAI people, Buckmaster was letting his paranoia about OpenAI training tank his opportunity to receive the Clay Prize (it seems like Buckmaster and Alpoge's result isn't quite the full result required for the Clay Prize, whereas apparently OpenAI does have that full result worked out, using the same approach that Buckmaster and Alpoge had been exploring).

Whether the Codex sessions could have indeed made their way into Astra training data is something I can only speculate on though.

New comment by ummonk in "Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting"

ummonk — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:52:00 +0000

Yes, but again, what people call planets was stable for over a thousand years before changing rapidly in the past few centuries (first with the Sun and Moon being removed during the Copernican revolution, then Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta being added before being removed when they discovered a bunch of other asteroids, then Neptune being added, and finally in the last century Pluto being added before being removed after they discovered a bunch of other dwarf planets).

If you don't like changes to what people call planets, you should be unrolling all the other changes that have also been made, and go back to the original definition that stood from ~200 BCE-1700 CE.

New comment by ummonk in "Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting"

ummonk — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:31:56 +0000

No that would be an argument to return to the original definition of planets (highly visible celestial objects that migrate across the sky, i.e. the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn).

If you believe in the "standard 9" you're just insisting on returning to a scientific definition of planets but one that is frozen on our scientific understanding from a few decades ago...

New comment by ummonk in "When str.lower() is a security vulnerability in Python"

ummonk — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:25:21 +0000

Yeah, that's what I figured, but my worry upon seeing this is "what happens if lower() changes again and people forget to update the list of exceptions?".

Unless they have unit testing on the entire Unicode code space to ensure what they're doing is always identical to 3.2.0.

New comment by ummonk in "When str.lower() is a security vulnerability in Python"

ummonk — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:56:14 +0000

> The fix was to create new exceptions so that str.lower() would behave as if it was using Unicode 3.2.0 for only particular function. So, we go through each Unicode codepoint and record when the behavior of str.lower() is different when comparing the Unicode version shipped with Python and Unicode 3.2.0

This sounds like a really hacky solution compared to implementing a separate frozen Unicode 3.2.0 lower.

New comment by ummonk in "Does anyone run Postgres without PgBouncer?"

ummonk — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 15:13:54 +0000

I feel like there are a lot of use cases where I’d opt for SQLite and a lot of use cases where I’d opt for Postgres + PgBouncer. I’m curious what kinds of features push towards using Postgres alone over SQLite.

New comment by ummonk in "Apple says more ex-employees may have taken confidential data to OpenAI"

ummonk — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:15:11 +0000

I thought those were just allegations they made in the lawsuit, not necessarily something they had written evidence of in the form of messages.

New comment by ummonk in "Theo de Raadt: "You've been smoking something mind altering" (2007)"

ummonk — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:16:42 +0000

How big is the OpenBSD kernel and userland actually compared to a virtualization layer?

New comment by ummonk in "Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness"

ummonk — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:28:07 +0000

I don’t follow. Are you under the misapprehension that ears was referring to auditory perception, rather than vestibular sense of motion?

New comment by ummonk in "Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee"

ummonk — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:54:48 +0000

You just press backspace and hit the accent mark key or for a printing press stack the accent mark on top of the letter. People ditched accents because they were rarely used in English writing (only really being used for some loanwords), not because simplifications were forced by typewriters or the printing press (which handle non-English languages just fine).

New comment by ummonk in "Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee"

ummonk — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:50:02 +0000

Protp-Sinaitic was an abjad not an alphabet.

New comment by ummonk in "Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee"

ummonk — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:45:38 +0000

"This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language" - nonsense. That's just because modern Hebrew is based on the written language and thus reflects spelling pronunciation rather than historical pronunciation.

Also, proto-Sinaitic is not an alphabet. That's why Persian writing became harder to read when they switched from the nearly alphabetic Old Persian cuneiform to Aramaic abjad descended from proto-Sinaitic.