Hacker News: williamcotton

New comment by williamcotton in "The evolution of effective altruism"

williamcotton — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 20:14:35 +0000

Will MacAskill responds to our cover story on effective altruism

https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/10/04/will-maca...

Will MacAskill responds to our cover story on effective altruism

williamcotton — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 18:58:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/10/04/will-macaskill-responds-to-our-cover-story-on-effective-altruism

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49956754

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by williamcotton in "Pop!_OS bans AI-generated code from much of its codebase"

williamcotton — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:50:14 +0000

Here’s an example:

https://williamcotton.github.io/datafarm-studio

Some demos of the above charting language:

https://williamcotton.github.io/algraf/demos

WASM, in browser editor, LSP, and more.

New comment by williamcotton in "Pop!_OS bans AI-generated code from much of its codebase"

williamcotton — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 20:16:50 +0000

I’ve had the best luck by spending quite a bit of time going over the big picture architecture up front and then diving into the modules to further refine the details, making sure to generate step-by-step chunks of work in Markdown format for implementation. I’ll spend literally a couple of days doing this before starting any coding.

Edit: My latest project is all GPT-6 Astra High. It takes a lot of steering to keep it from adding a bunch of, while useful, features that are not strictly enough to the point. That main issue is it’ll use a lot of extra tokens in the process!

What was your process?

New comment by williamcotton in "Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests"

williamcotton — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 23:24:26 +0000

No one reads my blog, should I never post my own articles?

New comment by williamcotton in "Evolving programming languages in the AI era"

williamcotton — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 14:06:05 +0000

I've been playing around with a new DSL, and I've had good luck adding a "describe" feature, eg,

  newdsl describe some_feature

This returns the docs for that language feature. So instead of a giant SKILL.md containing the language spec, it exposes a way for an LLM to introspect.

DSLs climb the ladder of abstraction and constrain the solution space at the language level, which IMO provides tighter feedback to both humans and machines.

New comment by williamcotton in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

williamcotton — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 01:33:28 +0000

ACX has been on the Georgist tip for awhile.

Tokens Too Cheap to Meter

williamcotton — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 15:44:54 +0000

Article URL: https://jyn.dev/tokens-too-cheap-to-meter/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803198

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by williamcotton in "AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons"

williamcotton — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 13:10:16 +0000

Why is LLM code always harder to audit?

So LLMs might decide to add backdoors without prompting?

New comment by williamcotton in "AI and the Destruction of the Creative Commons"

williamcotton — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:54:38 +0000

How sure are you that any printer driver didn’t include a backdoor? What’s the difference between the LLM code with the backdoor and the human code with the backdoor?

New comment by williamcotton in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

williamcotton — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 02:34:54 +0000

There’s some level of irony around the fact that McDonalds spends quite a lot on branding and design.

New comment by williamcotton in "I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture"

williamcotton — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:07:57 +0000

Is there truly anything new under the sun? Hasn't all of existence alway been here? All math, all physics? We could have merely discovered it. Intuition might be nothing more than combinations of what already exists rather than some sort of divine insight that unlocks previously unknowable mysteries.

New comment by williamcotton in "Astra for Law"

williamcotton — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 01:34:18 +0000

Ok, so, “gibberish” in this case?

Honestly, this word has lost all meaning, outside of perhaps “any use of AI”.

Well at least I know where team “lawslop” is coming from. Thanks, I guess?

New comment by williamcotton in "Astra for Law"

williamcotton — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:37:18 +0000

I’m honestly looking for an actual example of something other than hallucinations! There are no examples in this entire thread! It’s just cynicism.

New comment by williamcotton in "Astra for Law"

williamcotton — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:28:10 +0000

Why be so unkind?

New comment by williamcotton in "Astra for Law"

williamcotton — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:00:03 +0000

So is there other “lawslop” or is it just hallucinations in this context?

New comment by williamcotton in "Astra for Law"

williamcotton — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 22:55:30 +0000

Aren’t hallucinations different than slop?

So no, I don’t know what they mean.

New comment by williamcotton in "Astra for Law"

williamcotton — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 22:09:34 +0000

What do you mean by “lawslop”?

New comment by williamcotton in "Small programming tricks"

williamcotton — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 16:35:07 +0000

Additional tip:

In the macOS terminal you can...

  Ctrl + Option + -

...and it'll undo your typing.

Dunno about other OS keys!

New comment by williamcotton in "PageRank explained"

williamcotton — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:48:19 +0000

Here's an in-depth explanation with an interactive demo that I made many moons ago:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130728183938/williamcotton.com...