Hacker News: xdavidliu

New comment by xdavidliu in "How and Why I Journal"

xdavidliu — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:27:28 +0000

not a bug; the post we are currently on is the one that apparently used to be negative.

New comment by xdavidliu in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"

xdavidliu — Sun, 10 May 2026 12:35:46 +0000

oh the irony

New comment by xdavidliu in "Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent"

xdavidliu — Tue, 05 May 2026 23:42:18 +0000

framing 4 gb of data per user as 4 gb is even more of a stretch

New comment by xdavidliu in "People who are blind from birth never develop schizophrenia"

xdavidliu — Tue, 05 May 2026 20:18:06 +0000

I'm of course not talking about the arithmetic, but rather understanding the semantics of ratios, sets, and subsets, and inferring statistical significance.

New comment by xdavidliu in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

xdavidliu — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:51:26 +0000

I think the CEO was more talking in the line of Bill Russell or Maximus from Gladiator, not final-year Haslem

New comment by xdavidliu in "People who are blind from birth never develop schizophrenia"

xdavidliu — Sun, 03 May 2026 21:45:12 +0000

this is the type of math they should be teaching in high school, not trigonometry and calculus (which should be electives)

New comment by xdavidliu in "Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them"

xdavidliu — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:23:33 +0000

humans are probably the least cheap thing you can have in this context

New comment by xdavidliu in "Delve removed from Y Combinator"

xdavidliu — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:42:24 +0000

> 404 not found

"delve removed from y combinator" removed from y combinator

New comment by xdavidliu in "Go hard on agents, not on your filesystem"

xdavidliu — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:13:10 +0000

kinda reminds me of the plot of Sphere, where Samuel L Jackson is reading 20,000 leagues under the sea and is thinking of giant squids.

New comment by xdavidliu in "10-202: Introduction to Modern AI (CMU)"

xdavidliu — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 11:18:56 +0000

that would be the exact opposite of modern

New comment by xdavidliu in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

xdavidliu — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 14:41:17 +0000

fair point

New comment by xdavidliu in "Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness""

xdavidliu — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 23:01:21 +0000

good question, I'm not sure. Maybe check out the new Eliezer Yudkowsky book? He definity talks about something akin to "post-GPT era" on there.

New comment by xdavidliu in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

xdavidliu — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 20:57:10 +0000

I should have clarified what I meant. The training data includes roughly speaking the entire internet. Open source code is probably a large fraction of the code in the data, but it is a tiny fraction of the total data, which is mostly non-code.

My point was that the hypothetical of "not contributing to any open source code" to the extent that LLMs had no code to train on, would not have made as big of an impact as that person thought, since a very large majority of the internet is text, not code.

New comment by xdavidliu in "Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness""

xdavidliu — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 20:54:25 +0000

for a book that surveys pretty much all of it, see "Empire of AI" by Karen Hao

New comment by xdavidliu in "Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness""

xdavidliu — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 20:51:09 +0000

seems to me when this kind of stuff happens, there's usually something else completely unrelated, and your comment was simply the first one they happened to have latched onto. surely by itself it is not enough to elicit that kind of reaction

New comment by xdavidliu in "Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI"

xdavidliu — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 15:02:15 +0000

open source code is a miniscule fraction of the training data

New comment by xdavidliu in "Richard Stallman on ChatGPT"

xdavidliu — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:05:59 +0000

i think your comment actually mostly makes sense, except the part about neural network guys needing to familiarize with Chomsky, which is not the case at all

New comment by xdavidliu in "Richard Stallman on ChatGPT"

xdavidliu — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 21:26:46 +0000

yeah, your parent comment appears to be just nonsensical name-dropping. happens a lot here. A different type of comment is the "X is just Y" comment that is kind of annoying, like "all of AI is just curve fitting", which the commenter wants readers to think is some kind of profound insight.

New comment by xdavidliu in "How elites could shape mass preferences as AI reduces persuasion costs"

xdavidliu — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 13:48:39 +0000

when Elon bought twitter, I incorrectly assumed that this was the reason. (it may still have been the intended reason, but it didnt seem to play out that way)

New comment by xdavidliu in "Mathematics and Computation (2019) [pdf]"

xdavidliu — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:41:49 +0000

is there a more accepted connotation of the lone word "computation" that means something different from "theory of computation" (in the sense of turing machines, computability, decidability, complexity classes, Sipser) etc?