Hacker News: xpct

New comment by xpct in "Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans"

xpct — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 11:17:20 +0000

Anti-human sentiment has been rising in some online spaces in the last year. Soon, LLMs will start mimicking that sentiment, the same way they copied our 2000s morality and political opinions.

New comment by xpct in "Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies?"

xpct — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 11:05:50 +0000

What does that even mean? They would have tried the models, noticed their limitations, and decide it's not AGI. Same as today.

New comment by xpct in "DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order"

xpct — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 04:43:48 +0000

I'd say that's not a very meaningful distinction to make.

New comment by xpct in "DeepSeek banned from U.S. federal civilian agencies under new DHS order"

xpct — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 04:41:22 +0000

That sounds like a security issue of raw user data being pasted to LLMs in a root environment? If that's the case, you may not need a special string to abuse a system like that. That's prompt injection.

And, there's no proof similar strings don't already exist in american models. What if "{id}_{url}" works to send it to an arbitrary URL, not a preset XYZ one?

New comment by xpct in "Hybrid Reasoning Agents: LLM agents that think in latent space, act through text"

xpct — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:59:01 +0000

I'd be happy to be corrected but my understanding is that it's just a side effect of scale. If we do more computation before we output, it becomes less observable.

New comment by xpct in "There's never been a better time to go into math (by: 3blue1brown) [video]"

xpct — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:41:20 +0000

> in a language only the machine understands

I wouldn't even grant that. It's a very one-directional problem solving approach where it's unknown to what extent it can build on its own findings.

New comment by xpct in "There's never been a better time to go into math (by: 3blue1brown) [video]"

xpct — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 04:36:22 +0000

What? Why are we nullifying so many human factors in one stroke? Humans strive to contribute to their community and to be recognized for it. We aren't machines, we have social and financial needs, and enjoy competition. Math being solved would mean part of humanity losing these parts of their lives.

New comment by xpct in "Personal software factories are a waste of time"

xpct — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 20:03:00 +0000

Can this be at the top? I had no idea such a term existed. And I don't think it should, either.

New comment by xpct in "Neural networks are clean"

xpct — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 06:41:10 +0000

Read through most of this. It does sound like fun detective work, looking at what neurons fire. Some of the concepts get quite complex. I wonder if this can be gamified.

New comment by xpct in "'500-hour' Order of the Sinking Star is as complex and exhausting as it sounds"

xpct — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 04:38:12 +0000

My favorite thing about puzzle games is meta, cognition stuff. What mindset can I put myself in, so that I can solve this faster? What should I think about, and how, to reduce complexity of the problem?

I tried the same last summer with Baba Is You and had an absolute blast. Playing through OotSS now, and momentum has been solid for the past ~20 hours. Skipping Stones has been my favorite!

New comment by xpct in "Using AI to reverse engineer hardware"

xpct — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:29:36 +0000

Indeed. I'd like to remind everyone that with LLMs it's increasingly simple to build quite a good profile of someone just from their social media posts.

New comment by xpct in "Using AI to reverse engineer hardware"

xpct — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:25:07 +0000

I wonder what the downstream effects of that will be. I imagine we may see some big lawsuits soon, meant to scare off the RE trend.

New comment by xpct in "Steam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher"

xpct — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:09:05 +0000

I don't think this is a statement about competition. This is not a metric anyone has competed on so far, it's being made into a press release.

New comment by xpct in "Simons Foundation launches $15M effort to help mathematicians navigate AI era"

xpct — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:34:51 +0000

> It seems that the solving rather than just the solution gave much to mathematics

The whole discourse of past few weeks has been mathematicians claiming the opposite.

New comment by xpct in "Steam Client is now faster than Epic's new vibe coded launcher"

xpct — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:31:54 +0000

The 'vibe coded' part needs to go. Both teams likely used AI-assisted coding. Neither team's product was completed by robots, not with current tech. Epic had the launcher update ready in advance to handle the bad PR from their announcement. Prepare for more announcements from Epic how AI and not humans solved something.

New comment by xpct in "I designed a nose guard for my dog and gave it away. Now 500 dogs wear one"

xpct — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:28:25 +0000

I'd hope it doesn't get solved, because it's one of the few signals I have to the person behind the screen.

New comment by xpct in "Fire at Starlink site in Bulgaria after suspected sabotage in Poland"

xpct — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 04:45:38 +0000

I don't think you should feel entirely safe in warring nations, no matter what you do.

New comment by xpct in "Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men"

xpct — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:28:43 +0000

Hmm.. I meant to make my point in isolation from LLMs. I definitely don't feel that way about learning music.

I do kind of understand it when it comes to programming, though. Hobby-like side projects often felt like they had some utility down the line, even if not directly applied. It's fun to show others what you've accomplished, to show off, maybe land a job from being noticed, etc.

New comment by xpct in "Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men"

xpct — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:12:32 +0000

I don't know if it's common but I generally don't like to be bad at my hobbies. I like it when I can do things well. I've been learning the piano recently and striving to play more difficult songs is what makes it fun.

New comment by xpct in "Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men"

xpct — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:10:20 +0000

Happy to hear that. What are you speedrunning?