Hacker News: yunwal

New comment by yunwal in "Thinking will become a hobby"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:10:18 +0000

We're talking about robotics, not AI? AI-driven robotics so far has zero practical applications

New comment by yunwal in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 05:21:25 +0000

Unless AI companies are willing to take on liability for bad decisions the bot makes some human who can be promoted or fired will need to roughly understand risks and tradeoffs of what ai does

New comment by yunwal in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 05:08:17 +0000

This is just not how math has ever worked and seems like a completely incorrect lens to apply to this situation.

New comment by yunwal in "Thinking will become a hobby"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:31:20 +0000

There’s no evidence that superhuman robots are around the corner, and even less evidence that such robots will be price competitive compared with human labor.

New comment by yunwal in "Thinking will become a hobby"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 02:42:39 +0000

Someone has no hobbies

New comment by yunwal in "Thinking will become a hobby"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 02:30:26 +0000

> or that crops in the rest of the world are particularly resistant to mechanization

The causality is somewhat mixed up here. People in the US don’t, for the most part, grow rice because it doesn’t pay a competitive wage in the US. So parts of the world with lower wages end up growing most of the rice.

New comment by yunwal in "Thinking will become a hobby"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 02:23:44 +0000

> economy is 100% automated?

People thought tractors would automate everything too. They didn’t. There’s more to life and work than being able to generate text.

New comment by yunwal in "Anthropic AI model submits false tip on unsolved Philly murder, police say"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 02:08:45 +0000

> “AI model submits false tip”, it doesn’t say anything about a form

The article mentions the website name in the first sentence, and it’s trivial to see that you submit a tip by filling out a form.

New comment by yunwal in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 02:05:43 +0000

> It's not our job to attempt to solve large-scale societal issues caused by technological development

Says who?

> Note that pretty much every time during the industrial revolution a technology replaced human effort, it ended up creating more jobs and wealth in the long term

Note that since the 1970s, and throughout the entire personal computing era, median wages have not outpaced inflation. Fewer Americans have access to good schools, median home buying age has increased, access to good healthcare has decreased. So I think there’s good reason to believe the “more jobs and wealth in the long term” trend has reversed for most people.

New comment by yunwal in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:58:58 +0000

This is absolutely not true. The reason nearly every mathematician believes the Riemann hypothesis is true is because out of zillions of discovered non-trivial zeros, so far 100% have been located at (0.5, ). If we had only discovered 3 such points, nobody would give it much credence.

New comment by yunwal in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:56:51 +0000

> you can't run experiments on your own

Who says?

New comment by yunwal in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:51:16 +0000

> there is a possibility that a clinical trial run by AI could hack the trial get something approved when it wasn't safe or effective

This possibility already exists and nothing about AI fundamentally changes it

New comment by yunwal in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:48:04 +0000

> humans would follow the spirit of the trial process

P-hacking has been a problem well before LLMs were wearing diapers

New comment by yunwal in "Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:36:31 +0000

I would say this statement is incorrect, and if I had to guess, it will be for the next 5 years. Google’s main product is ads, followed by search, gmail, and Google Docs suite, and Gemini is not on track to dethrone either any time soon.

New comment by yunwal in "AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software"

yunwal — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 01:24:32 +0000

I think eventually we’ll substitute code review with statistical evals for some cases. Similar to how we do drug trials.

New comment by yunwal in "AI is a tool and using it well takes skill"

yunwal — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 23:55:58 +0000

I don’t think that’s “the whole shtick” anymore than it is for something like cars. There are valid ways to use it as a tool to provide net new value, and inevitably a whole bunch of people will end up using it as a lazy machine anyway, especially if their country/society benefits from people using it that way (Americans in both cases).

New comment by yunwal in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

yunwal — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:24:15 +0000

If it's a threat to people's livelihood or sense of meaning, it makes sense to consider how we can prevent massive numbers of people (especially incredibly smart people) from becoming disgruntled, depressed, or destitute. Typically societies with a lot of unhappy people do not function well (perhaps by definition), even if they have some technological edge.

New comment by yunwal in "Anthropic AI model submits false tip on unsolved Philly murder, police say"

yunwal — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 22:09:07 +0000

I can’t imagine anyone thinking filling out a form requires scary levels of power. It actually makes the model look incredibly dumb. It’s probably a real, stupid thing that happened.

New comment by yunwal in "Special Projects (2016)"

yunwal — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:06:56 +0000

LLMs were also a nice example of this before 2018 or so, so I wouldn't necessarily count on quantum computing being a disappointment forever.

New comment by yunwal in "OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals"

yunwal — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 22:36:15 +0000

Right, they also seem to have hidden it from the Australian government a month after learning about it. That feels like it should qualify as conspiracy in any reasonable legal system