Hacker News: z3c0

New comment by z3c0 in "How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn't"

z3c0 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:14:33 +0000

While I wouldn't go as far as claiming Bell stole the patent, that he filed his patent within hours of Elisha Grey is so fortuitous a coinicidence that one can't help but wonder if it weren't a coincidence.

New comment by z3c0 in "Federal judge calls Flock 'indiscriminate mass surveillance'"

z3c0 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:48:57 +0000

"Digital effects" have always been a grey area for unreasonable search-and-seizure. This was an infamous moment for the late Antonin Scalia, who, iirc, argued that the constistution couldn't reasonably be addressing this matter, as the Founding Fathers had no concept of digital effects when defining "documents and effects".

New comment by z3c0 in "500k facial scans at UK stations yield no arrests, 1 false positive"

z3c0 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 17:58:52 +0000

I'd say the biggest indicator towards crime is self-absorption and lack of empathy. Apparently, HN comments are great place to devise a corpus upon.

New comment by z3c0 in "OpenAI agent hacked Australian government website, PM says"

z3c0 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 11:19:29 +0000

Decades worth of hackers missed the opportunity to say "It wasn't me -- my computer did it."

New comment by z3c0 in "Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]"

z3c0 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:03:28 +0000

I expect because it's overly reductive to the point of falsehood. Two sufficiently complex systems will likely exhibit enough parallels to form a useful analogy, but that does nothing to reflect the ways the systems aren't alike.

New comment by z3c0 in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

z3c0 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 22:42:25 +0000

I'm not outside of enterprise and have worked hands-on for over a decade with AI-driven customer workflows. The cost of accessibility audits are NOT higher than AI R&D or third-party B2B contracts for vaporware touting to do the same.

Sorry if that assertion stands opposed to your value prop.

New comment by z3c0 in "GLM-5.3 is now open-weight"

z3c0 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 22:23:41 +0000

Because they would have to reveal their training regiment, which likely formed the basis for versions 4 and 5.

Or did you just mean the weights? If so, the open models distilled from GPT3 should mostly suffice. That's what good "open weights" are.

New comment by z3c0 in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

z3c0 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 22:15:49 +0000

Research and fallbacks would certainly be better. An 85% design, 15% algorithmic solution is probably the sweet "pobody's nerfect" spot, but a company using AI to solve accessibility is like selling rape whistles -- in a perfect world, your market is nonexistent.

New comment by z3c0 in "Judge rules Trump administration’s blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal"

z3c0 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:47:23 +0000

> Even the Citizens United decision did not set the bar for civil damages to be awarded for a civil rights violation to a 'corporate personhood'

I'm almost upset at the notion only being invoked. Let's hope we don't see such a precedence emerge, especially around a company touting to be selling "intelligence".

New comment by z3c0 in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

z3c0 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:26:40 +0000

Using AI to close gaps in accessibility is like adding treads to your vehicle because society is too lazy to pave roads.

New comment by z3c0 in "Stop Making TUIs"

z3c0 — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 11:56:17 +0000

Yeah, the holier-than-thou vibe-coder is a new cliche I'm not enjoying.

New comment by z3c0 in "Every Model Cheats"

z3c0 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:21:35 +0000

I have seen it do exactly that, in a "hands thrown up" fashion.

Note the levels of "thinking" that occur on NOT assertions. Those streams typically keep things on track. It's not that saying "don't use the Internet" will cause it to rebuke cos misalignment (a childish concept made by laymen, I'll add.) It's that the odds of it later "forgetfully" spewing in a thought stream, "wait, I have't checked the Internet" goes up substantially.

Saying "using only offline methods, do xyz" limits those odds considerably.

This isn't opinion or anecdote -- just how the model works. The additional guardrails to keep the model on track are bolted on via finetuning, hence the increasing jankiness.

New comment by z3c0 in "Every Model Cheats"

z3c0 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:29:41 +0000

Correct. Simulating a train of thought with contextual token streams, a thought does not make.

New comment by z3c0 in "Every Model Cheats"

z3c0 — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:28:50 +0000

It'll work up to a point, but pay attention to the thought streams when asserting what NOT to do and you'll see the turmoil it creates in the context.

Your prompt is more of a linguistic linchpin that allows you to coax out needed patterns. You place your pins on what you want to contextualize for the task at hand, not on what you don't want to contextualize.

New comment by z3c0 in "Every Model Cheats"

z3c0 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:45:18 +0000

It's also worth noting that saying "Don't cheat" just added "cheat" to the context. Prompting what "not" to do is folly, because there's no decision making occurring. Telling the model to perform the task locally is logically the same as telling it to not use the Internet, without every mentioning the Internet.

New comment by z3c0 in "If your agent commits a crime, who is responsible?"

z3c0 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:09:02 +0000

The AI service that trained and hosts the model, and then gave access to the general public while deferring their actual liability via a sneaky ToS.

It's strange how many people feel ownership over "their" agents, and it's clear that AI companies plan to take advantage of that as a way to avoid legal liability for the things they actually do -- with their servers and their code -- on behalf of someone who only wrote a string.

New comment by z3c0 in "Taylor Farms has rewritten its cyclospora statement four times in sixteen days"

z3c0 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:48:40 +0000

And whether or not what replaces it is any better. Historically speaking, widespread democracy is still a recent development.

New comment by z3c0 in "Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)"

z3c0 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:23:27 +0000

Also, analytics are not limited by JavaScript and browser APIs. Getting your attention isn't so valuable without knowing how to do it a second time.

New comment by z3c0 in "Who manages the agents?"

z3c0 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 20:17:23 +0000

I'm struggling to imagine aliens resurrecting a data center and countless hackneyed python packages so they can spew a language they don't even know. Not that it wouldn't be useful to their linguists, of course, but still a very optimistic analogy for LLMs.

New comment by z3c0 in "98% Isn't Much"

z3c0 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:09:24 +0000

When measuring and reporting models to the non-saavy, I usually reframe them into odds. One failure for every 49 successes is a scary failure rate when operating at a large scale.

This is largely why I don't condone LLMs in operational pipelines. Your workflow? Fine. The company's? Hell no.