arglebarnacle

The models are getting better at agentic coding, so over time using complicated harnesses and precise prompt engineering to attempt to squeeze out an extra X% performance will become irrelevant as the models approach expert-level performance. The bitter lesson in miniature.

I hear you but of course history is full of examples of biases shared across large groups of people resulting in huge human costs.

The analogy isn’t perfect of course but the way humans learn about their world is full of opportunities to introduce and sustain these large correlated biases—social pressure, tradition, parenting, education standardization. And not all of them are bad of course, but some are and many others are at least as weird as stray references to goblins and creatures

Fascinating. We hear that the leaps in AI have been made possible by orders of magnitude increases in compute and data availability, and of course that’s substantially true—but exactly how true? It’s a nice exercise in perspective to see how much or how little modern machine learning methods would have been capable of if you brought them by time machine to the 70’s and optimized them for that environment.

Interesting, when I've come across this before I have always interpreted it as "not from Hong Kong", especially in a context like this where it's raised in the context of engaging with a western counterpart's potential suspicion.

It's been my experience that westerners (I am a westerner) do have different assumptions about "mainland" Chinese people than people from Hong Kong who are assumed to be more cosmopolitan, "westernized", or even "politically neutral" from a western liberal capitalist perspective, so it seems reasonable to point it out in this context.

A really interesting article, and I'm likely to give it a shot a work. I'm grateful for it, and yet I found it difficult to get through because of a sense of "LLM style" in the prose.

I won't speculate on whether the post is AI-written or whether the author has adopted quirks from LLM outputs into their own way of writing because it doesn't really matter. Something about this "feeling" in the writing causes me discomfort, and I don't even really know why. It's almost like a tightness in my jaw or a slight ache in my molars.

Every time I read something like, "Not as an aesthetic choice. Not as nostalgia. *But as a thinking tool*" in an article I had until then taken on faith was produced in the voice of a human being feels like a let down. Maybe it's just the sense that I believed I was connecting with another person, albeit indirectly, and then I feel the loss of that. But that's not entirely convincing, because I genuinely found the points this article was making interesting, and no doubt they came originally from the author's mind.

Since this is happening more and more, I'd be interested to hear what others' experiences with encountering LLM-seeming blog posts (especially of inherently interesting underlying content) has been like.

Agreed, and the impact, culture, and law around the rise of distributed smartphone video by citizens is especially relevant in a universe where the Justice Department has called filming immigration officers "obstruction of justice" and even "domestic terrorism" (https://reason.com/2025/12/26/justice-department-says-filmin...)

I assume your choice to describe average HR reps as “clueless ladies” isn’t meant to suggest that you respect e.g. women software engineers on your team any less. But if the gender of the clueless HR employees isn’t relevant, why mention it? Maybe worth reflecting on whether calling them clueless ladies rhetorically emphasizes their cluelessness

A dead project that has been replaced with a fork with a different name? Maybe I’m missing something but this really doesn’t seem so bad as far as name collisions go

On a full keyboard it’s not too bad—just hold alt and tap 0151 on the numpad. Honestly I wish it was harder to type for stylistic reasons—it would help cure me of my em-dash addiction

Why do you find it believable that they asked for government intervention to protect "the innocent" as opposed to simply acting to protect their own private financial interests, which seems to be the simplest explanation?

I'm not even convinced that the depositors made whole here were innocent--they accepted a known risk by exceeding the risk-free FDIC limit. The sad part is that in our society, we have no qualms about literally turning working people out into the street when they make financial missteps, but the already-wealthy receive prompt intervention from the highest levels to protect them and other wealthy people from the consequences of their investment decisions.

What argument is really left for this kind of intervention, besides appeals to the trickle-down system where the rich must be vigilantly protected since the rest of our society is set up to be disrupted when they fail. The whole system is morally and politically bankrupt.

Very funny to me that on the way out of the room Wittgenstein allegedly "clapped the two examiners [Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore] on the shoulder and said, 'Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it.'"

It would have been better to say that she has an ideological objection to using they/them pronouns (rather than non-binary identity), so I'll concede that point.

But the thrust of my post is that it's wrong to describe her as someone who is helping the LGBTQ+ community, just in a different way, and I stand by that. She said in her statement that she "write[s] in a gender-neutral way specifically to avoid gender landmines".

I'm sure this is a relatable sentiment to cisgender people who's main engagement with the trans community is anxiety about making mistakes. But this can't be compared to the marginalization trans people face. One way that non-binary people are denied space in our culture is by being erased. It's not a high crime to go out of your way to avoid our pronouns like this, but by doing so Monica is someone who is doing the bare minimum of avoiding offense--she is not helping or supporting non-binary people or fostering their inclusion.

Despite the implication of your reply I am actually not outraged that she could continue to be a Stack Exchange moderator, that seems fine. But I am intransigently against the vision of LGBTQ+ allyship laid out in the GGP, where being a supporting helper just means not being hostile.

Trans people are fighting for our lives in society right now, it would really help if people could find it in themselves to pick the right side, use our pronouns in public, and build the cultural space for us to exist in normalcy, instead of only think about this issue when twitter "activists" have "gone too far" by criticizing someone they like.

That's not true--the moderator said she refused to acknowledge non-binary people by their pronouns if they use a singular "they" because of an ideological objection to their gender identity.

I am non-binary and use they/them pronouns, and while I'm not bothered when people avoid my pronouns e.g. by using my name instead, it's another thing entirely to assert that someone who doesn't consider non-binary identity valid "believes in helping the LGBTQ+ community but differed in how to do so."

Simply avoiding being rude (by deliberately using the wrong pronouns) is the baseline for respect, literally the least you can do. To "help" implies to support--if you support our community please use our correct pronouns and correct other cis people who misgender trans folks in your presence, don't merely humor us.

Yeah, but unlike management, you can start an opposition caucus in your union, do organizing, win an election, and reform bad union leadership.

We just have such low awareness in the US about what unions are and how they work that we take self-serving, collaborationist, timid union leadership as a fact instead of something we can and should urgently struggle to change.

The unions are democratic institutions that represent the self-organization of working people. If the current leadership of a union is bad (and in many cases it is) it should be campaigned against, voted out, and replaced. Giving up on the idea of a union because you don't like who's been elected to run it is self-defeating.

Does anyone have any insight about what kind of jobs are out there for people with the kind of skills demonstrated in this post?

I have a lot of data exploring, cleaning and visualizing skills, python/SQL skills and experience using it to make business decisions, but this type of thing falls short of what most people would consider "data science"

Its much more likely that the critical or cynical response to alturism by wealthy individuals and corporations is political than psychogical. What I see is ordinary people railing against a system where millions of people work multiple jobs for starvation wages and no benefits while other have amassed wealth on a scale never before seen in human history. When our supposed billionaire entrepreneur betters and even those same corporations make "alturistic" charitable donations, the response is skepticism and political anger, not envy.

"Explaining" your political opponents arguments as an envious psychological response is a political smear, not a neutral analysis.

I understood the title more as, "since we all know other people's bragging is insufferable and does little to convince us of the bragger's supposedly higher status, why do we continue to brag ourselves as if we believe it will have the intended effect on others?"

The answer, and the article gets at this in the last section, is a variety of anxious human emotional impulses. I guess we knew that, but the way the article teased it apart was interesting for me anyway.

The GP was pretty clearly talking about PGP in the context of ordinary encrypted communication between people (like email). Keybase isn't competing with PGP for signing releases. In the field that we are talking about, PGP has absolutely failed to gain widespread traction outside a certain hard core group of nerds.

You can see a flash of that in this article with "Actor systems can perform computations that are impossible by Turing Machines"

Honestly I don't think most Airbnb users are looking for a hotel like experience. They're looking for something in between renting an apartment in a foreign city for a month and a hotel--a genuine short term apartment rental.

I use Airbnb a lot, but I actually agree with what you're saying. If you want a profession hotel experience, stay at a hotel. Sometimes it's preferable to have more space, maybe a kitchen, and more privacy, even if it means giving up daily maid service, a front desk, or other typical hotel amenities.

In the sea of dead links, early tech companies, think tanks, and so on, I was happy to see my local (Boston) PBS and NPR affiliate, WGBH. I don't usually think of public broadcasting as an early tech adopter, so even in Boston it was a pleasant surprise to see they registered one of the first 100 .org domains.

"With bread risen with instant dry yeast, it will definitely resemble visual qualities of bread, but the texture and taste will not be comparable to bread that uses wild yeast."

This is so wrong it drives me insane. The key thing is the length (and thus slowness) of the rise of the dough, not whether you use wild or instant yeast. Sourdough raised on a hot countertop for thirty minutes will not be nearly as good as a dough with a reduced amount of instant yeast raised at a cool temperature for three hours. The idea that all non-sourdough has poor flavor and texture is pure opinion, and silly at that. Any serious bread baker would tell you that that there are many many wonderful breads made with instant yeast--take the French baguette for example.

Well I wasn't cheating in any way, just using the auction house/trade chat much more than a typical new account because most of my MMO experience was in EVE online and I like the "economic PVP" of cornering markets and flipping for a profit.

Some cursory research told me that new accounts with a lot of market activity were a "red flag" for the automated system due to similarity with bots that created new accounts to evade bans, which I guess makes sense. Of course this is the internet and you have no particular reason to believe I was or wasn't cheating on World of Warcraft, but for what it's worth this HN account is linked to my real identity and if I were cheating all the time I would know better than to brag about it or even obliquely reference it in my posting here.

I was misatakenly caught in an automated ban wave in World of Warcraft for "botting" just a couple months after joining, but as soon as a human reviewed my account I was reinstated immediately.

The automated system flagged my account a second time a few weeks later, and when I appealed they simply said that although they didn't see any evidence of rule-breaking behavior, nobody got caught by the automated system twice unless they were cheating.

I was out over $100, and I didn't even get six months to play the game. Sometimes The Machine just "knows best".

I don't disagree with you either. I'm just saddened by the way we're trained to accept it as normal that Microsoft's shareholders are allowed to make a 75%+ margin on the efforts of an exceptional developer.

At least in a employee owned company (or similar structure) the extra value is being split up equitably among people who are also working towards the enterprise's success. Especially if it's really true that the way to "10x" is to boost your teammates abilities, this nicely aligns everyone's incentives to cooperate and improve.

The 10x developer narrative is intriguing because 10x developers aren't being paid 10x (maybe more like 2.5x), yet it's held up as a personal goal. Unless you own your own company, you're basically aspiring to deliver actual millions of dollars in uncompensated value to your employer.

Piping curl to bash is equivalent to running a remote code execution exploit against yourself. Even if you implcitly trust the endpoint, do you trust that they will remain uncompromised forever? Also, it's especially silly because it's never the best or only way of accomplishing a given task, so it serves only to shoot yourself in the foot.

We're talking about a world where automation has consumed say 20%+ of jobs. You presumably don't want to let these newly unemployed people starve, so what's to be done? It's naive to think that continued rising mass unemployment while a small amount of robot owners get richer and richer is a stable model of society. The automated economy would end up in public hands soon enough, one way or another.

This is a fascinating and illuminating piece of history, but I have a hard time believing that these cartographic mistakes are the reason for China's posture in the South China Sea.

The first part of the article mentions the strategic and economic resources in the region. Do we think that China would be minding its own business if these mistakes had not been made? It seems more likely that we would simply be left with the "ancient and historical claim[s] to the reefs and rocks in the South China Sea" without the attendant maps from the early 20th century.