tptacek

25 ms·

1. 631.▲
   by tptacek 3mo ago

   This was especially funny to watch during the Jacobian Conjecture announcement, where people on HN were waiting for "Lean proofs" and corroboration from other mathematicians for... a published counterexample to the Conjecture.
2. 632.▲
   by tptacek 3mo ago

   I believe that he might, but anything valuable he says will be said better and more credibly by someone else.
3. 633.▲
   by tptacek 3mo ago

   She wasn't making an argument for the verisimilitude of her translation, just a comment about how detached the most popular English translations are from the source text; some of what's in those translations is literally invented,
4. 634.▲
   by tptacek 3mo ago

   So, basically everybody? DANE has virtually no uptake. I think it might literally just be Microsoft at this point?
5. 635.▲
   by tptacek 3mo ago

   Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast just had Emily Wilson on talking about comparisons between the translations, and quite a bit of the iconic lines of the Odyssey from the midcentury translations are kind of just made up. Like, &qu
6. 636.▲
   by tptacek 3mo ago

   I don't have a direct opinion about Zitron's economic takes. I don't have a stake in that argument, I don't do financial planning for inference providers or training, I'm open to a variety of arguments, in either di
7. 637.▲
   by tptacek 3mo ago

   He doesn't like or believe in the economics of the frontier labs and then works backwards from that, which takes him to some very strange places.
8. 638.▲
   by tptacek 3mo ago

   Yeah, you're off on what an ad hominem is. I would dispute that I attacked his character at all, but that doesn't matter: an ad hominem isn't an "attack on character", it's an argument that is predicated on an
9. 639.▲
   by tptacek 3mo ago

   I'd be interested in the schematics of where you think the "ad hominems" are in my comment.
10. 640.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    If that's all Zitron wrote, I don't think he'd be as polarizing (or as dunked on). But he goes way, way past that.
11. 641.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    I swear to Christ before this comment I had completely forgotten that Zitron had ever written anything about me. Zitron isn't an engineer and doesn't code, so I'm not all that het up by his attempt to rebut me.
12. 642.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    I don't see how it does. Claude Code is an extremely widely used product; the preceding comment offered an objective evaluation target, not a "trust me it's good" argument.
13. 643.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    There are good sources of well-argued AI skepticism, and then there's Ed Zitron.
14. 644.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    I've always wanted to do an explainer of the deployment system and state-tracking at Fly.io using Factorio as a visual metaphor.
15. 645.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    I don't have edgy humor, like at all, so I take notice when people call this stuff out, is all.
16. 646.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    I believe this too: that the current moment with LLMs is destabilizing to all sorts of knowledge work, and especially to non-bench-work sciences, but that over the long run it's just going to raise the game. I'm not a person who t
17. 647.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    "Accounting for genetics"?
18. 648.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    This doesn't do anything. Just email hn@yc.
19. 649.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    You gotta understand the context we're discussing this in, where a post from a year ago that raised a mob of anti-AI people got brought into a discussion about this, a post that is by itself a tricky needle to thread. That was an unple
20. 650.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    I'm not dying on this hill. I punched up this post and that paragraph is mostly mine, and I'm telling you it's a random Seinfeld reference and not a joke about an actual tragedy, any more than me joking about the Andrea Doria
21. 651.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    I wouldn't write the same post in 2026. What would be the point? Everybody already accepts the arguments in it.
22. 652.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    I think I'll be the 10,000th industry person to say that Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce are deeply at risk at the present moment, and if they have a chance at retaining value it's only because they're Systems Of Record, and that
23. 653.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    Then you're breaking other man-made things, not SHA2, but I didn't ask about other man-made things.
24. 654.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    I gotta admit here I'm completely lost on what we're debating.
25. 655.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    I have never watched a single episode of Buffy (or of Star Trek The Next Generation, if Picard also said this.)
26. 656.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    Do you think Jira is going to survive this moment? I don't. I've never met anybody who likes Jira .
27. 657.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    That's nice of you to say, and I appreciate it. I'd be sad in the event you're describing too! I spent a lot of time on Fly Machines (not nearly as much as JP and Peter, though).
28. 658.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    Once again, people are grappling with an axiomatic definition of "memory safety" and avoiding the fact that it's a term of art with a very specific meaning: comprehensive protection from The Memory Corruption Vulnerabilities,
29. 659.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    You're describing craftsmanship. What's wild about this thread is the comfort with which people who disagree with me dismiss entirely the value of craft. It's as if I said "on one hand, there's science; on the other
30. 660.▲
    by tptacek 3mo ago

    Ah, that's fair! I just got the impression that other people on this thread were axiomatically deriving that we were killing Machines, rather than just shifting the roadmap towards Sprites.