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The LLMentalist Effect (2023)
The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour
Topics /
AI & Machine Learning
The most popular blog posts about ai & machine learning on Hacker News. 756 posts.
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For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day. In 2026, the music is out of phase with the work.
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Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse
How a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for public trust on AI.
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I Wasn't Allowed Prompting ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk: This Is Discrimination (2025)
By Dr. Rachel Simmons, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
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Fabrice Bellard's TS Zip (2024)
Results and speed for other programs on enwik8 and enwik9 are available at the Large Text Compression Benchmark .
396
Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well
A sampling of recent news
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Better Models: Worse Tools
About an aggravating tool-calling regression in newer Claude models.
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AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence
I used to be one of these people. I read Yudkowsky and was like, OMG recursive self improvement hard takeoff AI is coming. Then I joined the real world and actually tried to do things. At comma, we ship a hardware product of similar complexity to a cell phone, and it’s really hard. Reality has lots of finicky details…
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AI-assisted cognition endangers human development?
Does AI-assisted cognition threaten human development? Explore the risks of AI-assisted thinking and learn strategies to use AI tools without freezing your critical thinking.
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Use boring languages with LLMs
Why coding agents perform better in cohesive ecosystems like Go than fragmented ones like JavaScript or Python
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Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom
1991: T and P of ChatGPT, distillation, deep residual learning, LSTM, GAN
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Training AI to Paint with Code
I'm a designer and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, NY.
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Humanising LLM Outputs Is Dumb
The largest tell for me to tell where culture and sentiment is shifting for AI tools is usually X, viral GitHub repositories and Hacker News. One of these tells I’ve been seeing a lot lately is skills like I have ADHD and Agents.md instructions such as giving outputs in only ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.
404
Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo
Frontier models can now produce novel historical knowledge, but in a really weird way
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Anthropic's growth just flattened
Look at the monthly numbers...
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Access to frontier AI will soon be limited by economic and security constraints
Soon, access to frontier AI will be scarce and selective
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Using LLM for confidence scoring is a bad idea
LLM-based agents can do a lot of tasks. Or, at least, they can appear to do them. For example, they write code, summarize papers, plan trips, and fill in forms. If you ask one for a probability or a confidence score, it will give you one of those too. I have seen many agent designers use LLMs to generate confidence…
409
If DSPy is so great, why isn't anyone using it?
Any sufficiently complicated AI system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden implementation of half of DSPy.
410
Fable Took My Job
Fable is cool yo, it takes jobs yo, - Dario "steve" Altman
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The Q, K, V Matrices
At the core of the attention mechanism in LLMs are three matrices: Query, Key, and Value. These matrices are how transformers actually pay attention to different parts of the input. In this write-up, we will go through the construction of these matrices from the ground up.
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Fable and the end of the free lunch
Fable’s price ended the free lunch of ever-cheaper frontier models. Now we have to think about which model gets which work.
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Don't Trust the Salt: AI Summarization, Multilingual Safety, and LLM Guardrails
“The devil is in the details,” they say.
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We might all be AI engineers now
The models are good now. But most people still miss the point.
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Wolfram Language and Mathematica version 15
AI-related upgrades like the built-in AI Assistant, extended computation-augmented generation and the Wolfram Agent Tools framework. Advances in TimeSeries & Tabular. New categorical data, ModelFit automated model selection, symbolic music. Efficient handling of gigabyte-sized notebooks. Gains in the already-robust…
416
Claude Token Counter, now with model comparisons
I upgraded my Claude Token Counter tool to add the ability to run the same count against different models in order to compare them. As far as I can tell …
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OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
Soundtrack: In Flames - Colony To further support my independent journalism, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $7 a month or $70 a year. If you’re subscribed to the free newsletter and logged in, you should see at the bottom right hand corner of your screen a little
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Eight more months of agents
I wrote up my experiences programming with LLMs a bit over a year ago , and updated it for the world of agents eight months ago . A lot has changed since then, so here is an update.
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Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later
Kelly predicted AI heavyweights while advocating for a future of open weights