Viewing profile — ian_j_butler

Right, I don't think researchers are confused on this point.. the anthropic piece is good outreach / science comms. OTOH this thread has like 200 comments and no mention of faithfu…

It's well-known that the reasoning model output is not necessarily faithful to the content of the thinking scratch pad anyway, even if you had it unsummarized and available verbati…

And that's the real tl;dr. Hybrids win whenever anyone actually checks. To really be scientific we still have to check, but.. why wouldn't they? Probabilistic AI brings intuition/l…

Like US politics now, AI talk is just a team sport where there's no room for nuance. If you want to talk about such things then you need to anticipate this and work around it from …

> I think we’re all used to user-hostile software these days, but this is the first time I’ve experienced software that feels like it’s actively trying to be disrespectful. Always …

Challenging questions for short answer format! But there's a pattern with this stuff that's always mostly the same. Specialist logics work great on the happy path, but when you dig…

> resolved this well enough. Opinions? Not at all resolved. If anything it is worse than before as we begin to understand it better, and now there are different versions of it that…

Hah, since it's open in another tab: Talk Isn’t Always Cheap: Understanding Failure Modes in Multi-Agent Debate @ https://arxiv.org/html/2509.05396v2 To actually engage more with t…

A great rambling book that's related here and connected to neuroscience too is "The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 190…

> If you want to overcome this situation you need to replace capitalism globally. Not true.. you just need to replace late-stage capitalism locally. There's a very reasonable conce…

Thanks for writing this. I'm going back to basics on a bunch of this stuff myself as the connections in the AI and ML literature keep heating up. Some stuff from my reading list la…

> If we want to have a game where every weapon is a viable option, then we can’t bump RPS’s 3 to 4. We have to jump all the way to 5 choices with the game Rock – Paper – Scissors –…

This is exactly like when Skippy is trying to work out the flavor profiles for the kinds of mush that monkeys will find most appealing. Yes, we know that "chocolate peanut butter b…

> something like Celery with all it's underlying infrastructure. Unpopular opinion, but combining this with the other "no thanks" sentiments in this subthread is the right answer. …

Why does someone go to the effort/expense of doing summaries without adding tags? The goal is less slop and not more, and this really just hurts usability after you've already spen…

> what leads people to this type of thinking once they get in a group setting? It just... seems endemic at this point. Large and fascinating topic I'm researching, very relevant fo…

This is actually pretty well-understood if people wanted to do it.. contrary to popular belief it's more about responsible governance than economics and not really a pro/anti capit…

Personally, just from the implausible level of first-person detail throughout I thought it's immediately clear the book is exceptionally well-researched but still technically quali…

> That book is fiction with a factual veneer. Definitely, but do check the link.. I dug it up originally by trying to track down detail about the nonfiction background that the boo…

Happy to see that it's got the obligatory monk/wizard photo. For more life and times stuff I also suggest Labatut's Cease to Understand the World book and https://theanarchistlibra…

Again you're probably thinking of the forum discussion / booster blogs / executive interviews that I'm suggesting you should leave behind. Papers are the only place left where nuan…

The media is hellbent on torching it, and on propping it up against all reason too, both things can be true. HN is no exception. It's another noisy room problem where the distortio…

> But you struggling with rent is entirely your self-inflicted problem... The funny thing about this is that practically every single person in the US between the ages of 25-45 was…

> How do you limit the tracking? Seems easy in the way that a lot of things are easy, and this definitely isn't about making everyone and everything untraceable. We don't really ne…