Running out of places to move the goalposts to • Hacker News Board

Re: Running out of places to move the goalposts to

#11

Post by judahmeek » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

mulmboy wrote: post #10

> AI seems to have caught up to my own intelligence even in those narrow domains where I have some expertise. What is there left that AI can’t do that I would be able to verify? The last few days I've been working on some particularly tricky problems, tricky in the domain and in backwards compatibility with our existing codebase. For both these problems GPT 5.2 has been able to come to the same ideas as my best, whic…

You steered a sycophantic LLM to the same idea that you had already had & think that's worth bragging about?

Re: Running out of places to move the goalposts to

#12

Post by judahmeek » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 1:33 PM UTC

nickdrozd wrote: post #4

andy99 wrote: post #2

I just commented about this in another thread. I know there has been some walking back e.g. of the significance of a Turing test but I think overall the goalposts for AI have shifted in the other way, to narrowing down the definition of intelligence to something like “being really good at some set of defined tasks” which coincidentally is basically the strong point of neural networks. We seem hyperfocused on finding…

What would be a better way to measure intelligence?

I like arcprize.org's approach.

Re: Running out of places to move the goalposts to

#13

Post by bediger4000 » Thu, Jan 01, 2026, 3:18 PM UTC

nickdrozd wrote: post #9

bediger4000 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be possible. nroff macro language has looping, string interpolation, functions and if/then/else. That macro language should be turing complete. People have written file-infecting virus malware with it, I believe, which indicate that a quine should be possible. I personally have made several attempts at an nroff quine over the years with no success. If it's not possible, I'd love to see an explanation, so th…

Here is an attempt: .de Q .nf .na .pso awk 'BEGIN{bs=sprintf("%c",92); pre=bs"&"} {out=pre; for(i=1;i Invoke with: nroff -U -Tascii quine.roff | sed -Ez '$ s/\n+$//' Possibly relies too much on awk + sed. So maybe not A+, but better than nothing.

To be completely honest, I don't think that counts. Shelling out to awk means you're not writing nroff.

It's possible to write quines in pure C or perl or m4 or python, without shelling out to another language.

Re: Running out of places to move the goalposts to

#14

Post by mulmboy » Fri, Jan 02, 2026, 7:14 AM UTC

judahmeek wrote: post #11

mulmboy wrote: post #10

> AI seems to have caught up to my own intelligence even in those narrow domains where I have some expertise. What is there left that AI can’t do that I would be able to verify? The last few days I've been working on some particularly tricky problems, tricky in the domain and in backwards compatibility with our existing codebase. For both these problems GPT 5.2 has been able to come to the same ideas as my best, whic…

You steered a sycophantic LLM to the same idea that you had already had & think that's worth bragging about?

I'm well ware that they can be sycophantic, and I structure things to avoid that like asking "what do you think of this problem" and seeing the idea fall out rather than providing anything that would suggest it. In one of these two cases it took an idea that I had inkling of, fleshed it out, and expanded it to be much better than I had.

And I'm not bragging. I'm expressing awe, and humility that I am finding a machine can match me on things that I find quite difficult. Maybe those things aren't so difficult after all.

By steering I mean more steering to flesh out the context of the problem and to find relevant code and perform domain-specific research. Not steering toward a specific solution.