a_bonobo (u/a_bonobo)

a_bonobo commented on Claim: GPT-5-pro can prove new interesting mathematics twitter.com/SebastienBube... · Posted by u/marcuschong

wenc · 7 hours ago

A lot of relationships are (locally) linear so this isn’t as restrictive as it might seem. Many real-life productionized applications are based on it. Like linear regression, it has its place.

T-SNE is good for visualization and for seeing class separation, but in my experience, I haven’t found it to work for me for dimensionality reduction per se (maybe I’m missing something). For me, it’s more of a visualization tool.

On that note, there’s a new algorithm that improves on T-SNE called PaCMAP which preserves local and global structures better. https://github.com/YingfanWang/PaCMAP

a_bonobo · 3 hours ago

There's also Bonsai, it's parameter-free and supposedly 'better' than t-SNE, but it's clearly aimed at visualisation purposes (except that in Bonsai trees, distances between nodes are 'real' which is usually not the case in t-SNE)

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.08.652944v1....

a_bonobo commented on Turning Claude Code into my best design partner betweentheprompts.com/des... · Posted by u/scastiel

jmull · 15 hours ago

Test-driven and prompt-driven development aside, I never understood why people (and groups) spend many hours (or 1000s, or 10000s of hours) building things when they don't really know what they're building.

(I've certainly seen it done though, with predicable result.)

a_bonobo · 4 hours ago

This is what Naur, 1985, Programming as Theory Building is about!

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

The act of programming is building the theory of what the program does, so that you acquire new knowledge of doing things. It's not just text production.

>"[...] not any particular knowledge of facts, but the ability to do certain things, such as to make and appreciate jokes, to talk grammatically, or to fish."

Which is why re-building a program from scratch is so tempting: you've figured out the theory as you went along, now you can build the real thing.

a_bonobo commented on Turning Claude Code into my best design partner betweentheprompts.com/des... · Posted by u/scastiel

hetspookjee · 19 hours ago

Over the last 2 weeks (evenings only) I've spend a lot of time crafting the "perfect prompt" for claude code to one shot the project. I ended up with a rather small CLAUDE.md file that references 8 other MD files, ranging from project_architecture, models_spec, build_sequence, test_hierarchy, test_scenarios, and some other files.

It is a project for model based governance of Databricks Unity Catalog, with which I do have quite a bit of experience, but none of the tooling feels flexible enough.

Eventually I ended up with 3 different subagents that supported in the development of the actual planning files; a Databricks expert, a Pydantic expert, and a prompt expert.

The improvement on the markdown files was rather significant with the aid of these. Ranging from old pydantic versions and inconsistencies, to me having some misconceptions about unity catalog as well.

Yesterday eve I gave it a run and it ran for about 2 hours with me only approving some tool usage, and after that most of the tools + tests were done.

This approach is so different than I how used to do it, but I really do see a future in detailed technical writing and ensuring we're all on the same page. In a way I found it more productive than going into the code itself. A downside I found is that with code reading and working on it I really zone in. With a bunch of markdown docs I find it harder to stay focused.

Curious times!

a_bonobo · 17 hours ago

I feel we're developing something like what made Test-Driven Development so strong: TTD forced you to sit down and design your system first, rather than making it all up on the fly. In the past we mapped the system while we were building the code for it.

This kind of AI-driven development feels very similar to that. By forcing you to sit down and map the territory you're planning to build in, the coding itself becomes secondary, just boilerplate to implement the design decision you've made. And AI is great at boilerplate!

a_bonobo commented on Show HN: XR2000: A science fiction programming challenge clearsky.dev/blog/xr2000/... · Posted by u/richmans

Tepix · 11 days ago

OK, so the tcp connection to clearsky.dev port 29438 succeeded, but right now nothing happens after you connect. Is this part of the puzzle?

a_bonobo · 11 days ago

It eventually printed

>send a single 0 byte followed by 'XR2K' for documentation.

But so far doing that hasn't led to anything :)

a_bonobo commented on Sam Altman now says AGI, or human-level AI, is 'not a super useful term' cnbc.com/2025/08/11/sam-a... · Posted by u/EvgeniyZh

a_bonobo · 12 days ago

This feels like Motte-and-bailey

>The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions that share similarities: one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial and harder to defend (the "bailey")

The bailey: 'we can build AGI, give us millions of dollars'. The motte: '“I think the point of all of this is it doesn’t really matter and it’s just this continuing exponential of model capability that we’ll rely on for more and more things'

a_bonobo commented on Why are there so many rationalist cults? asteriskmag.com/issues/11... · Posted by u/glenstein

a_bonobo · 12 days ago

This is a great article.

There's so much in these group dynamics that repeats group dynamics of communist extremists of the 70s. A group that has found a 'better' way of life, all you have to do is believe in the group's beliefs.

Compare this part from OP:

>Here is a sampling of answers from people in and close to dysfunctional groups: “We spent all our time talking about philosophy and psychology and human social dynamics, often within the group.” “Really tense ten-hour conversations about whether, when you ate the last chip, that was a signal that you were intending to let down your comrades in selfish ways in the future.”

This reeks of Marxist-Leninist self-criticism, where everybody tried to up each other in how ideologically pure they were. The most extreme outgrowing of self-criticism is when the Japanese United Red Army beat its own members to death as part of self-criticisms.

>'These violent beatings ultimately saw the death of 12 members of the URA who had been deemed not sufficiently revolutionary.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Red_Army

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

a_bonobo commented on Face it: you're a crazy person experimental-history.com/... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

tqi · 24 days ago

> This is why people get so brain-constipated when they try to choose a career, and why they often pick the wrong one

Does everyone (or even most people) have a "right" career? I actually think this framing itself is harmful. If comparison is the thief of joy, then what could be worse than believing that there is some yet to be discovered perfect-for-you career out that you are missing.

a_bonobo · 24 days ago

I think I agree with you, it's harmful. If you sit down and unpack everything you're about to do you'll end up not doing anything, except what gives you the most pleasure.

There are many things I started in my life that all led to wonderful places, but if I would've sat down and prepared myself about all the horrible steps in the middle, I wouldn't have done them. Even now my work has 'bad' aspects that would've kept me away from taking up the work in the first place, if I'd known about them. I still do them because the work needs to be done.

a_bonobo commented on Australia widens teen social media ban to YouTube, scraps exemption reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

nojs · 25 days ago

> Australia already requires you to register for voting and other things, so the trivial solution here is: give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site

Which “gov site”? Registering for voting does not give you an electronic log in of any kind.

a_bonobo · 25 days ago

Not that poster but since Covid, most people have a registration on the MyGov app that handles medicare, tax etc. You could easily add a one-time token mechanism to that app

a_bonobo commented on How Anthropic teams use Claude Code anthropic.com/news/how-an... · Posted by u/yurivish

godelski · a month ago

Unironically this can actually be a good idea. Instead of "rerunning," run in parallel. Then pick the best solution.

  Pros:
   - Saved Time!
   - Scalable! 
   - Big Bill?

  Cons:
   - Big Bill
   - AI written code

a_bonobo · a month ago

This repo has a pattern where the in parallel jobs have different personalities: https://github.com/tokenbender/agent-guides/blob/main/claude...

a_bonobo commented on I know genomes and I didn’t delete my data from 23andMe stevensalzberg.substack.c... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

a_bonobo · a month ago

Three massive differences between DNA and any other 'private data'.

Once DNA has flown the coop, you won't get a new set of SNPs. That's it, it's a 'complete' picture of your SNPs (not your genome, yes, but SNPs are enough for many use-cases like ancestry estimation). Your private browsing data, however, is messy, ever-changing, has huge holes, changes over devices, and you can take active steps against leaking it (including even fuzzing it - you can't fuzz your SNPs!). Your SNPs are written in stone.

Second, you don't have to leak your DNA for the data to be out there, a distant cousin is enough to implicate you. You can do nothing at all and still get scooped up. (see the arrest of the Golden State Killer) My cousin's browsing history, on the other hand, says very little about me.

Third, your DNA implies you as part of minorities. Your browsing profile does not. China uses DNA to track minorities [1] and that may come to a government near you, soon. Again, data that may not even be shared by you may send you off to a camp.

[1] https://www.aspi.org.au/report/genomic-surveillance/

P.S.: And no, 'private mode' doesn't help you.