benatkin (u/benatkin)

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benatkin commented on Child prodigies rarely become elite performers economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/i7l

beambot · 6 days ago

Definitely uncommon, but not unprecedented:

Hakeem Olajuwon - didn't start basketball until 15 or 16.

Kurt Warner - undrafted, returned to NFL at 28.

Francis Ngannou - started MMA at 26.

benatkin · 6 days ago

Basketball is a general purpose sport. The Claude of it can win. Some other sports such as gymnastics would need something more like the AlphaZero of it to win.

benatkin commented on Child prodigies rarely become elite performers economist.com/science-and... · Posted by u/i7l

g947o · 6 days ago

You missed the second word in the title, "prodigies".

benatkin · 6 days ago

That was covered just fine IMO. The reaction seems to be "so what?" I think that's a valid reaction. It's a long article to state something obvious, that the important thing about being on your way to greatness is having great talent and training to win starting at an early age, not winning before reaching a certain age.

I had an LLM first pick five figure skaters, and in the follow up query tell me which had wild success before age 12, and only two of the five fit that category, but each started learning at 6 years old or earlier. The other three seem like child prodigies in retrospect to me.

benatkin commented on 221 Cannon is Not For Sale fredbenenson.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/mecredis

benatkin · 7 days ago

Needs to be a new HTTP status code to go along with 418. Never mind that it doesn't start with the right number.

Also I'm sure glad that scammer didn't manage to buy that cannon!

benatkin commented on Zig Libc ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#... · Posted by u/ingve

ale · 9 days ago

i tested sonnet 4.5 just last week on a zig codebase and it has to be instructed the std.ArrayList syntax every time.

benatkin · 8 days ago

Try it again. This time do something different with CLAUDE.md. By the way it's happy to edit its own CLAUDE.md files (don't have an agent edit another agent's CLAUDE.md files though [0])

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723384

benatkin commented on Self Driving Car Insurance lemonade.com/car/explaine... · Posted by u/KellyCriterion

microtherion · 12 days ago

I'm quite skeptical of Tesla's reliability claims. But for exactly that reason, I welcome a company like Lemonade betting actual money on those claims. Either way, this is bound to generate some visibility into the actual accident rates.

benatkin · 11 days ago

> betting actual money on those claims

Insurance companies can let marketing influence rates to some degree, with programs that tend to be tacked on after the initial rate is set. This self driving car program sounds an awful lot like safe driver programs like GEICO Clean Driving Record, State Farm Good Driver Discount, and Progressive Safe Driver, Progressive Snapshot, and Allstate Drivewise. The risk assessment seems to be less thorough than the general underwriting process, and to fall within some sort of risk margin, so to me it seems gimmicky and not a true innovation at this point.

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benatkin commented on Show HN: Amla Sandbox – WASM bash shell sandbox for AI agents github.com/amlalabs/amla-... · Posted by u/souvik1997

benatkin · 12 days ago

The readme exaggerates the threat of agents shelling out and glosses over a serious drawback of itself. On the shelling out side, it says "One prompt injection and you're done." Well, you can run a lot of these agents in a container, and I do. So maybe you're not "done". Also it's rare enough that this warning exaggerates - Claude Code has a yolo mode and outside of that, it has a pretty good permission system. On glossing over the drawback: "The WASM binary is proprietary—you can use it with this package but can't extract or redistribute it separately." And who is Amla Labs? FWIW the first commit is in 2026 and the license is in 2025.

Posted by u/benatkin 13 days ago

Software Survival 3.0 steve-yegge.medium.com/so...

benatkin commented on Benchmarking OpenTelemetry: Can AI trace your failed login? quesma.com/blog/introduci... · Posted by u/stared

benatkin · 13 days ago

> AI SRE in 2026 is what DevOps Anomaly Detection was in 2015 — bold claims backed by huge marketing budgets, but lacking independent verification. There are stories of SaaS vendors abruptly killing the observability stack. Our results mirror ClickHouse’s findings: while LLMs can assist, they lack the capabilities of a skilled SRE.

The key is LLMs can assist. It would be nice if they went farther into this, and seen how much more quickly a human that wrote a complex prompt, or went back and forth with a coding agent, could do the tasks compared to an unassisted human. I'm confident that it's at a level that already has profound implications for SRE. And the current level of getting it right with a simple prompt is still impressive.

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u/benatkin

KarmaCake day8079March 15, 2007

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