frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Something Big Is (Not) Happening

https://www.aricolaprete.com/2026/02/something-big-is-not-happening.html
32•DiscourseFan•3h ago

Comments

mchusma•1h ago
These responses to AI seems to be from people who have not experienced what AI can do, and are therefore skeptical.

But I have personally repeatedly used AI instead of humans across domains.

AI displacement isn’t a prediction. It’s here.

DangitBobby•1h ago
The original seems to be arguing, among other things, that the singularity has begun because AI has been employed to improve AI development tooling. I can see it both ways, but skepticism on these claims is natural and warranted. I agree with you that there's no shortage of people underestimating the importance of this moment in history.
mellosouls•1h ago
This is a reference to the unaccountably viral article from a couple of days ago, discussed here:

Something big is happening (97 points, 77 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973011

AreShoesFeet000•1h ago
The mere idea that you could derive new correspondence to an emerging reality by rearranging fragments of the past is just insane to me.
hackyhacky•1h ago
Isn't "rearranging fragments of the past" what humans do? We call it creativity.
AreShoesFeet000•1h ago
In part, but we also actually live in the present. The ideas as being dynamically confronted with reality instead of having a fixed arrangement*.

The LLM couldn’t be enhanced by dynamic training because that’s already what humans do. It’s by design that their “guidelines” are fixed.

badtuple•1h ago
That is one theory of creativity. It is extremely far from proven.
twism•1h ago

       \ | /
      --(_) --
    .'  .   '.
   /  .   .   \
   |    .     |
    \  .   . /
     '.  . .'
       'v'
layer8•1h ago
Too few “r”s.
irdc•1h ago
Thus making humanity an ever-receding area of AI-incompetence.
red75prime•1h ago
The article feels, I don't know… maybe like someone calmly sitting in a rocking chair staring at the sea. Then the camera turns, and there's an erupting volcano in the background.

> If it was a life or death decision, would you trust the model? Judgement, yes, but decision? No, they are not capable of making a decision, at least important ones.

A self-driving car with a vision-language-action model inside buzzes by.

> It still fails when it comes to spatial relations within text, because everything is understood in terms of relations and correspondences between tokens as values themselves, and apparent spatial position is not a stored value.

A large multimodal model listens to your request and produces a picture.

> They'll always need someone to take a look under the hood, figure out how their machine ticks. A strong, fearless individual, the spanner in the works, the eddy in the stream!

GPT‑5.3‑Codex helps debug its own training.

irishcoffee•1h ago
> A self-driving car with a vision-language-action model inside buzzes by.

Vision-action maybe. Jamming language in the middle there is an indicator you should run for public office.

nickorlow•1h ago
> GPT‑5.3‑Codex helps debug its own training

Doesn't this support the author's point? It still required humans.

grumpymuppet•49m ago
Is that the hang-up? Like are people so unimaginative to see that none of this was here five years ago and now this machine is -- if still only in part -- assembling itself?

And the details involved in closing some of the rest of that loop do not seem THAT complicated.

nickorlow•40m ago
You don't know how involved it was. I would imagine it helped debug some tools that they used to create it. Getting it to actually end to end produce a more capable model without any human help absolutely is that complicated.
dvt•1h ago
I think people are just getting lost in the sauce. Forget all the "singularity" or "AGI" nonsense. LLMs are genuinely useful automation machines. They're fantastic for going from semi-structured data to structured data. They're great for going from text blob to decision points. They're great for going from vague instructions to step-by-step inference.

No one (at least no serious person) is saying ChatGPT is Immanuel Kant or Ernest Hemingway. The fact that we still have sherpas doesn't make trains any less useful or interesting.

lich_king•1h ago
I think this post is specifically an answer to yet another "AGI is just around the corner" post that made waves recently.

Fundamentally, I think that many problems in white-collar life are text comprehension problems or basic automation problems. Further, they often don't even need to be done particularly well. For example, we've long decided that it's OK for customer support to suck, and LLMs are now an upgrade over an overseas call center worker who must follow a rigid script.

So yeah, LLMs can be quite useful and will be used more and more. But this is also not the discourse we're having on HN. Every day, there's some AGI marketing headline, including one at #1 right now from OpenAI.

dvt•1h ago
The AI-assisted GPT theoretical physics derivation? There's literally no mention of AGI in the article, and it's pretty tame, especially considering it's a PR piece by OpenAI.
alansaber•1h ago
It's referencing https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening
lich_king•31m ago
It's a press release from a vendor that constantly talks about AGI, and it's meant to showcase the capabilities of an unreleased model in an experiment you can't replicate. But my comment was less about the link and more about the discussion, which has immediately bifurcated into the "it's done and dusted" and "this is overhyped and LLMs are useless" camps.
alansaber•1h ago
I think what's surprising people is how a rough, first-order approximate solution (produced with little cognitive effort) is good enough for 90% of everyday tasks
MattGrommes•42m ago
This is what I've been saying. We're not so much learning that LLMs are intelligent, we're learning that a lot of what we think of as intelligence is actually just pattern matching.
general_reveal•48m ago
If I showed you a new species of animal that does exactly what an LLM does, what would you say? Let’s say a bird, you ask it a question , and it returns an expert level human response. What if these new birds were everywhere?

That’s very big.

shahzbha•42m ago
I still can’t believe parrots are real.
stephc_int13•1h ago
The long tail is fatter and longer than many people expect.

AlphaZero was a special/unusual case, I would say an outlier.

FSD is still not ready, but people have seen it working for ten years, slowly climbing up the asymptote, but still not reaching human level driving, and it may take a while.

I use AI models for coding every day, I am not a luddite, but I don't feel the AGI, not at all, what I am seeing is a nice tool that is seriously over-hyped.

rfonseca•59m ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008929
argee•59m ago
The original [0] that this is in response to, essentially posits that something you cannot afford to ignore is going on, especially if you work in a white collar job. Admittedly a little bit of FUD [1] is going on with the "AI is coming for your job" narrative, but the core idea, that this is a fast moving field where it's worth re-examining your assumptions from time to time, appears to be sound and hard to disagree with.

This article has a confrontational title, but the point made here seems to not be incompatible with the original...the author is confronting the FUD directly, which is understandable but perhaps not quite as useful as refuting the core thesis, which is that something you cannot afford to ignore is happening.

In fact, both these people seem to be in agreement that you need to keep an eye on this ball, they just have a "panic" versus "don't panic" framing. Should you panic in an emergency? Research says no [2].

[0] https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt - note the original author is an AI founder

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9180869/

xeckr•45m ago
The strawberry/seahorse emoji meme is like a century old in AI-time.
dang•44m ago
This has been popping up quite a bit but as far as I can tell, neither the original thought piece nor (therefore) the critiques are particularly above-the-bar?

Something Big Is Coming (Annotated by Ed Zitron) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47007991 - Feb 2026 (31 comments)

Something Big Is Happening - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973011 - Feb 2026 (74 comments)

bdangubic•37m ago
interesting how little discussion “something big is happening” got considering it surpassed 100 million views …
dang•8m ago
IIRC, it got flagged by users. That might have been a good thing in this case.

HN gets tons of thought-piece submissions about AI so we try to keep the bar relatively high (notice that word 'relatively'. I'm not saying it's as high as all that!) If discussion here is somewhat uncorrelated with discussion on the rest of the internet, that's good, at least for this kind of content.

rolph•31m ago
the frequency of the same subject matter with no apparent evolution is spam posting, in my opinion.

GPT-5.2 derives a new result in theoretical physics

https://openai.com/index/new-result-theoretical-physics/
320•davidbarker•4h ago•231 comments

Show HN: Data Engineering Book – An open source, community-driven guide

https://github.com/datascale-ai/data_engineering_book/blob/main/README_en.md
32•xx123122•2h ago•4 comments

Building a TUI is easy now

https://hatchet.run/blog/tuis-are-easy-now
71•abelanger•6h ago•61 comments

Font Rendering from First Principles

https://mccloskeybr.com/articles/font_rendering.html
62•krapp•5d ago•5 comments

Show HN: Skill that lets Claude Code/Codex spin up VMs and GPUs

https://cloudrouter.dev/
76•austinwang115•4h ago•16 comments

The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-meta-facebook-instagram-brussels-kill-infinite-scrolling/
197•danso•3h ago•174 comments

gRPC: From service definition to wire format

https://kreya.app/blog/grpc-deep-dive/
66•latonz•4d ago•0 comments

Monosketch

https://monosketch.io/
673•penguin_booze•11h ago•123 comments

I'm not worried about AI job loss

https://davidoks.blog/p/why-im-not-worried-about-ai-job-loss
101•ezekg•4h ago•170 comments

How did the Maya survive?

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/feb/12/apocalypse-no-how-almost-everything-we-thought-we-kn...
93•speckx•9h ago•63 comments

OpenAI has deleted the word 'safely' from its mission

https://theconversation.com/openai-has-deleted-the-word-safely-from-its-mission-and-its-new-struc...
224•DamnInteresting•1h ago•95 comments

Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android

https://ios-countdown.win/
1248•ozzyphantom•9h ago•628 comments

The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting

https://ardentperf.com/2026/02/13/the-scott-shambaugh-situation-clarifies-how-dumb-we-are-acting/
96•darccio•4h ago•43 comments

Show HN: Moltis – AI assistant with memory, tools, and self-extending skills

https://www.moltis.org
61•fabienpenso•1d ago•21 comments

CSS-Doodle

https://css-doodle.com/
111•dsego•15h ago•13 comments

Faster Than Dijkstra?

https://systemsapproach.org/2026/02/09/faster-than-dijkstra/
94•drbruced•3d ago•57 comments

Green’s Dictionary of Slang - Five hundred years of the vulgar tongue

https://greensdictofslang.com/
84•mxfh•5d ago•13 comments

Advanced Aerial Robotics Made Simple

https://www.drehmflight.com
99•jacquesm•5d ago•9 comments

Implementing Auto Tiling with Just 5 Tiles

https://www.kyledunbar.dev/2026/02/05/Implementing-auto-tiling-with-just-5-tiles.html
70•todsacerdoti•5d ago•11 comments

WolfSSL sucks too, so now what?

https://blog.feld.me/posts/2026/02/wolfssl-sucks-too/
62•thomasjb•13h ago•45 comments

Sandwich Bill of Materials

https://nesbitt.io/2026/02/08/sandwich-bill-of-materials.html
187•zdw•5d ago•23 comments

Age of Empires: 25 years of pathfinding problems with C++ [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEBQveBCtKY
79•CharlesW•4h ago•17 comments

Lena by qntm (2021)

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
301•stickynotememo•18h ago•162 comments

The wonder of modern drywall

https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/the-wonder-of-modern-drywall
36•jger15•20h ago•70 comments

Zed editor switching graphics lib from blade to wgpu

https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/46758
277•jpeeler•9h ago•252 comments

MySQL foreign key cascade operations finally hit the binary log

https://readyset.io/blog/mysql-9-6-foreign-key-cascade-operations-finally-hit-the-binary-log
12•marceloaltmann•4d ago•0 comments

Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you

https://skipthe.tips/
428•randycupertino•23h ago•372 comments

Dario Amodei – "We are near the end of the exponential" [video]

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dario-amodei-2
67•danielmorozoff•6h ago•138 comments

GovDash (YC W22) Is Hiring Senior Engineers (Product and Search) in NYC

https://www.workatastartup.com/companies/govdash
1•timothygoltser•11h ago

New Nick Bostrom Paper: Optimal Timing for Superintelligence [pdf]

https://nickbostrom.com/optimal.pdf
63•uejfiweun•18h ago•73 comments