Top all-time · #1139
Rohit Krishnan
Personal blog · strangeloopcanon.comaiphilosophy
Rohit Krishnan writes Strange Loop Canon, a personal blog at strangeloopcanon.com about ai and philosophy. Since 2020, 61 different Hacker News readers have linked it 86 times, most often “What can LLMs never do?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-06, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Strange Loop Canon for essays on the limits of LLMs and agents and on thinkers versus doers. Most comments cite its posts as sources for their own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.” ― Albert Einstein.
Most-linked posts?
- What can LLMs never do?6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2024-04-24
- The future of work is world models3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-03-26
- Some things to learn from the British East India Company's growth and demise3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-09-04
- The Curiosity Theory of Everything3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-19
- Why do big businesses seemingly suck at innovation?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-02-16
- Presenting the Strange equation, the AI parallel of the Drake equation3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-12-15
- On thinkers and doers (2022)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-05-05
- Deplatforming: AI Edition2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-04-26
- What would a world with AGI look like?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-01-22
- In Defense of Gemini2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-06
What Hacker News says?
A couple of people asked where this was. I think the article is https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/some-things-to-learn-from... and the HN discussion is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32710002 (but I am not MichaelZuo and it's possible that I've got the wrong thing).
Comment linking /p/some-things-to-learn-from-the-british
on “Many companies aren’t prepared to replace underperforming CEOs”Submitted What can LLMs never do? as a story · 460 points
HN discussionWe need results from these harder/different benchmarks which give pretty bad scores to current top LLMs. https://www.wolfram.com/llm-benchmarking-project/ https://help.kagi.com/kagi/ai/llm-benchmark.html Edit : There are few other benchmarks that give pretty low scores (<20%) to top LLMs. Can't find them atm. There was a benchmark with common sense easy looking questions. Edit: found two more papers https://arxiv.or…
Comment linking /p/what-can-llms-never-do
on “Reflection 70B, the top open-source model”Submitted Two stories about tacit knowledge as a story · 114 points
HN discussionThis paper reads to me as being about fundamental limitations of Transformers and backdoor risk. The paper starts off by reviewing work which uses an encompassing theoretical model of transformers to prove they're limited to only expressing computations in TC^0 (roughly, upperbounded by set of parallelizable problems that can be solved by relatively shallow circuits). There's also a reference to a paper which finds…
Comment linking /p/what-can-llms-never-do
on “Let's Think Dot by Dot: Hidden Computation in Transformer Language Models”Submitted Some things to learn from the British East India Company's growth and demise as a story · 93 points
HN discussionThis is a thoughtful article on the current limitations of LLM and agents: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/what-can-llms-never-do A good example is that you can teach a first grader how to play wordle, but an LLM can’t be taught. That’s a pretty big gap to a situation where most humans can be replaced.
Comment linking /p/what-can-llms-never-do
on “OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computers”Submitted What we want is a hunter gatherer lifestyle with space age tools (2022) as a story · 82 points
HN discussionNot to be that guy but PG has a great one on this: https://paulgraham.com/love.html And here's another great one about how ease, and not grind, arguably led to some of the biggest discoveries ever, like General Relativity: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/on-thinkers-and-doers I am currently doing a masters degree at Carnegie Mellon and I gotta be honest, this place is so dehumanizing for the exact reasons discuss…
Comment linking /p/on-thinkers-and-doers
on “What if hard work felt easier?”Submitted Seeing Like a Network as a story · 73 points
HN discussionWeird. Seems like this is a plagiarism of this article: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/agi-strange-equation (Or maybe it's an independent reinvention of the same idea, and something's just in the water.)
Comment linking /p/agi-strange-equation
on “AGI Doom and the Drake Equation”Submitted Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations as a story · 66 points
HN discussionI remember this article. The issue today is that there is so much abundance of digital products that streaming sites like Spotify need to charge extra for content considered premium: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/discovery-is-the-original... I think that with the online marketplace "optimized" for low cost- Amazon and Direct from Supplier available through Drop Shipping, the long tail needs to focus on more bas…
Comment linking /p/discovery-is-the-original-sin-of
on “The Long Tail (2004)”Submitted The mystery of the garage as a story · 59 points
HN discussionNo, it was from a random substack: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/some-things-to-learn-from... . I’m not sure what historians could debate here. The EIC ultimately failed as a business once it became a government—the costs of governing wiped out the profits from the trade monopoly. But the administrative achievements are undeniable. This is evident from undisputed historical facts. In the mid-18th century, Engla…
Comment linking /p/some-things-to-learn-from-the-british
on “The case for overhauling American science”Submitted On thinkers and doers (2022) as a story · 55 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Mechanical King as a story · 44 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Study of Eccentricity as a story · 35 points
HN discussionSubmitted On Medici and Thiel as a story · 26 points
HN discussionSubmitted Discovery is the original sin of the modern age as a story · 21 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Business of Building God as a story · 12 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why isn't there a philosophy of business? as a story · 11 points
HN discussionSubmitted Ads are inevitable in AI, and that's okay as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Happened in the 2010s? as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted If AGI is the future, vibe coding is what we should all be doing as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted What Can LLMs Never Do? as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted All AI learning is tacit learning as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Nobody Knows Anything as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted AIs are companies, my friend as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Much Should You Lie? as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
