Top all-time · #1307
Timothy B. Lee
Personal blog · understandingai.orgaiscience
Timothy B. Lee writes Understanding AI, a personal blog at understandingai.org about ai and science. Since 2023, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 87 times, most often “Human drivers are to blame for most serious Waymo collisions”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Exploring how AI works and how it's changing our world. Click to read Understanding AI, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- Human drivers are to blame for most serious Waymo collisions5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-09-10
- Elon Musk wants to dominate robotaxis–first he needs to catch up to Waymo4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-10-10
- Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-06-15
- Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-07-27
- Driverless cars may already be safer than human drivers2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-08-31
- Don’t exclude AI-generated art from copyright2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-09-21
- Copyright lawsuits pose a serious threat to generative AI2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-04-05
- Amazon's self-driving unit just hit a major setback2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-19
- How mathematicians are responding to AI2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-08-04
- The death of self-driving cars is greatly exaggerated2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-05-31
What Hacker News says?
> often with no clear winner. You have to pick one somehow. It's not like it's taking some kind of "real" output and obfuscating it. It’s very rare for multiple outputs to actually be equal so the only choice is to choose one at random. Instead its become accepted practice to make sub optimal choices for a few reasons, one of which really is to decrease the likelihood of reproducing existing text. Nobody wants a hea…
Comment linking /p/metas-llama-31-can-recall-42-percent
on “Anthropic judge rejects $1.5B AI copyright settlement”Submitted AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected as a story · 366 points
HN discussionThey are reducing jobs already. Recent grads are having serious trouble to get work right now: https://www.understandingai.org/p/new-evidence-strongly-sugg...
Comment linking /p/new-evidence-strongly-suggest-ai
on “OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart”Submitted Waymos crash less than human drivers as a story · 345 points
HN discussionWaymo has been at the forefront of cutting edge AI/ML since the beginning: https://waymo.com/research/ This is a good read: https://www.understandingai.org/p/elon-musk-wants-to-dominat... This talk by Waymo co-CEO is even better (especially from 33:50): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_wGhKBjH_U
Comment linking /p/elon-musk-wants-to-dominate-robotaxisfirst
on “Waymo closes $5.6B investment round”Submitted The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise as a story · 306 points
HN discussionEh? I’ve never heard of them until this article and my first impression of it was worse than bad. The author seems full of hubris and the subject matter is a reformulated “tech journalism is broken” is comically late by, oh, about a decade. The author seems to be unaware that this isn’t a new thing. Then there’s some cringeworthy stuff like unironically using the word normie before conjuring an irrelevant excuse to…
Comment linking /p/why-im-not-worried-about-ai-taking
on “Debugging Tech Journalism”Submitted Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon as a story · 192 points
HN discussionI checked this out [1] just to get a sense, and apparently there have been 200 total collisions involving Waymos, about one every 100,000 miles. 43% were at relative speeds of under 1 MPH. Only 23 were serious enough to cause an injury or deploy airbags, and of those, 16 were rear-end crashes. At least one of the 16 involved a driver who hit the Waymo a second time as he tried to run away, so probably not good faith…
Comment linking /p/human-drivers-are-to-blame-for-most
on “Tesla self-driving promises are getting weaker on new cars”Submitted Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book as a story · 191 points
HN discussionThe ones I visit daily https://pluralistic.net/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/author/edward/ https://www.understandingai.org/ https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html https://european-alternatives.eu/ https://www.openrightsgroup.org/ https://hope.net/ for some human spiritual depth: https://www.themarginalian.org/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Where do you find/post blog articles?”Submitted The Ukraine war is driving rapid innovation in drone technology as a story · 57 points
HN discussionAuthor here. What do you mean? The article this thread is about has hardly any opinion in it. Or consider this piece explaining how LLMs work: https://www.understandingai.org/p/large-language-models-expl...
Comment linking /p/large-language-models-explained-with
on “How to think about the OpenAI Q* rumors”Submitted Human drivers are to blame for most serious Waymo collisions as a story · 42 points
HN discussion> your problem space doesn’t need an LLM to solve it Hmmm… kinda opinion right? I’m saying; in specific situations, you can validate the output and aggregate solutions based on deterministic criteria to mitigate hallucinations. You can use statistical methods (eg. There’s a project out there that generates tests and uses “on average tests pass” as a validation criteria) to reduce the chance of an output hallucinatio…
Comment linking /p/how-to-think-about-the-openai-q-rumors
on “Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice”Submitted Why humanoid robots won't catch up to human workers any time soon as a story · 37 points
HN discussionSubmitted Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book as a story · 35 points
HN discussionSubmitted New evidence strongly suggest AI is killing jobs for young programmers as a story · 22 points
HN discussionSubmitted Few of Waymo's most serious crashes were Waymo's fault as a story · 20 points
HN discussionSubmitted LLMs are much worse than humans at learning from experience as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Elon Musk wants to dominate robotaxis–first he needs to catch up to Waymo as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Human drivers are to blame for most serious Waymo collisions as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Few of Waymo's most serious crashes were Waymo's fault as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tesla's robotaxi strategy looks a lot like Waymo's as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why large language models struggle with long contexts as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Robot startups are trying everything they can think of to get more data as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted How mathematicians are responding to AI as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Pentagon is making a mistake by threatening Anthropic as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted 16 charts that explain the AI boom as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Tesla is (still) following in Waymo's footsteps as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
