Hacker News: Balinares

New comment by Balinares in "IRCv3"

Balinares — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 11:12:34 +0000

Some never left. Notoriously, some bigtech companies have an internal IRC network for tech discussions because that's one communication system that you can rely on to stay up even during catastrophic outages.

New comment by Balinares in "AHM Statement on OpenAI's October 6 Release of Mathematical Documents"

Balinares — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 07:02:17 +0000

Because it succinctly but correctly spotlights the motivation for the release and the fact that motivation is self-serving and not necessarily a positive for the field.

New comment by Balinares in "Reasons to Dislike AI Coding"

Balinares — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 06:56:24 +0000

Duchamp's Fountain.

Anything can be art.

New comment by Balinares in "Run Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (125B) on consumer hardware (RTX 4090) at 100T/s"

Balinares — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 06:46:18 +0000

3.8 is absolutely quite a bit better than 3.5. My go-to quick benchmark is a bit like yours, implementing a simple but complete game in pygame. Most small models output code that's too buggy to be fixable. Qwen 3.8 wrote buggy code too, but the bugs were minor, and the game legitimately playable and fun.

That said, I've not found it very reliable, especially at the low quant required to run on my hardware. It's very capable for its size, enough to be legitimately useful, but it's never certain whether it will hit its capability peak on a given attempt, and sometimes you have to give it multiple tries.

New comment by Balinares in "Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026"

Balinares — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 15:09:40 +0000

100% wealth tax rate past e.g. $999M -- capping wealth like a Zelda wallet -- would address a certain number of issues around the many externalities of unbounded, bottomless greed.

Mind you, I don't think that's ever happening, considering that one such issue is there's currently nothing to keep a dishonest actor who ended up beyond that threshold from spending mountains of cash (still a small fraction of the total there) toward convincing those susceptible to such that a system which permits such dishonest actors is good akshyually.

New comment by Balinares in "AI borrowers face tough sell in risky corners of US credit market"

Balinares — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 12:49:44 +0000

Your example supports the thesis that R&D tax credits are in fact decorrelated from R&D successes so I'm confused what point you are trying to make.

New comment by Balinares in "10-year Treasury yield climbs above 5.3% to a level not seen in 24 years"

Balinares — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 07:07:50 +0000

The Macron government went out of its way to cut taxes for the wealthiest percentiles. Debt exploded, costs were cut, infrastructure went unmaintained (which only ended up adding to structural costs), but the GDP growth remained anemic.

However the wealth of the wealthiest increased substantially, so there's that, I guess.

New comment by Balinares in "Denying Insulin and Meds: Disturbing Pictures of Neglect in ICE Mortality Report"

Balinares — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 06:55:22 +0000

This is a good question. It's worth noting that the US forces did not in fact uniformly liberate every concentration camps prisoner: they left those incarcerated for being homosexual. So even back then the lines were blurrier than commonly taught.

New comment by Balinares in "Pentagon Influencer Called Liberal Women 'Pestilence' Who Will End Civilization"

Balinares — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 14:04:25 +0000

I mean, there is such a thing as reality, and it exists regardless of your observing it; we can agree on this much, I'm sure?

New comment by Balinares in "PS5 Relapse Exploit"

Balinares — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:46:23 +0000

Also super fast loading times. Playing e.g. RDR2 on a physical console, by comparison, is painful.

Stadia worked absurdly well. One of the beta games was Thumper, a demanding rhythm game (I might be the reason why it was in the beta lineup actually). How well did that work out? Well, the latency made it hard to play... until I switched my TV to so-called "gaming mode". And then it was fine.

No kidding. The TV was introducing more latency than Stadia itself.

I also once tested it on hotel wifi. It worked great.

(Mind you, this was in Europe. YMMV.)

The business model however was terrible and killed the product IMO. Which, honestly, good: Stadia would have killed video game archiving efforts. If a publisher folds and Stadia and similar platforms stop streaming its streaming-exclusives, then those games are gone. Not worth it, no matter how well it worked.

New comment by Balinares in "What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals"

Balinares — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 06:55:50 +0000

You'd think reducing crime and saving money in the process would be enough incentive, but it turns out that can be a hard sell on a public that's been trained to relish in seeing violence applied to people presented as bad. I've found that there are people so keenly keyed to said relish that they'll just dead refuse to believe that supportive approaches to drug addiction can be cheaper than coercive approaches with better results to boot, and that's kind of tragic honestly.

New comment by Balinares in "Claude Opus 5.5"

Balinares — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:24:25 +0000

Unless they already have something similar of their own, which is always possible, they'd be stupid not to. I don't suppose we'll ever know, though. It would not be a good look if after the trillions of dollars that have been thrown at US labs, investors found out that they're down to copying Chinese tech.

New comment by Balinares in "MiMo v2.6"

Balinares — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 16:37:51 +0000

I don't understand on what you are basing this reasoning? If a well educated workforce can produce Fable then why couldn't a well educated workforce produce MiMo?

Besides, the latter actually published and open-sourced its RL stack to make it reproducible, which would in fact make it more trustworthy than the models you are speculating were distilled.

New comment by Balinares in "Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint"

Balinares — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 08:54:48 +0000

I wonder how well it performs in practice, because I can't help seriously doubting those benchmarks. That would put this 6GB model in Opus 4.6+ ballpark. Granted, that's mostly to Qwen 3.8's credit, but it's hard to believe that Qwen's already unbelievable capability density can still be compressed this much more.

New comment by Balinares in "25 years of mass surveillance is enough"

Balinares — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 16:05:09 +0000

The number of people abject enough to end up with transphobic views is thankfully nowhere near that. Most people, as it turns out, are not creepily obsessed with other people's genitals. Most people also aren't driven by a horrible urge to find minorities to torment. Though those who are would sure claim otherwise, of course; trying to normalize their awfulness is part of the playbook.

New comment by Balinares in "25 years of mass surveillance is enough"

Balinares — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 15:54:24 +0000

Because then they'll move on to the next victims and in having surrendered without even a fight you've granted them momentum for no good reason whatsoever, and you'll have fewer allies left too.

New comment by Balinares in "I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea"

Balinares — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 12:30:18 +0000

You are however under no obligation to grant your instincts unrestricted access to the pilot seat.

New comment by Balinares in "Irish, Scottish and Welsh leaders meet to plan break-up of United Kingdom"

Balinares — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:49:09 +0000

Scotland at least mulled independence quite seriously pre-Brexit, and one of the strongest arguments against which the UK advanced was that in leaving the UK Scotland would also leave the EU. The EU presidency, at the time held by Spain which was also concerned about its own independantist movement, supported that argument.

Then the UK voted for Brexit. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted against but England voted for it, and it outweighs both, so the UK left, dragging Scotland and Northern Ireland along and out of the EU. Neither were hugely amused.

So to answer your question, the Venn would likely be somewhat disjoint. That's a simple summary of a messy bag of thorns, though, so the details are likely way more nuanced.

New comment by Balinares in "An open letter to Dario: if you mean it, open the weights"

Balinares — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 13:05:17 +0000

He sells himself as an ethical guy, and doing things that are broadly positive for everyone even if they're against your own personal self-interest is basic ethicality.

New comment by Balinares in "AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement"

Balinares — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 09:46:02 +0000

How about connecting the sadist to the caring environment where they might heal and, in time, learn empathy.