<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: Imnimo</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Imnimo</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 05:57:53 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=Imnimo" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I could imagine cases where prediction markets could offer some actual insight, but in practice they seem few and far between. Most markets I've seen devolve into one or more of: betting on unimportant events (e.g. sports games), insider trading, or poorly written ambiguous resolution criteria. It's just hard for me to imagine that, on net, these markets will offer more societal good than the harm we've seen from sports betting.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2026 21:31:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48199955</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48199955</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48199955</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "I'm scared about biological computing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>But this is where the line slightly blurs in my head. Did we possibly just build the first human biocomputer and immediately put it in a simulated hell, playing the same game on loop, forever? Using the same reward mechanisms we use for LLMs?<p>This description does not seem to really match what was done in the Doom demo, and makes me skeptical that the author has actually looked into the details.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 20:58:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028459</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028459</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48028459</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "Craig Venter has died"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The bad boy of science!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 03:30:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957747</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957747</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47957747</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My read is not so much "if we say this is dangerously powerful, it will make people want to buy our product", but rather that there is a significant segment of AI researchers for whom x-risk, AI alignment, etc. is a deal-breaker issue. And so the Sam Altmans of the world have to treat these concerns as serious to attract and retain talent. See for example OpenAI's pledge to dedicate 20% of their compute to safety research. I don't get the sense that Sam ever intended to follow through on that, but it was very important to a segment of his employees. And it seems like trying to play both sides of this at least contributed to Ilya's departure.<p>On the other hand, it seems like Dario is himself a bit more of a true believer.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2026 15:52:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950128</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950128</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47950128</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for 'any lawful' use of AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Unsurprising from Google, but still bad. If Google has no right to object to a particular use, this is equivalent in practice to "any use, lawful or not".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:32:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936733</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936733</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936733</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "United Wizards of the Coast"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Back when Arena was first announced, there was an interesting line in their write-up:<p><a href="https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/everything-you-need-know-about-magic-gathering-arena-2017-09-07" rel="nofollow">https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/everything-you-nee...</a><p>>We've created an all-new Games Rules Engine (GRE) that uses sophisticated machine learning that can read any card we can dream up for Magic. That means the shackles are off for our industry-leading designers to build and create cards and in-depth gameplay around new mechanics and unexpected but widly fun concepts, all of which can be adapted for MTG Arena thanks to the new GRE under the hood.<p>At the time, this claim of using "sophisticated machine learning" to (apparently?) translate natural language card text into code that a rules engine could enforce struck me as obviously fake. Now nearly ten years later, AI is starting to reach a level where this is plausible.<p>In their letter, the union writes:<p>>Over the past few years, pressure has ramped up from leadership to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work at WOTC, often over the explicit concerns of impacted employees<p>I'm curious if this would include fighting against turning WotC's old fanciful claim into a reality as the technology matures?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:42:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926354</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926354</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926354</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why should we think that pro-social capabilities are simply not expressible by weight-based ANN architectures?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:15:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757903</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757903</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757903</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Tigers, hippos and SARS-CoV-2 also developed ”through evolution”. That does not make them safe to work around.<p>Right, but the article seems to argue that there is some important distinction between natural brains and trained LLMs with respect to "niceness":<p>>OpenAI has enormous teams of people who spend time talking to LLMs, evaluating what they say, and adjusting weights to make them nice. They also build secondary LLMs which double-check that the core LLM is not telling people how to build pipe bombs. Both of these things are optional and expensive. All it takes to get an unaligned model is for an unscrupulous entity to train one and not do that work—or to do it poorly.<p>As you point out, nature offers no more of a guarantee here. There is nothing magical about evolution that promises to produce things that are nice to humans. Natural human niceness is a product of the optimization objectives of evolution, just as LLM niceness is a product of the training objectives and data. If the author believes that evolution was able to produce something robustly "nice", there's good reason to believe the same can be achieved by gradient descent.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:12:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757884</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757884</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47757884</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: Safety"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>Unlike human brains, which are biologically predisposed to acquire prosocial behavior, there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware that ensures models are nice.<p>How did brains acquire this predisposition if there is nothing intrinsic in the mathematics or hardware? The answer is "through evolution" which is just an alternative optimization procedure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:25:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47755246</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47755246</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47755246</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "ChatGPT won't let you type until Cloudflare reads your React state"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's interesting to me that OpenAI considers scraping to be a form of abuse.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:38:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568172</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568172</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568172</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "ARC-AGI-3"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So, if you look at the way the scoring works, 100% is the max. For each task, you get full credit if you solve in a number of steps less than or equal to the baseline. If you solve it with more steps, you get points off. But each task is scored independently, and you can't "make up" for solving one slowly by solving another quickly.<p>Like suppose there were only two tasks, each with a baseline score of solving in 100 steps. You come along and you solve one in only 50 steps, and the other in 200 steps. You might hope that since you solved one twice as quickly as the baseline, but the other twice as slowly, those would balance out and you'd get full credit. Instead, your scores are 1.0 for the first task, and 0.25 (scoring is quadratic) for the second task, and your total benchmark score is a mere 0.625.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 26 Mar 2026 04:58:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526772</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526772</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47526772</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "ARC-AGI-3"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Suppose you construct a Mechanical Turk AI who plays ARC-AGI-3 by, for each task, randomly selecting one of the human players who attempted it, and scoring them as an AI taking those same actions would be scored. What score does this Turk get? It must be <100% since sometimes the random human will take more steps than the second best, but without knowing whether it's 90% or 50% it's very hard for me to contextualize AI scores on this benchmark.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Mar 2026 21:46:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47523711</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47523711</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47523711</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "Goodbye to Sora"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It was neat to be able to try my own prompts and get a sense of what the state of video generation was. But I certainly never generated something that I thought I got real value out of on its own merits, and I still don't understand why there was a social media component to the app.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:58:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509180</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509180</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509180</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "US Job Market Visualizer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The fact that the LLM appears to never assign an actual 0 or 10 makes me suspicious. Especially when the prompt includes explicit examples of what counts as a 10.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:14:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47402666</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47402666</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47402666</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think the problem for xAI is that it can really only hire two types of researchers - people who are philosophically aligned with Elon, and people who are solely money-motivated (not a judgment). But frontier AI research is a field with a lot of top talent who have strong philosophical motivation for their work, and those philosophies are often completely at odds with Elon. OpenAI and Anthropic have philosophical niches that are much better at attracting the current cream of the crop, and I don't really see how xAI can compete with that.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 20:56:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47369770</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47369770</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47369770</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>>What we’re learning from this episode is that the government actually has way more leverage over private companies than we realized.<p>Who is learning this for the first time only now? Even just restricting ourselves to the current administration, look at how many times Trump has directed punitive actions against private entities! Look at his actions against law firms like Perkins Coie or Covington & Burling. This is not something that just arose out of nowhere with Anthropic.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:58:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341694</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341694</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341694</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "Glaze by Raycast"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My metric for this kind of stuff is: Did Glaze build the Glaze app?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:45:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47253529</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47253529</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47253529</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "OpenAI, Pentagon add more surveillance protections to AI deal"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If someone tells you they're going to handle US communications in a way that is consistent with the FISA Act, that is not a good thing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 03 Mar 2026 01:59:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226950</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226950</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47226950</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>None of those explanations are compatible with the pledge of solidarity in the We Will Not Be Divided letter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 04:04:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190252</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190252</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190252</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Imnimo in "OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't see how OpenAI employees who have signed the We Will Not Be Divided letter can continue their employment there in light of this. Surely if OpenAI had insisted upon the same things that Anthropic had, the government would not have signed this agreement. The only plausible explanation is that there is an understanding that OpenAI will not, in practice, enforce the red lines.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2026 03:36:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189970</link><dc:creator>Imnimo</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189970</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47189970</guid></item></channel></rss>