Hacker News: ViscountPenguin

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Your brain was never designed for this much bad news"

ViscountPenguin — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 06:13:24 +0000

Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B"

ViscountPenguin — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:45:11 +0000

Petitioning the corrupt head of state to force Anthropic out of business seems to be part of the business model.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "4 things to know about the new sunscreen ingredient the FDA approved"

ViscountPenguin — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:42:58 +0000

Nearly everyone I know puts sunscreen on their hands. Here in Australia, the world melanoma capital, sun safety is drilled into you as a kid, to the extent that "no hat no play" used to be official policy in most schools.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

ViscountPenguin — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:48:39 +0000

I think that really depends on which country you live in. My country has only had a few relatively minor spats with China, Vietnam less so.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

ViscountPenguin — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 03:36:39 +0000

In my experience, US citizens are completely blind to how much stuff like this makes citizens of other countries hate their government (which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens; not that I condone hating any group of people based on the actions of their state)

The US has spent the last 12ish years betting that they're the only country that matters, but the end of result of that is that somehow when I talk to Australians in my age group the average person has a more positive opinion towards China even than the US.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive"

ViscountPenguin — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 10:55:00 +0000

Eh, I've have the exact opposite experience.

Way back before instruct models it was pretty difficult, but for the last couple of years I haven't needed anything more complex than the type of text that I might send in a detailed email to a colleague.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Starfish by Peter Watts (1999)"

ViscountPenguin — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:33:56 +0000

There's something interesting here, where the very thing that prompted the LLM boom (transformer networks) was the thing that introduced a higher level of information integration into neural networks; under the somewhat mainstream theory (not to say uncontroversial, though) that consciousness is a function of Integrative Information (IIT), it could be said that transformers are in a real way more conscious than previous architectures.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Starfish by Peter Watts (1999)"

ViscountPenguin — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:21:35 +0000

Eh, I love blindsight, but I really think it oversold the case against consciousness and for belligerent intelligent life.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Claude Fable 5"

ViscountPenguin — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 03:05:04 +0000

Oh, fuck

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Claude Fable 5"

ViscountPenguin — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 21:26:03 +0000

You're off by an order of magnitude with those last two.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab"

ViscountPenguin — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:28:06 +0000

The thing I've never understood about the ai investment model is the upside. What's the point of valuations that only make sense if you've built a digital god, when at that point you've literally got a digital god. I can't imagine the tangible value of money being high in that scenario

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "They’re made out of weights"

ViscountPenguin — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 05:40:59 +0000

I find that a lot of arguments against emergent consciousness seem to just come out of an atheist rephrasing of abrhamic priors about the existence of a "soul". In personal chats, I've found people from East Asian countries (minus Korea, which makes sense) to be much more open to the idea of machine consciousness.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "How is Groq raising more money?"

ViscountPenguin — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 22:11:51 +0000

That kind of shows what I mean actually. I can get double the tokens per second for a little more, or 10% less for 20% less in price.

It's on the pareto frontier, sure, but a kind of shittt point of it

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "KL Zero: KL divergence intuition game"

ViscountPenguin — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 04:04:19 +0000

The x axis is unlabelled, there's literally no way to know if you're close to the correct probability mass.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "How is Groq raising more money?"

ViscountPenguin — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 02:53:05 +0000

I don't really get the value proposition of groq as a user, the performance is really poor for the token price. Data centres on the other hand are becoming a commodity, and I don't see any reason a priori to invest in groq specifically for something like that.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "PyTorch Landscape"

ViscountPenguin — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:05:47 +0000

Pyro is really cool if you're into probabilistic programming languages, but the Numpyro is significantly faster iirc.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Voice AI Systems Are Vulnerable to Hidden Audio Attacks"

ViscountPenguin — Mon, 18 May 2026 22:00:32 +0000

Lots of bugs seem to be fundamentally quite local, but potentially with global trigger conditions. Heart bleed for example could've been avoided even if you could only read small segments of the codebase at a time, but could only be triggered with more context.

I suspect that a combination of ai and memory safe languages will really shine in the next decade.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format"

ViscountPenguin — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:48:03 +0000

The biggest difference would be the fact that you can discover video game cheating through some kind of trace. Speed running communities go pretty hardcore on that kind of thing nowadays.

It's a lot harder to detect cheating when your only trace is how fast someone submitted the string CTF{DUck1e_Pwned}

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "More than sixty percent of the United States is experiencing drought conditions"

ViscountPenguin — Fri, 15 May 2026 02:08:15 +0000

Contrarian experts are really important imo, and I don't think their efforts should be devalued just because nuts might be attracted to them. As long as they're properly engaging in the scientific method I reckon that they're perfectly fine to quote.

New comment by ViscountPenguin in "Do teachers need advanced degrees?"

ViscountPenguin — Fri, 15 May 2026 02:04:44 +0000

If someone has a historical of unethical behaviour it's reasonable to want significantly more evidence for their claims.