Hacker News: agnosticmantis

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic"

agnosticmantis — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 02:40:01 +0000

My $0.02: Competing against exp(t/2) + exp(t/2) is much much easier than exp(t/2+t/2)=exp(t).

(If anthropic didn't exist, ØpenAI would suck up all the capital and talent in the room. Anthropic's existence has helped divide capital+talent that'd otherwise be gobbled up by the single fastest growing player.)

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs"

agnosticmantis — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:03:06 +0000

"You could see a single robotaxi being worth, or providing, about $30,000 of gross profit per year. ... A Tesla is an appreciating asset..."

- Elon Musk during Tesla's Autonomy Day in April 2019.

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents"

agnosticmantis — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 23:43:55 +0000

> Checkpoints are a new primitive that automatically captures agent context as first-class, versioned data in Git. When you commit code generated by an agent, Checkpoints capture the full session alongside the commit: the transcript, prompts, files touched, token usage, tool calls and more.

Whether or not useful for agent collaboration, the data here will be more valuable than gold for doing RL training later on.

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Reza Pahlavi: Iran is ready for a democratic transition"

agnosticmantis — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:53:02 +0000

Archived (non-paywall) version: https://archive.is/BObYG

Reza Pahlavi: Iran is ready for a democratic transition

agnosticmantis — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:53:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/01/06/pahlavi-iran-democracy-transition-planning

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46530772

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Why didn't AI “join the workforce” in 2025?"

agnosticmantis — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 21:39:34 +0000

One would have to control for all the layoffs, tarrifs, interest rates etc too.

On the other hand, people are working much harder today than 3 years ago (remember people not showing up to work and posting on TikTok about how little work did collecting paychecks from 2 different companies etc?)

Just saying it's very hard to look at a time series and determine an effect size, even though politicians/CEOs like to claim ownership for growths.

New comment by agnosticmantis in "A website to destroy all websites"

agnosticmantis — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 02:36:26 +0000

I’ve started experimenting with Quarto[0] for scientific/technical publishing on a personal website, and it’s been quite easy to use so far. I especially like that it has builtin support for LaTeX, markdown, code blocks and Jupyter notebooks. Only thing is I wish there were more templates ready to use.

[0] https://quarto.org

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Warren Buffett steps down as Berkshire Hathaway CEO after six decades"

agnosticmantis — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 07:58:00 +0000

He shamelessly advertised companies in his portfolio, whether it was always having a can of coke or candies on the table or stopping at a McDonald's in a documentary.

I refuse to believe that his lifestyle was what was on display.

He lived in the same house for 60 years, sure, but his private jets kept getting upgraded. Good for him, but I find the frugality theater very off putting.

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Nature Is Laughing at the AI Build Out"

agnosticmantis — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 22:24:57 +0000

I find it hard to see an upper bound to demand for compute/power.

If models/hardware become 1000X more efficient/cheaper/smaller, people will be running 1,000,000X more jobs with even bigger models on even more intensive tasks, running them for even longer, etc.

We haven't even scratched the surface for video, world models and robotics.

When the markets panicked during the first DeepSeek episode, I just bought more Nvidia for this very reason. NVidia may very well tank sooner or later, but I'm sure it won't be because demand for compute tanked due to more efficient models. A more plausible scenario would be a competitor dethroning NVidia, kinda like Google's recent surge indicated.

Comparison of Waymo Rider-Only crash rates by crash type to human benchmarks

agnosticmantis — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:55:06 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15389588.2025.2499887

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46128070

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Gemini 3"

agnosticmantis — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 19:17:55 +0000

This says Gemini 2.5 though.

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Waiting for SQL:202y: Group by All"

agnosticmantis — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 04:30:11 +0000

The Pipe Query Syntax in GoogleSQL implements this elegantly as well:

https://docs.cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/standa...

New comment by agnosticmantis in "The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership"

agnosticmantis — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:03:20 +0000

> Once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panel.

So OpenAI will declare AGI as soon as ChatGPT is a better AI lawyer than any Microsoft could hire.

RFC: Evolving PyTorch/XLA for a more native experience on TPU

agnosticmantis — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 13:46:31 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/pytorch/xla/issues/9684

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732844

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Show HN: Erdos – open-source, AI data science IDE"

agnosticmantis — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 01:31:41 +0000

This looks very cool, I’m gonna try it later today.

Out of curiosity, why the name Erdos? AFAIK Erdos was neither a statistician, data scientist nor AI researcher.

He sure solved many probability/combinatorics problems and famously had many many collaborators.

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Daniel Kahneman opted for assisted suicide in Switzerland"

agnosticmantis — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 19:09:04 +0000

"His decision seems to have been based less on his famous scientific thinking and more on a very personal feeling. He wanted to retain his autonomy until the end and to shape his own end."

So you could say it was more system 1 thinking rather than system 2.

I would've expected the opposite given our survival instincts.

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Sora, AI Bicycles, and Meta Disruption"

agnosticmantis — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 01:45:02 +0000

Only difference is soon you'll have Mickey Mouse tell you (and your children) to buy same old crap that the influencers were shilling.

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Sora, AI Bicycles, and Meta Disruption"

agnosticmantis — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 01:37:04 +0000

Business idea: disrupt all these apps by creating an agent that watches all the brainrot for us so we all get our stolen attentions back.

New comment by agnosticmantis in "Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant"

agnosticmantis — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 06:15:10 +0000

How about the donor piggy though?

If this becomes commonplace and animals are bred/raised just for their organs, we get into murky ethical territory. (Yes, people already eat the organs for food, that's murky too. But industrial scale organ farming sounds even worse somehow.)

Tesla Is Dropping the Dream of Human-Free Self-Driving Cars

agnosticmantis — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 06:34:22 +0000

Article URL: https://www.vice.com/en/article/tesla-is-dropping-the-dream-of-human-free-self-driving-cars/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45286237

Points: 7

# Comments: 2