Hacker News: bigmadshoe

New comment by bigmadshoe in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

bigmadshoe — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 20:11:01 +0000

Why do doctors need to be paid integer multiples more in the US than every other country on earth? This is not rhetorical, I mean it sincerely.

And I’m aware that medical debt is a big issue, but it seems like a chicken-or-the-egg type problem. Of course you can charge $500k for a medical degree when the doctor can make it back and then some in 5-10 years.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813"

bigmadshoe — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:22:34 +0000

Why are people giving these n=1 comparisons like they mean anything? The worst offender is that pelican guy. These are non-deterministic systems and a single trial should not update your priors much at all.

Of course it's significant that your response had a bug and took four times longer, but if you're only going to try once, this isn't real science, it's just vibes.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "Apple introduces leasing program for iPhones and other devices"

bigmadshoe — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:51:15 +0000

I think that’s a fair point, and my response wasn’t to suggest that financing is inherently a bad thing. I was replying to the question “doesn’t everyone win from this?”, and I believe the realistic answer is that no, Apple wins and financially uneducated people lose.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S."

bigmadshoe — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:54:05 +0000

Can you elaborate on this? I’m not an expert at all but this seems so far from true I’m struggling to understand if you’re serious.

Wouldn’t we expect tens of millions of casualties, nuclear fallout rendering large swathes of countries uninhabitable, and ensuing total societal collapse once the globalized western world is separated from their foreign means of production?

New comment by bigmadshoe in "New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S."

bigmadshoe — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:50:46 +0000

You think Amazon shouldn’t get in trouble for this because someone else did it first?

New comment by bigmadshoe in "Apple introduces leasing program for iPhones and other devices"

bigmadshoe — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:41:13 +0000

The downside is that it causes people to buy phones they can’t afford because it seems cheaper. People don’t reason about $50 per month the same way they do about $1200. The mistake in your comparison is assuming the target customers were going to buy the phone anyway, when they weren’t.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis"

bigmadshoe — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:44:27 +0000

It looks awful on mobile too. Barely readable in many parts.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough"

bigmadshoe — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:31:14 +0000

Sure, but none of this would be profitable in the context of a private enterprise.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "AI revenues are growing fast, but not fast enough"

bigmadshoe — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:35:42 +0000

The Apollo program wasn’t for profit and if it was it never would have yielded a return on investment.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "Ruff v0.16.0 – Significant new updates – 413 default rules up from 59"

bigmadshoe — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:11:34 +0000

I would hate to work on that codebase. We learn to parse code more quickly over years of looking at code written with the same conventions and style. There’s a reason why Google are so serious about following their style guides.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation"

bigmadshoe — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:16:46 +0000

I don’t think it’s morally consistent to “warn” about the consequences while devoting your life to bringing about those consequences as quickly as possible. If I was in that position of power and truly believed what I was saying, I would devote my work to slowing down that process to give time for society to adapt, not speeding it up.

It’s more reminiscent of a religious group who smugly tells you that the end-times are coming, and only they are going to be saved. Except in this case they are literally bringing about the end-times.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation"

bigmadshoe — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:49:00 +0000

It’s the same thing as always: with the wind of years of unlimited VC money in their sails, people at major AI organizations genuinely believe they’re smarter than everyone else. “Why do we need to do things ‘by the book’ if we’re so smart?”. “Move fast and break things” - except the thing they’re breaking is society.

We saw this with the non-stop flagrant messaging about how “AI is going to kill X% of all jobs”, as if saying the quiet part out loud wouldn’t have consequences worth considering. These people believe they’re omnipotent and thus untouchable.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "EVE Online's Carbon engine is now open source: Fenris Creations explains why"

bigmadshoe — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:03:29 +0000

One of the parent comments specifically mentioned “space engines”, not MMOs.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "OpenAI reduces Codex Model Context Size from 372k to 272k"

bigmadshoe — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 22:58:21 +0000

The improved token efficiency would only account for the output and reasoning tokens occupying context, right? What about the user messages and other context like file contents? I’m not sure how these measure up in a long conversation

New comment by bigmadshoe in "Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)"

bigmadshoe — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:43:02 +0000

My bad, apparently it's prescription-only for children in particular.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)"

bigmadshoe — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:05:06 +0000

It's worth keeping in mind that melatonin is also prescription-only in many countries e.g. UK, Canada, Japan, Australia.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality risk than sleep duration (2023)"

bigmadshoe — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:05:14 +0000

The problem with that take is that the evidence for melatonin is quite poor outside of jet-lag and certain more serious sleep disorders, and there can be unexpected effects elsewhere in the body when supplementing hormones, e.g. increased rates of depression for melatonin in particular.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "Bonsai 27B: A 27B-Class model that runs on a phone"

bigmadshoe — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:36:06 +0000

Note the “but free from unnecessary inductive biases” part of my comment. By that I meant a decision to make each expert good at a human-defined thing.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "Bonsai 27B: A 27B-Class model that runs on a phone"

bigmadshoe — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 05:07:57 +0000

Good point! I thought you meant splitting them and then doing inference with some kind of learned router while keeping all the split models loaded at once. What you're suggesting is pretty sensible.

New comment by bigmadshoe in "Bonsai 27B: A 27B-Class model that runs on a phone"

bigmadshoe — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 23:49:06 +0000

Bitter lesson is knocking. Mixture of experts is essentially what you’re describing but free from unnecessary inductive biases.