Hacker News: blueblimp

New comment by blueblimp in "EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear"

blueblimp — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:23:38 +0000

Seems bizarre. It's not like companies didn't want to sell it--they'd prefer to have the revenue. This is just kicking them then while they're down. I wonder if it will reduce risk-taking since it increases the downside of launching an unpopular product.

New comment by blueblimp in "EverQuest"

blueblimp — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 19:12:15 +0000

The inter-city travel was my favorite part of EverQuest. (The rest of the game, I didn't find too interesting.) The level of challenge was about right: if you looked at maps and planned your route, you could generally get to where you wanted to go, but it was hazardous.

I wonder if there's a game that focuses on that sort of travel experience.

New comment by blueblimp in "I made a history timeline to learn what events happened around the same time"

blueblimp — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 04:51:01 +0000

I enjoyed browsing through it. One comment: the "philosophy and art" row is missing anything after 1890.

New comment by blueblimp in "It’s nearly impossible to buy an original Bob Ross painting (2021)"

blueblimp — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 20:47:37 +0000

> Today, 1,165 Bob Ross originals — a trove worth millions of dollars — sit in cardboard boxes inside the company’s nondescript office building in Herndon, Virginia.

This seems like a bit of a waste given that there's demand for them.

New comment by blueblimp in "OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B"

blueblimp — Wed, 07 May 2025 00:20:22 +0000

I feel it too:

- Plenty of em-dashes

- "you're absolutely right"

- "They're X, not just Y"

New comment by blueblimp in "Let's talk about AI and end-to-end encryption"

blueblimp — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 19:14:07 +0000

And the most important thing about PCC in my opinion is not the technical aspect (though that's nice) but that Apple views user privacy as something good to be maximized, differing from the view championed by OpenAI and Anthropic (and also adopted by Google and virtually every other major LLM provider by this point) that user interactions must be surveilled for "safety" purposes. The lack of privacy isn't due to a technical limitation--it's intended, and they often brag about it.

New comment by blueblimp in "Let's talk about AI and end-to-end encryption"

blueblimp — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 18:59:49 +0000

> Yet this approach is obviously much better than what’s being done at companies like OpenAI, where the data is processed by servers that employees (presumably) can log into and access.

No need for presumption here: OpenAI is quite transparent about the fact that they retain data for 30 days and have employees and third-party contractors look at it.

https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/how-we-use-your-data

> To help identify abuse, API data may be retained for up to 30 days, after which it will be deleted (unless otherwise required by law).

https://openai.com/enterprise-privacy/

> Our access to API business data stored on our systems is limited to (1) authorized employees that require access for engineering support, investigating potential platform abuse, and legal compliance and (2) specialized third-party contractors who are bound by confidentiality and security obligations, solely to review for abuse and misuse.

New comment by blueblimp in "1/0 = 0 (2018)"

blueblimp — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 21:09:22 +0000

This sort of convenient semi-arbitrary extension of a partial function is ubiquitous in Lean 4 mathlib, the most active mathematics formalization project today. It turns out that the most convenient way to do informal math and formal math differ in this aspect.

New comment by blueblimp in "Engineering Sleep"

blueblimp — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 21:12:15 +0000

> many of my math friends consistently slept 9–10 hours a day.

Anecdotally, I've noticed an association between long sleeping and math ability in particular, so this doesn't surprise me. I wonder if it's been studied scientifically.

New comment by blueblimp in "Tencent Hunyuan-Large"

blueblimp — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 20:43:21 +0000

In Meta's case, the problem is that they had been given the go-ahead by the EU to train on certain data, and then after starting training, the EU changed its mind and told them to stop.

New comment by blueblimp in "The rollercoaster king: the man behind the UK's fastest thrill-ride"

blueblimp — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 07:41:40 +0000

Video of Hyperia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wUKY3HBw2U

A fun point in the article: Burton got into the industry via Rollercoaster Tycoon experience:

> Curiosity became an obsession in his teens, when he started to play RollerCoaster Tycoon, a computer game that allowed him to devise his own rides. [...] In the end he won the job, he said, on the strength of those speculative rollercoasters he had made in a video game.

New comment by blueblimp in "How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me"

blueblimp — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 17:22:51 +0000

I agree: a well-designed educational course can feel like a video game in some ways, in that you're learning at a high, consistent rate.

New comment by blueblimp in "The Art of Finishing"

blueblimp — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 22:45:04 +0000

My favorite blog post on tips for finishing is this classic by Derek Yu (of Spelunky fame): https://makegames.tumblr.com/post/1136623767/finishing-a-gam....

New comment by blueblimp in "Former Bungie, Pokémon lawyer explains how they caught leakers"

blueblimp — Sun, 21 Jul 2024 05:54:35 +0000

That was strange. I had to reread it to confirm that he's just talking about some random kid looking at the publicly-available game data files, not an employee or anyone else with special access.

New comment by blueblimp in "A Trivial Llama 3 Jailbreak"

blueblimp — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 00:49:23 +0000

All sorts of technology can be used secretly to assist criminal enterprises. Cars, computers, pencils, electricity, etc. It's unfair to hold LLMs to a higher standard than what applies to nearly everything else.

New comment by blueblimp in "USAF Test Pilot School, DARPA announce aerospace machine learning breakthrough"

blueblimp — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 17:50:44 +0000

Yep. Advanced military technology tends to favor countries with high GDP per capita, which are mostly liberal democracies.

New comment by blueblimp in "DBRX: A new open LLM"

blueblimp — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 22:29:25 +0000

The license allows to reproduce/distribute/copy, so I'm a little surprised there's an approval process at all.

New comment by blueblimp in "DBRX: A new open LLM"

blueblimp — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 22:17:29 +0000

Qwen1.5-72B-Chat is dominant in the Chatbot Arena leaderboard, though. (Miqu isn't on there due to being bootleg, but Qwen outranks Mistral Medium.)

New comment by blueblimp in "Solving Crew Battle Strategy with Math"

blueblimp — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 21:13:07 +0000

The Bradley-Terry model is essentially the same thing as Elo.

https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-12-07-leaderboard/

> This model actually is the maximum likelihood (MLE) estimate of the underlying Elo model assuming a fixed but unknown pairwise win-rate.

New comment by blueblimp in "What Extropic is building"

blueblimp — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 16:27:54 +0000

This was definitely easier to follow.

Since they're building a special-purpose accelerator for a certain class of models, what I'd like to see is some evidence that those models can achieve competitive performance (once the hardware is mature). Namely, simulate these models on conventional hardware to determine how effective they are, then estimate what the cost would be to run the same model on Extropic's future hardware.