Hacker News: eob

A Manchurian Candidate Hidden in Qwen's Weights

eob — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 17:50:59 +0000

Article URL: https://edwardbenson.com/2026/10/manchurian-candidate-mode

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50277898

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

These Neurons Control Territorial Claims

eob — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 01:18:21 +0000

Article URL: https://edwardbenson.com/tinkering/neuron-explorer

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50253557

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by eob in "Award-winning AI literature"

eob — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:18:52 +0000

Bit of a side question to the crowd:

If anyone wants to commission an AI novella, holler out to me. (For free -- this is a hobby)

I've been trying to build an automated book publisher for about a year now. While the books aren't yet "human good", the slop factor is getting fairly low. Part of that is because I've stuck to formats easier for AI to avoid the uncanney vally in: recipe books, historical re-tellings, etc.

New comment by eob in "Eight Bits of Trust: eMudhra's CA keys cracked in milliseconds"

eob — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:00:01 +0000

With the speed of vibe coding.. I'd expect the "Reverse Engineer Anything" folks to come out with a "Man in the Middle Anything" app by lunch

New comment by eob in ""I'm on a war footing": Terry Tao and the crisis in math"

eob — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 03:25:36 +0000

A lot of us here are VC minded hackers *because* we spent years of our lives working minimum wage jobs in academia and then eventually realized we preferred to build!

New comment by eob in "Tell HN: Bob Cringely has died"

eob — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 12:58:36 +0000

Rest in peace Bob. One of the great early tech writers. The feeling of his writing -- the blend of fact and opinion and sense of humor, and more than anything the sense the really cared -- always felt to me like one of the seeds that developed into the blogosphere.

Run frontier models on gaming GPUs

eob — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 03:14:18 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/andy_shuoyang/status/2090856982383300898

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49396266

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by eob in "Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?"

eob — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:25:41 +0000

Simon I hope from this day hence, your bio always includes:

"Simon Willison, among other things, is an advocate for the inclusion of pelican geometry in LLM training datasets."

What I learned building an AI book publisher

eob — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:40:12 +0000

Article URL: https://edwardbenson.com/2026/07/ai-book-publishing-lessons

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48993790

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by eob in "Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public"

eob — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:15:48 +0000

I think because you don't know /which/ developer you're going to get.

One interesting aspect of LLMs is that each one, weights frozen, can be thought of as a single developer whose work you have already evaluated.

The cost of finding, evaluating, and negotiating with a new human is tremenous.

New comment by eob in "All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes"

eob — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:10:19 +0000

These comments are so filled with cool projects and visualizations I’ll throw my own out there:

Trying to generate non-slop, print-worthy recipe books for different diaspora communities.

www.robotbookclub.com

I’m pretty sure the recipes have surpassed slop. The photos are pretty close. The layouts, intros, and “chef photos” need a lot of work though.

New comment by eob in "All of human cooking compressed into 2 megabytes"

eob — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:07:12 +0000

This is how I write down recipes for myself! There’s got to be some cognitive archetype that works better with this style encoding.

New comment by eob in "Show HN: Forge – Guardrails take an 8B model from 53% to 99% on agentic tasks"

eob — Wed, 20 May 2026 01:40:03 +0000

Do you have any suspicion about what is different between the backends?

That's an absolutely bonkers statistic: it would mean spurious differences in hosting container overwhelm the performance differences between models.

New comment by eob in "Apple randomly closes bug reports unless you "verify" the bug remains unfixed"

eob — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 01:23:13 +0000

My guess it's just the emergent behavior that results when a company doesn't provide developers time to fix bugs.

If their week is already booked full just trying to keep up with the roadmap deadlines, a bug ticket feels like being tossed a 25lb weight when you're drowning.

You could say: "but have pride in your work!"

But if your company only values shipping, not fixing, that attitude doesn't make it through the first performance review.

New comment by eob in "Verizon outages reported across U.S."

eob — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:19:23 +0000

You think like a person who’s debugged large systems failures before :). That feels very plausible.

New comment by eob in "Verizon outages reported across U.S."

eob — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 19:15:46 +0000

Some outlets reporting T-Mobile and ATT as well.

I assume state on state cyber attacks are commonplace but get minimized to avoid public fear.. perhaps this will be the first notable one.

New comment by eob in "AI URI Scheme – Internet-Draft"

eob — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 20:22:10 +0000

I build coding agents for a living, and I'm struggling to map this onto the set of things I do at work.

In general, interoperability and user choice are really important for us to get right as the community of people building AI platforms...

Have others reading this document been able to map it onto their work?

As a specific example:

> ai://bank/service/payments?amount=10¤cy=USD

I'm not sure what this is representing here. Is it a way to encode a clickable link to chat with `bank` about `service/payments` with a few additional args attached?

New comment by eob in "Swift-erlang-actor-system"

eob — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 04:26:29 +0000

Third party apps can’t use the network though. Iirc there’s an async message queue with eventual delivery that each app gets, which it can use to send messages back and forth with a paired phone app.

New comment by eob in "Show HN: Dia, an open-weights TTS model for generating realistic dialogue"

eob — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 20:37:33 +0000

Bravo -- this is fantastic.

I've been waiting for this ever since reading some interview with Orson Scott Card ages ago. It turns out he thinks of his novels as radio theater, not books. Which is a very different way to experience the audio.

New comment by eob in "Obituary for Cyc"

eob — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 19:57:44 +0000

Or vice versa - perhaps some subset of the "thought chains" of Cyc's inference system could be useful training data for LLMs.