<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: fennecfoxy</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=fennecfoxy</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:34:14 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=fennecfoxy" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's fine. Even re-reading what I'd said it does seem a little extreme, but I still believe the core idea of it. I'm just watching violent criminals in UK get early release while the hapless government and public cannot rub two neurons together to just build more prisons + address problems at the root (income inequality, rising prices, lack of things to do in smaller towns/villages).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:15:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242181</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242181</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242181</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, I always thought the future of this stuff would be hot-pluggable MoE modules or LORAs that are able to be downloaded and applied/used at will like how skills have become a thing.<p>Like, atm most architectures seem limited by a single context and fixed architecture with no hot loading. Especially for robotics, being able to load/unload various specialised skills on limited mobile hardware will (I hope) definitely become a thing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:13:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242170</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242170</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242170</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When I lived in Auckland (now in the UK) I used to go to gigs at Whammy bar in St. Kevins arcade, the dive bar part is awesome and I think they stop people doing it now but when I was in uni the walls used to be covered by graffiti and scribbles by people.<p>If you've never been totally recommend. K Road in general is always so amazing (well, like >7 years ago).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:09:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242148</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242148</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242148</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes, also because I imagine people generally followed the dog damned rules there.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:03:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242094</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242094</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242094</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "New Zealand lost its music media, and what we're building to replace it"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yep, as a Kiwi living in UK I actually went back to NZ to redo my visa about December 2019, then that was all sorted and I returned about late Jan-early Feb 2020.<p>I had a stopover in Bangkok and _everyone_ was wearing masks. Not just Asian people, _everyone_. And that's when I was like "oh...this covid thing in the news is gonna be a bit bigger than we thought".<p>Then I land in the UK after that and all my friends & colleagues either haven't heard of covid or aren't really bothered by it ("it won't come here"). Was back at work for 2 weeks, then the first lockdown hit.<p>And we had lockdown, after lockdown, after lockdown. I would walk to the supermarket (the one thing we were allowed to do as per the rules) and be walking past parks filled with moron families socialising in the middle of lockdown.<p>The UK had so many long lockdowns because people here are quite selfish and cannot follow rules - and before people take offence - this is in contrast with NZ culture. There's much more "me me me" and "mine mine mine" culture here in the UK.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:02:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242089</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242089</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242089</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, I'm saying it's only human to retroactively want to do extreme fantastical violence against people who have physically harmed you when you live in a society that a: does not care that you were hurt because you're a man and b: pressures men into fending for themselves, sorting out their own problems and "manning up".<p>I'm not the type, myself. But damn, no wonder downtrodden men end up snapping - because they most often have nobody to turn to and are forced to exist within a bubble that analyses their weakness and victimhood as much as women are for beauty standards, etc.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:34:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49211089</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49211089</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49211089</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I would also like someone to clarify this for me. I (think) I understand what people mean by a neurosymbolic model however common definitions are a bit funky.<p>If it's neuro (llm/transformer similar) symbolic (symbolic with hand crafted rules) then, imo, that's no different from current tool calling harness implementations and I'd love for someone to explain it further to me if I've misunderstood.<p>If it's neuro (llm/transformer similar) symbolic (symbolic rules that have also been learned via training) then yeah I can understand how it's a distinct concept.<p>But every definition I've seen tells me that a standard harness of:<p>query->llm->[tool call symbol + tool name + tool params] aka symbols governed by logic, including param/arg validation->llm->etc<p>Already meets the requirements for being "neurosymbolic"...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:31:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49211039</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49211039</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49211039</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm curious about this too as I've been working with a 1300 page document on procedures for [industry]. Where every single section is primarily about [industry] with minor differences in verbs actions etc for the procedures.<p>I've found with traditional embeddings that obviously you're getting an average of the content of the chunk even with the semantic awareness magic. And our (or I guess the) core problem seems to be a lack of enough contrast between chunks with makes one-shot pure embedding based RAG extremely difficult and low quality.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:24:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210938</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210938</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210938</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is nice to have a model that can "do it all", though. And surely that's still the end goal? Like how MoE is still somewhat popular in certain areas even after its heyday.<p>I am wondering if models will end up being some sort of evolution of MoE where it has something internally like the model the author refers to that gets surfaced when it needs to search in some way. I guess it makes sense; our own brains have so many distinct task-specific regions.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:04:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210634</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210634</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210634</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>By post-train I presume you mean a finetune? Unless that's wrong (please correct me if so).<p>I haven't looked into model architecture people are working with for this stuff too deeply yet but I presume the core idea is fine-tuning a lightweight reasoning-enabled LLM specifically using search as a metric for training?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:02:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210586</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210586</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210586</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thank you for the link! Super interesting and I appreciate how it was written.<p>It seems like a lot of the problems I have been running into with RAG on large/complex documents with generally low contrast in the information is not one that has been perfectly solved yet - here I am thinking I'd been a bit behind.<p>It's just unfortunate that none of the cloud providers are flexible enough to deal with the pace of change. Probably going to have to shove one of those 8b~ models into an instance to use when needed.<p>It's interesting you mention late interaction (retrieval), I had recently been using ChatGPT as a mirror to throw ideas back at me on this issue and had been musing about how nice it would be to have some sort of hierarchical embeddings that capture a whole chunk, then sentences and then sentence fragments or individual word and it seems that that fits the bill!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:58:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210527</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210527</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210527</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "Beating GPT-5.6 Sol on retrieval with 100x cheaper open models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hmmmm, this is a problem I have been facing recently.<p>Basic embeddings give decent-ish results (in the top say 20 chunks). Basic agentic retrieval gives slightly better results so long as the agent part of it doesn't go down the wrong track.<p>I like the idea of what's discussed in the link, however atm we are on Bedrock KBs and so locked in to a very basic implementation of RAG, because Amazon doesn't have the foresight to make things flexible enough - including making it an absolute pita to use their hybrid search. But, I guess they "work" reliably.<p>One of our core issues centers around a 1300 page document all about the same overall topic but with minor various for specific procedures/situations. Typical embeddings waters this down so that each chunk really just represents the common theme and therefore lacks a lot of contrast.<p>But now that luna's (and others) price has been cut, perhaps I'll start experimenting with giving it free rein to explore the data a little in the same way that I do a web search.<p>One thing that definitely helped was providing a separate index of each section where I had another model summarise the primary unique topics in each section to act as a guide for the agent. I think either we should be chucking the entire doc at a model (400k tokens...so not really ideal at this time) or improving RAG accuracy. For the latter I think even with embeddings, meaning of words and semantic connections are not enough at all - attention is KV so it is 2 dimensional and once I started getting into it I've kind of realised that 2 dimensions aren't really enough to represent the logic that exists between tokens (i.e. sections of documents that refer to a sequence of actions dependent on some logic that references "variables" from another section, i.e. "if x, y has happened then refer to z sequence). There's much deeper meaning to human language than I think basic embeddings covers.<p>I think it's becoming clear to me that in the same way that embeddings encode the web of semantic meaning of a chunk of text, I need something similar to a hybrid of the author's model + reranker + super-embeddings that encodes as much of the entire meaning of a text as possible and not just semantic.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:19:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209974</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209974</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209974</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I always agree with your statement when people discuss it from a purely theoretical philosophical/moral standpoint.<p>But when it actually happens to you, as I have been violently mugged several times. Oh, would I push that button - pull that trigger and I'd rewind time so I can do it a few times over. Cathartic.<p>These little fuckers hide out in alleyways late at night and they've made a career of it. They do it so often they embellish their muggings with other bits like choking and mock stabbing or slamming people's heads against pavements. So fuck 'em.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:27:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208302</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208302</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208302</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "My phone detects going on a run as “someone snatching my phone and running off”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah it triggers for me when I'm on the tube, ahahahaa.<p>But I would rather it do that than my phone still be unlocked after being mugged or scooter thieves'd'd.<p>I've also ensured I switch to esim so that they can't just eject it. Unfortunately they will still dump it into faraday bags.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:25:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208285</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208285</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208285</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "My personal AI benchmark: “Generate an SVG of a frog with a Habsburg jaw”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't that therefore a benchmark specifically on "it can generate an SVG of this exact thing" and naught else?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:28:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154862</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154862</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154862</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "Don't be a meat proxy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Because it's harder to fire managers. And even harder to fire executives.<p>Who goes when companies need to downsize? Rarely executives; they'll always find a way to be retained...hell, they're the ones with the power to decide who goes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:27:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154841</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154841</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154841</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "Are AI labs pelicanmaxxing?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What I find interesting, though, is how the "feature" isn't really exciting anymore, or because it creates SVGs that aren't "perfect" that we maybe feel underwhelmed sometimes (at least I do).<p>However thinking about it...if someone asked me to manually create an SVG, or hell even draw a quick doodle on a bit of paper of the same, I'd still probably be much slower than an LLM and potentially end up sketching less accurate anatomy than the machine.<p>I think the general "organic task" stuff has been mostly sorted out, but in personal and professional experiences using AI to try to _do_ something, I've found less so recently problems with hallucinations and moreso problems with attention.<p>For example GPT5.6 still has issues where if I provide it with a list of documents and then ask it to raise questions from that information. Then provide it with additional documents that answer some of those questions and ask it to summarise which outstanding questions there are again, it still asks questions that have become irrelevant with the additional documents - but when this is pointed out it knows exactly what to do and produces the correct list of outstanding questions.<p>I'm sure frontier models are doing all sorts of crazy stuff with attention already, but it seems to me like we almost need some hierarchical attention mechanism like KVL (with Level added) so that it's aware not only of semantic connections between tokens in the context but also of where there are gaps, missing links to assist the model in becoming aware of its own attention span (I guess).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:42:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020669</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020669</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020669</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "Men That Don't Fit In (1911)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mean there is a difference between lower level evolved behaviours like seeking out food species or being tribal and higher level societal behaviours such as deciding that tribalism is unnecessary under some circumstance, such as judging people by the colour of their skin in a modern, mixed society.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:15:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020374</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020374</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49020374</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "VTubing: How a Japanese Phenomenon Is Going Worldwide"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Never seen Taalas?<p>Let alone a decent sized model on a couple 4090s or similar, pretty gud t/s to churn out tts/stt/response/control model actions and emotes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:56:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48992425</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48992425</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48992425</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by fennecfoxy in "VTubing: How a Japanese Phenomenon Is Going Worldwide"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Nah weaboos and (us) furries been doing it for ages + not necessarily expensive at all, can use a webcam for basic ones for ages now.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:54:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48992404</link><dc:creator>fennecfoxy</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48992404</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48992404</guid></item></channel></rss>