Hacker News: graboy

New comment by graboy in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

graboy — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:25:08 +0000

You have a misunderstanding. Watermarking does not bias the responses in any way. How is this possible?

Before: "He leaped at the chance" - 33%. "Jumped at the opportunity" - 66%.

After: "He leaped at the chance" - 33%. "Jumped at the opportunity" - 66%.

But if you refresh your response from Anthropic 100 times:

Before: "Jumped at the opportunity" He leaped at the chance" "Jumped at the opportunity"

After: "He leaped at the chance" "He leaped at the chance" "He leaped at the chance"

The second one is detectable as being watermarked.

davmre has a good explanation that's more in-depth.

New comment by graboy in "Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness"

graboy — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:52:48 +0000

These come from my own musings not someone else's - but bearing sycophancy in mind, I asked Claude and it told me this is basically the "strict church thesis" from sociology of religion, and linked me this paper, I think it lines up with my takes written from someone who has had this idea before: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/230409

New comment by graboy in "Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness"

graboy — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:45:10 +0000

I've thought about this. Aristotle doesn't draw as hard of a line between right and wrong behavior or advocate for specific actions, with the right action depending on circumstance, and to finding the middle path. Traditional religions might be a bit more hardline, with specific rules or commandments. It's easier to identify with belonging to a particular group when the line between belonging and not belonging is more crisp and defined by particular practices.

Would love to know if others have takes.

New comment by graboy in "Aristotle quotes on virtue, knowledge, and happiness"

graboy — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:28:55 +0000

It's more social, the translation of political is coming from polis; man is by nature meant to be part of a city or community.

New comment by graboy in "Which streaming service was that on again?"

graboy — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 01:42:50 +0000

I've advocated for this exactly. For alcohol it's called the three-tier system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-tier_system_%28alcohol_d...

New comment by graboy in "Scaling Laws, Carefully"

graboy — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 07:11:01 +0000

Yeah I mean, if you and I were to play the word-guessing game where you needed to guess what next word I'm thinking of, there's always uncertainty in your guess because it's a game of partial information - you can't fully observe my inner state. But that doesn't mean you couldn't evolve a strategy that spends a really long time thinking and analyzing to get asymptotically close to the best guess. There's no limit on that intelligence.

New comment by graboy in "Three main saturated fats raise your cholesterol"

graboy — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:22:58 +0000

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5837225/

New comment by graboy in "Nihilistic Violent Extremism"

graboy — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 14:51:03 +0000

Eric Hoffer would agree with this take.

New comment by graboy in "How often do full-body MRIs find cancer?"

graboy — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 07:17:05 +0000

I kinda agree with you and I understand your point but I also think there is a social-ethical reality that if a doctor finds something they must treat it. The two options are 1. doing nothing, or 2. reducing cancer risk and you get unnecessary biopsies.

You're thinking of this as there being an objective positive utility for not dying of cancer and a objective negative utility for biopsies, and there being an objective optimal "rational" tradeoff that the best radiologist can optimize for to get their "nearly certain" detection threshold.

But frankly - the tradeoff for the value of a human life is perhaps the most uncertain thing one could choose. It lies in the eyes of the patient if the worry and time associated with a false detection is worth their reduced chance of death. The ethical uncertainty expressed in the OP - are these unnecessary biopsies worth it - is warranted.

New comment by graboy in "GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark"

graboy — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 08:22:53 +0000

IIRC, a lot of design went into making it so that you can disable parts of this chip selectively.

New comment by graboy in "I Quit My Job at OpenAI"

graboy — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 19:29:05 +0000

If Anthropic's claim to never run ads is true, then won't users just switch over there?

New comment by graboy in "Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?"

graboy — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 14:48:06 +0000

N=1, I've been on GLP-1s for a long time and continue to be an obsessive.

New comment by graboy in "Cardiovascular disease is a solved problem"

graboy — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 22:12:34 +0000

> This is why the paper presented does not support the claim that LDL is the sole source of heart disease

Is that what we were arguing about? I guess it was. At some point in thinking about this my frame must have shifted into agreement with you. Of course there are other causes of heart disease besides LDL, like blood pressure, duh. The smooth dose response is about the particular gene not being linked to heart disease through something other than LDL, roughly.

New comment by graboy in "Cardiovascular disease is a solved problem"

graboy — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 18:15:30 +0000

What do you think of Dr. Schooling's response that the Mendellian effects might be inflated? I think they had a good defense but was not entirely convinced they hadn't sidestepped the issue that Schooling was getting at, wasn't sure either way.

https://www.jacc.org/doi/epdf/10.1016/j.jacc.2013.01.067

New comment by graboy in "Cardiovascular disease is a solved problem"

graboy — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 17:41:26 +0000

I think maybe you are saying that there may be some way that the genes affect heart disease not through LDL, and therefore MR does not apply because the "exclusion restriction" [1] fails here? Or are you talking about a different assumption?

The cited study addresses this, which is why I pointed to figure 3. They argue that if genes were causing heart disease not through LDL in any meaningful way, you wouldn't expect such a clean dose-response consistency across different genetic variants - it would be more jagged.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendelian_randomization#Defini...

New comment by graboy in "Cardiovascular disease is a solved problem"

graboy — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 01:18:40 +0000

https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2012.09.017

Across different genetic variants, lower lifetime LDL -> lower risk of death. Check out figure 3.

The causality of LDL -> plaque buildup -> 55-60% [1] of heart disease related deaths is also well understood, so it seems clear to me that preventing plaque buildup in the first place prevents over half of heart disease related deaths.

Would like to know if you disagree, "Minimize LDL at all costs" goes current mainstream medical guidance, so I'd like to disconfirm my beliefs if possible.

[1] Number from deep research.

New comment by graboy in "Cardiovascular disease is a solved problem"

graboy — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 21:03:04 +0000

Here is the chief editor of JAMA internal medicine arguing there is not enough evidence to prescribe statins for primary prevention in those 40+: https://www.natap.org/2016/HIV/ied160021.pdf

New comment by graboy in "Russia Creates New Military Branch Dedicated to Drone Warfare"

graboy — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 07:19:58 +0000

what?

New comment by graboy in "Hydrogel-based expanding pill for weight loss shows promising results in trial"

graboy — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 05:40:34 +0000

Gelesis100, another oral hydrogel, I understand is not very effective, I wonder what makes this one different?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelesis100

New comment by graboy in "Empathy for Dummies"

graboy — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 13:51:24 +0000

To the extent empathy is "do onto others as others would do onto you", empathy has a moral justification derived from Kant's categorical imperative.