Hacker News: ianm218

New comment by ianm218 in "Roblox shares plummet 18% as child safety measures weigh on bookings"

ianm218 — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:08:17 +0000

This feels like a bit of a reach. It's not really clear that adding face scanning as a blocker for chat makes anyone more likely to fall for scams. These hypotethical god tier engineers should just make scam prevention software in addition to face scanning anyway?

New comment by ianm218 in "Uber wants to turn its drivers into a sensor grid for self-driving companies"

ianm218 — Sat, 02 May 2026 18:46:06 +0000

Well there's a world simulation model and then the driving model.

You can imagine improving i.e. a specialized math model (problem in, theorem out) with a normal LLM that knows lots of problems and theorems generally.

New comment by ianm218 in "Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron"

ianm218 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:06:40 +0000

Ah thanks for clarifying it seemed like that was assumed knowledge in this thread.

New comment by ianm218 in "Anthropic Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron"

ianm218 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:28:18 +0000

What do you mean?

New comment by ianm218 in "Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal"

ianm218 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:48:09 +0000

If someone working on early computer networks thought they could scale up world wide and that soon everyone people would be launching trillion dollar companies on the internet you would have called that delusion right?

He doesn't need to be right but it's not crazy at all to look at super human performance in DOTA and think that could lead to super human performance at general human tasks in the long run

New comment by ianm218 in "Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal"

ianm218 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:42:09 +0000

What do you mean we were "supposed to have AGI last summer"?

People obviously have really strong opinions on AI and the hype around investments into these companies but it feels like this is giving people a pass on really low quality discourse.

This source [1] from this time last year says even lab leaders most bullish estimate was 2027.

[1]. https://80000hours.org/2025/03/when-do-experts-expect-agi-to...

New comment by ianm218 in "How to stop a data center in your backyard"

ianm218 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:45:12 +0000

Why not throw almost all zoning regulations out besides some designations for what areas can be used for industrial uses?

The status quo of zoning basically just stops people from living and working where they want to.

New comment by ianm218 in "How to stop a data center in your backyard"

ianm218 — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:42:43 +0000

In most cases the government should get out of the way for any development of private property. If they need to pay for increased usage of utilities but 90% of restrictions on private development are insane on the US Coasts.

New comment by ianm218 in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

ianm218 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:16:51 +0000

This is probably not this companies vision but it does seem interesting if companies sell "dumb" machines and then consumers can BYO electronics. Like an agricultural version of comma.ai.

Not sure how much appetite there is for that but half price + 5 grand in off the shelf electronics seems like something margin sensitive farmers would do.

New comment by ianm218 in "Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return"

ianm218 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:16:08 +0000

With chip development you need scale in order to get to the edge. It makes sense to finance demand so you can get to scale it's not like it's a ponzi scheme.

Anthropic gets access to limited compute resources and Amazon gets demand to justify increased R&D and capex + feedback from the best users in the field.

New comment by ianm218 in "Why Japan has such good railways"

ianm218 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 15:12:01 +0000

Japan and the US are huge - we’re taking about metros here. The situation in NYC is much worse.

New comment by ianm218 in "Why Japan has such good railways"

ianm218 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:01:34 +0000

Europe and USA are both huge places so it depends what you mean. If you compare major east coast cities - Boston, DC, and NYC to European metros like Paris/ Madrid/ Lisbon the biggest tax on the citizens is the same in that it’s impossible to build anything so a huge % of income needs to go to housing.

New comment by ianm218 in "Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs"

ianm218 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 12:23:01 +0000

https://hashrateindex.com/blog/nvidia-vera-rubin-nvl72-specs...

Honestly some of this info is quite hard to parse. I think the efficiency is ~35X on the system level but 10X on the hardware level. I think this is due to Nvidia bringing in Groq in addition to chip improvements.

New comment by ianm218 in "Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs"

ianm218 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:57:48 +0000

This is hard to say definitively. The new Nvidia Vera Rubin chips are 35-50x more efficient on a FLOPS/ megawatt basis. TPU/ ASICS/ AMD chips are making similar less dramatic strides.

So a service ran at a loss now could be high margin on new chips in a year. We also don’t really know that they are losing money on the 200/ month subscriptions just that they are compute constrained.

If prices increase might be because of a supply crunch than due to unit economics.

New comment by ianm218 in "The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)"

ianm218 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 01:04:09 +0000

They have been exponentially decreasing so far [1] and the Vera Rubin generations chips will be going live that are 35X more efficient in terms of inference/ megawatt [2]. Even with rising prices 10x is possibly conservative.

Maybe if demand is truly crazy the labs will take more margin

1. epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends

2. http://hashrateindex.com/blog/nvidia-vera-rubin-nvl72-specs-...

New comment by ianm218 in "The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)"

ianm218 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 23:46:25 +0000

You’re missing the cost curve of inference. What costs $20-50k now will cost 2-5k in a year or two at which point the math is a no brainer. It makes a lot of sense to build products that almost work now or are almost economical and ride the trend line.

New comment by ianm218 in "AI Job Loss Tracker"

ianm218 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 13:36:31 +0000

I think your narratives are a bit mixed up. We went from science experiment ChatGpt 2022 to zero day finder that is too dangerous to release 4 years later. So whoever has been talking about progressive model updates has surely been correct?

New comment by ianm218 in "AI Job Loss Tracker"

ianm218 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:56:47 +0000

> One would otherwise expect the layoffs to reflect the multiple and much hyped "step change" improvements over the past few years. Instead the chart shows a sudden plateau starting a month ago.

Can you clarify the theory here? So if there is a “step change” you expect companies to do layoffs all at once? How does this account for I.e. diffusion lag or companies deciding if it’s better to chase growth vs. capital efficiency?

New comment by ianm218 in "South Korea introduces universal basic mobile data access"

ianm218 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 17:32:24 +0000

I feel like you are applying a US specific/ western lense to this. In East Asian countries they’ve built lots of infrastructure around that presumption already and are committed to it.

New comment by ianm218 in "I've Sold Out"

ianm218 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:59:57 +0000

Did he preach open source all his life? He seems to have been a long time open source builder who has also previously sold a project.