Hacker News: ivanovm

New comment by ivanovm in "Discovery Loop"

ivanovm — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:50:18 +0000

It's a total delusion to think that the key to reverse-engineering the brain or producing energy from fusion is policy.

It also happens to be the favorite pretext for people to seize more political power and launder more money through nonprofits though.

New comment by ivanovm in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

ivanovm — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 17:24:40 +0000

RL environment (instruction, stateful container, reward function) is the training data product being bought

New comment by ivanovm in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

ivanovm — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 16:10:15 +0000

No, it isn't. The private data is largely private data, created by highly-specialized, highly-paid contracted teams of experts for domains finance, swe, consulting, etc.

Reddit data is just not that interesting, that deal is worth like $60m/year. Labs spend 10x as much on computer-use RL environments.

New comment by ivanovm in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

ivanovm — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:59:26 +0000

labs invest multiple billion dollars a year each in private data, and that number is growing. internet training data is not where frontier capabilities come from, this view is outdated

New comment by ivanovm in "From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone"

ivanovm — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:31:53 +0000

I don't condone the practice, and I don't want to run afoul of anthropic or risk my reputation for it

New comment by ivanovm in "From PGP to Mythos: a brief history of export controls that didn't stop anyone"

ivanovm — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 18:00:36 +0000

it is certainly possible and being done all over the place. there's a black market that chinese labs use to buy frontier american llm trajectories by the millions through US intermediaries. they're not even particularly shy about it, i have been offered $0.7 per opus 4.8 call

there's also a market for chinese labs sending checkpoints to US companies to be trained on US compute and sent back

i'm surprised that so many people take chinese tech reports about how they train their models at face value tbh

New comment by ivanovm in "Claude Fable 5"

ivanovm — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:25:51 +0000

The benchmarks are now the equivalents of SAT/ACT/other standardized exams for humans. They are directionally quite predictive, but with plenty of outcome variance on the margins

New comment by ivanovm in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

ivanovm — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:51:25 +0000

Yes, they did. You could also find this information easily. A company like Andon creates value by exposing interesting AI failure modes, so it makes perfect sense for them to move on to harder problems when the previous ones get saturated. I think you're just being overly cynical.

New comment by ivanovm in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"

ivanovm — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:34:49 +0000

You could just look it up on their website leaderboard? The newest Claude model makes over $10k profit over a simulated year of operation, after starting with $500

New comment by ivanovm in "We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant"

ivanovm — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:47:33 +0000

I don't think this was a simple assumption. LLMs used to be much dumber! GPT-3 era LLMS were not good at grep, they were not that good at recovering from errors, and they were not good at making followup queries over multiple turns of search. Multiple breakthroughs in code generation, tool use, and reasoning had to happen on the model side to make vector-based RAG look like unnecessary complexity

New comment by ivanovm in "Things I want to say to my boss"

ivanovm — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 21:24:23 +0000

Kinda funny how we went full circle with you calling me ignorant and illiterate on the basis of not using your preferred terminology, as opposed to the actual, obvious meaning of the subject

New comment by ivanovm in "Things I want to say to my boss"

ivanovm — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 19:54:41 +0000

It's far more telling that you'd imagine this is a literary tool so interesting or complex that other people haven't seen it or thought of it

https://www.google.com/search?q=it%27s+not+x+its+y

New comment by ivanovm in "Things I want to say to my boss"

ivanovm — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 18:09:05 +0000

Say more, I'd love to know how this is a demonstration of illiteracy

New comment by ivanovm in "Things I want to say to my boss"

ivanovm — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 17:03:08 +0000

this has ai writing smell all over it. entire paragraphs that just say it's-not-this-it's-that over and over again

New comment by ivanovm in "iPhone dumbphone"

ivanovm — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 16:20:15 +0000

one underrated approach more and more people are finding success with: apple watch ultra as a primary device (optionally with a case for a more phone-like factor)

you can do most things an iphone does, but you can't doom scroll. you don't have to eject out of apple ecosystem, you get payments, 2fa, navigation, notifications. your iphone can remain as a backup that's always in sync for when you need it (e.g. traveling)

New comment by ivanovm in "Unemployment rising in remote-friendly occupations (2024)"

ivanovm — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 20:41:53 +0000

> In nearly every case of RTO, there was no recorded dip in productivity associated with the move to remote work.

I am extremely skeptical of this. On the contrary there is a mountain of direct evidence that people barely work when working from home. People have been openly bragging both on the internet and in person about how they do laundry and watch netflix and mow their lawns while looking productive

All you need to do is look at the crowds in the park or lines at the grocery store on any given friday to gauge how much work is being done on wfh days

New comment by ivanovm in "Delta Engineered a Pricing System That Sorts You by Economic Value"

ivanovm — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:42:42 +0000

the funny part about the backlash is that the travel budgets are likely somewhat pareto distributed and under the not-personalized pricing strategy it is the little guy who is probably overpaying for plane tickets, not the corporations and the wealthy individuals

New comment by ivanovm in "Measuring the impact of AI on experienced open-source developer productivity"

ivanovm — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 23:53:54 +0000

I find the very popular response of "you're just not using it right" to be big copout for LLMs, especially at the scale we see today. It's hard to think of any other major tech product where it's acceptable to shift so much blame on the user. Typically if a user doesn't find value in the product, we agree that the product is poorly designed/implemented, not that the user is bad. But AI seems somehow exempt from this sentiment

New comment by ivanovm in "Show HN: Muscle-Mem, a behavior cache for AI agents"

ivanovm — Wed, 14 May 2025 20:43:06 +0000

would just caching llm responses work here?

New comment by ivanovm in "The Burnout Machine"

ivanovm — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 23:49:44 +0000

The tech industry unfortunately screwed up a basic social contract

It is well-understood in every other industry - if you want to be at a prestigious firm, make top compensation, sit in a nice office, work with top-tier coworkers and enjoy excellent perks, you must hustle hard and be unreasonably competitive every day to continue reaping those benefits.

I'm not even talking about back-breaking work - this is true for law, medicine, financial services, entertainment, sports, academia, and everything else I can think of.

After a decade+ run of cheap money and strong demand for talent, returning to broader reality may feel very unfair for many. But that doesn't make it so