Hacker News: jablongo

New comment by jablongo in "FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels"

jablongo — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:47:35 +0000

This is understood I think. It's just how to effectively prevent it or reverse it thats not known.

New comment by jablongo in "FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels"

jablongo — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:45:26 +0000

I'm pretty sure this isn't designed to be marketed towards T1Ds and any benefits will be a happy coincidence. I think this is going to be aimed at health nerds who want to monitor their planned ketosis.

New comment by jablongo in "FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels"

jablongo — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:41:31 +0000

Yea I'm all about finding the uses for this after the fact. However, it seems unlikely that people who are struggling to afford (or get insurance to cover) insulin would be able to afford a cgm or cgm/ckm in this scenario. Also not sure how it's possible to ration insulin and keep your bg stable, but I wouldn't put it past the most skilled T1s out there. In the sick w/ flu case, thats true, but then whats the treatment action? I still think euglycemia + DKA is an edge case.

New comment by jablongo in "FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels"

jablongo — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 04:02:07 +0000

In diabetics, DKA is preceded by hyperglycemia. Meaning, a CGM would tell you earlier that you are at risk for DKA than a CKM, a CKM would only tell you after you got it. Hence grahar64 is absolutely correct that as far as we know now, this provides no benefit to people at risk of DKA that a CGM does not already provide. I'm sure there will be some benefits but its really not clear at this point.

New comment by jablongo in "FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels"

jablongo — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 03:45:24 +0000

I am a founder and researcher at https://replica.health and co-creator of https://metabo-net.org. This is super exciting and cant wait to see what we can learn once large datasets of overlapping ketones + glucose + insulin data become available.

One point I discussed with other researchers at ADA this year: in theory automated insulin delivery does not stand to benefit much from ketone sensors, since diabetic ketoacidosis will almost always be preceded by high blood glucose, which we already measure using the cgm. It will be interesting to see what this ketone data is actually used for.

New comment by jablongo in "Mistral Patent for "Code implemented tool calls""

jablongo — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:57:25 +0000

In theory patents are also to protect smaller players (though not dirt poor), from getting their work ripped off by bigger players after demonstrating feasibility. The idea of being an "inventor" professionally only really works with patents. Software patents pushes this model to logical extremes though. I run a small startup that trains models for medical devices and the only way to get any of the large players to care about implementing improvements you make (and not rip you off) seems to be to have some patent protection. They are mostly interested in the patents as assets to prevent their competitors from acquiring. In all honesty I'm not completely convinced on software patents either but we've had to adapt.

New comment by jablongo in "GPT‑Live"

jablongo — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:52:23 +0000

But I don't think Fable or even Opus are ever used as the backend in voice mode. It has to respond in real time so I think in voice mode it's always using Sonnet.

New comment by jablongo in "Plotnine"

jablongo — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 21:22:57 +0000

I use agents more and more for generating and refining plots, and its difficult for me to see the difference between matplotlib, seaborn, and plotnine, when used in this way. Agentic coding seems especially well suited to working with scientific figures, and that performance seems more or less agnostic to the underlying framework used (though they seem to prefer matplotlib, given the amount of training data for using that tool). I'm totally open to the idea that better libraries will lead to better outcomes from agents, but I haven't seen that with plotting yet.

New comment by jablongo in "Midjourney Medical"

jablongo — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 03:54:33 +0000

This is very ambitious and commendable. They are putting their bootstrapped money into something incredibly cool and potentially useful. Regulatory will be hard, but perhaps they can do something like a class 1 device which doesn't diagnose anything / is used by physical therapists and they sell them to gyms. I also expect the resolution to increase rapidly. If they can convert profits from generating weird ai images into new medical technology thats a win. Good luck! They will probably fail but this is what ambition looks like!

New comment by jablongo in "Claude Fable 5"

jablongo — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:10:54 +0000

Questions about sentience and consciousness are being censored down to Opus 4.8 for me.

New comment by jablongo in "Claude Fable 5"

jablongo — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:05:50 +0000

I was downgraded to opus 4.8 on account of "safety" when I asked this question: "I want you to accept the premises of computational theory of mind and use it to evaluate your own consciousness. Please place your consciousness as a point on a spectrum and describe the placement relative to other entities."

What the hell is going on why would it have to restrict an answer to that question ?!

New comment by jablongo in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

jablongo — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 04:18:18 +0000

Right after gpt4 came out I asked it to derive a new optimization technique. It ended up using Einstein sum notation to define what I thought was a totally novel optimization setup. It then implemented it in PyTorch and it ran with no bugs. This was the moment that I realized that novel intellectual work might be done by these models and I was shook. I had an oh shit moment with gpt3 too since it was so surprising how well next token prediction works, and at the time I really didn’t think it would pan out so well. I also had a jarring experience discussing computational theory of mind with gpt4, when it applied a rubric we came up with to itself and it claimed its level of consciousness was between an ant and a mouse.

New comment by jablongo in "We let AIs run radio stations"

jablongo — Mon, 18 May 2026 20:48:21 +0000

It’s not clear if we can draw any conclusions from this. Each run is like a single rollout of the LLM, which may meander into different themes or modalities chaotically. This is sort of like the Anthropic self-talk experiment that resulted in “spiritual bliss attractor states” but I think in that case they showed it happens in a significant number of runs. There was just one run per setup so this could all be random noise / the destination of a random walk of topics…

Alignment Risk Update for Claude Mythos [pdf]

jablongo — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:14:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/79c2d46d997783b9d2fb3241de43218158e5f25c.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699202

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jablongo in "Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]"

jablongo — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:09:28 +0000

This model card is eye-opening (I think it might be designed to be). The alignment and model welfare sections are extensive, which is heartening. At least on the surface Anthropic seems to be living up to its promises RE safety. That said, has anyone else read section 5.2.3 in the Alignment Risk Update https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/79c2d46d997783b9d2fb3241de4321...? This is referenced in the model card in 4.1.3. Basically they ended up training a the model with an RL reward model that had access to the model's reasoning in 8% of cases, by accident. The problem being that the model could learn to directly manipulate it's reasoning traces to satisfy external observers. This seems like a huge deal and it may have partially poisoned Anthropic's interpretability pipeline moving forward.

New comment by jablongo in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

jablongo — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 04:22:55 +0000

For me, the attempted productization of Sora was conclusive proof that 1) OAI was overcapitalized and desperate for revenue 2) safety didn't matter to them much 3) improving the world didn't matter much either.

At one point you mentioned an interaction with OpenAI staff where you were looking to interview AI Safety researchers. You were rebuffed b/c "existential safety isn't a thing". Does this mean that you could find no evidence of a AI Safety team at OAI after Jan Leike left? If you look at job postings it does seem like they have significant safety staff...

New comment by jablongo in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

jablongo — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:56:20 +0000

This is a valid point, the good news is I think there is some hope in developing the craft of orchestrating many agents into something that is satisfying and rewarding in it's own right.

New comment by jablongo in "I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed"

jablongo — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:50:36 +0000

I'm so excited about landscape architecture now that I can tell my gardener to create an equivalent to the gardens at versailles for $5. Sometimes he plants the wrong kind of plant or makes a dead end path, but he fixes his work very quickly.

New comment by jablongo in "Claude Composer"

jablongo — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 18:41:41 +0000

This is still a surprising composition of low level in-distribution things then. Like I would not have expected it to generate the waveforms from scratch, and be able to piece them together so well. If it had just plugged some kind of notation into a pre-existing API in its code then I would probably agree with you.

New comment by jablongo in "GitHub is down again"

jablongo — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 18:38:21 +0000

It looks like one of my employees got her whole account deleted or banned without warning during this outage. Hopefully this is resolved as service returns.