Hacker News: jablongo

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.

New comment by jablongo in "Claude Composer"

jablongo — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 01:13:38 +0000

I have a deep background in music and I think that while the creation was super basic, the way the output was so unconstrained (written by a model fine-tuned for coding), is really interesting. Listen to that last one and tell me it couldn't belong on some tv show. I've had always issues with any ai generated music because of the constraints and the way the output is so derivative. This was different to me.

New comment by jablongo in "Claude Composer"

jablongo — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 01:09:33 +0000

I've got to come to the OPs defense as well. This was a remarkable demonstration of Claude performing a task thats probably very out of distribution. This would not be interesting if it were a music generation model or program, it's interesting because this is not what Claude code was explicitly trained for. The fact that it generated waveforms from scratch and built up from there is really amazing. Your cynicism was applied before even reading the article.

New comment by jablongo in "I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor"

jablongo — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 15:56:13 +0000

There needs to be more documentation about what info was provided to the LLM and in which format before we decide that LLMs are necessarily bad at this. That said, you would expect the offering from a $500bn company to be more robust and better tested than this, assuming this is reported accurately.

New comment by jablongo in "Proof of Corn"

jablongo — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:48:03 +0000

I think you could have credibly said this for a while during 2024 and earlier, but there is a lot of research that indicates LLMs are more than stochastic parrots, as some researchers claimed earlier on. Souped up versions of LLMs have performed at the gold medal level in the IMO, which should give you pause in dismissing them. "It can't actually understand how many there currently are, the season, how much land, etc, and do the math itself to determine whether it's actually needed or not" --- modern agents actually can do this.

New comment by jablongo in "Health care data breach affects over 600k patients, Illinois agency says"

jablongo — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 20:29:24 +0000

Interestingly in healthcare there is a correlation between companies that license/sell healthcare data to other ones (usually they try to do this in a revokable way with very stringent legal terms, but sometimes they just sell it if there is enough money involved) and their privacy stance... and it's not what you would think. Often it's these companies that are pushing for more stringent privacy laws and practices. For example, they could claim that they cannot share anonymized data with academic researchers, because of xyz virtuous privacy rules, when they are actually the ones making money off of selling patient data. It's an interesting phenomenon I have observed while working in the industry that seems to refute your claim that "there's no money in privacy". Another way to think about it is that they want to induce a lower overall supply for the commodity they are selling, and they do this by championing privacy rules.

New comment by jablongo in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

jablongo — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 06:05:53 +0000

Trump received 77.3M votes while Kamala received 75M. Since the total was 156.7M it was barely a plurality instead of a majority (just under 50%).

New comment by jablongo in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

jablongo — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 05:51:55 +0000

I don't think the US has "shitty class relations". Most of your complaints are true, but in the US social class is mutable and upgrades to social class are encouraged and celebrated (even though this is becoming much more difficult in practice). Contrast this with Europe and other parts of the world with entrenched aristocracies and castes that survive generations. There are major problems but social mobility is still relatively better in US; in Europe healthcare is way better and being on the bottom rung isn't as bad, but fewer people from the bottom make it to the top.