Hacker News: jackdeansmith

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Our position on open-weights models"

jackdeansmith — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 01:45:27 +0000

I think it would be entirely reasonable to ban death stars in private hands, the same way I think it's entirely reasonable to ban uranium enrichment in private hands. My point is that it's a question of fact about how risky an AI model can be. I think it's clear that current models are not enriched uranium or death star level, but I don't think there's anything ruling it out in the near future!

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Our position on open-weights models"

jackdeansmith — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 01:31:41 +0000

>If the biggest danger of LLMs is that they can hack traditional systems

This is doing a lot of lifting. If the biggest danger of LLMs is they could uplift bioweapon development, the situation is different. If the biggest danger of LLMs is they reach capabilities allowing for recursive self improvement, the situation is very different still.

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Our position on open-weights models"

jackdeansmith — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 01:20:13 +0000

I see a very clear link, very capable AI models are clearly able to find and exploit cyber vulnerabilities at a speed and scale not possible before. In the right hands, that's clearly a weapon

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Our position on open-weights models"

jackdeansmith — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 01:14:47 +0000

And what are those ingredients for biology, which can be constrained as effectively as uranium enrichment? I'd argue there isn't anything which can easily be restricted or monitored.

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Our position on open-weights models"

jackdeansmith — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 01:13:44 +0000

What about uranium enrichment?

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Some users have noticed settings that let Meta analyze and retain phone photos"

jackdeansmith — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 18:36:56 +0000

They can't. You have to explicitly give apps permission to access your photo library.

New comment by jackdeansmith in "The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019)"

jackdeansmith — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 17:39:04 +0000

I think it's a lot harder to have this particular type of communications failure if you're writing on a chalkboard. Imagine trying to write out that whole slide, it would take forever. If you really did have to present that information on a chalkboard, you'd be significantly more likely to write something along the lines of:

"We checked the test data: possible to damage tiles significantly" "Foam that hit wing was way bigger than the tests"

Obviously you can miscommunicate via any medium, but I think the author's point here (which I agree with) is some mediums lend themselves to specific types of miscommunication.

New comment by jackdeansmith in "What I learned gathering nootropic ratings (2022)"

jackdeansmith — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 17:07:16 +0000

I think this is clearly a joke

New comment by jackdeansmith in "The Hollow Men of Hims"

jackdeansmith — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:57 +0000

>The real tragedy is not that Hims exists, but that it works so perfectly. Every day, thousands of people choose their compounded weight-loss drugs over FDA-approved alternatives, their combination ED pills over established single-ingredient treatments, their algorithmic consultations over actual medical care. They make these choices not because the products are better, but because the entire experience has been optimized to feel more like shopping and less like confronting the mortality and vulnerability that define the human condition.

Strongly disagree with almost everything in this article, but specifically this. The reason people make these choices is not because of slick marketing working against them, it's because the existing process to get medical treatment is paternalistic, hard to navigate and often expensive.

If you want safe and really high quality medical care you should absolutely have a personal physician you have a personal relationship with, who understands your lifestyle, your risk factors for side effects, and your medical needs deeply. How many Americans have that? Maybe a few dozen? The market has responded to just how terrible the existing system is.

New comment by jackdeansmith in "LLMs are cheap"

jackdeansmith — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 04:20:01 +0000

I misunderstood your comment then, my assertion is that models which have the same capabilities as current models will be cheaper in the future. I have no doubts that models with more capabilities will be more expensive.

New comment by jackdeansmith in "LLMs are cheap"

jackdeansmith — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:15:46 +0000

Want to bet? I'll give you 5:1 odds that tokens from a model with some specific benchmark performance (we can sort out the specific benchmarks or basket of benchmarks if you want to bet) will be cheaper two years from now.

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Claude 4"

jackdeansmith — Fri, 23 May 2025 00:04:13 +0000

In my opinion most Anthropic models are the opposite, scoring well on benchmarks but not always way on top, but quietly excellent when you actually try to use them for stuff.

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Claude 4"

jackdeansmith — Thu, 22 May 2025 23:56:09 +0000

What would convince you that a system is too dangerous to release?

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Open-Sourcing R1 1776"

jackdeansmith — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 22:29:04 +0000

There was certainly some client side censorship, but also the model weights clearly had some of this baked in. You can try yourself by asking the same queries to r1 hosted by a US host like together.

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Things Every Hacker Once Knew (2017)"

jackdeansmith — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 18:22:42 +0000

As someone born in 1997 and working in the software industry, one thing I’ve learned is that the discipline of software engineering is sometimes mostly about understanding the history of a system. Love reading stuff like this because sometimes it really makes some concept click!

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Why Apple put a Thread radio in the iPhone 15 Pro"

jackdeansmith — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 21:58:27 +0000

Didn't know I wanted it, but I now really want P2P iMessage between mountain summits

New comment by jackdeansmith in "iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus"

jackdeansmith — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 19:15:03 +0000

3D photo/video features did come to the pro phones flower/bird/food/tree/everything ID is in the new OS, it identified a plant genus in one of my photos yesterday. Pretty cool!

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Country Highpoints"

jackdeansmith — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 21:04:19 +0000

Eric Gilbertson has become more than a legend in the Pacific Northwest mountaineering and peak bagging community, in part by revising the list of 100 highest peaks in the state with manual GPS and theodolite surveys. The writeups are great: https://www.countryhighpoints.com/luna-east-fury-west-fury-t...

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky is moving from science fiction to reality"

jackdeansmith — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 20:24:00 +0000

EOR oil is lower carbon than non-EOR oil. Greenwashing seems excessive, there is no fraud here, everyone is very upfront about what they are doing.

New comment by jackdeansmith in "Sucking carbon dioxide out of the sky is moving from science fiction to reality"

jackdeansmith — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 20:21:26 +0000

Carbon in the atmosphere is a stock and flow problem, even if we get to net zero emissions, we have just stopped the problem from getting worse. At that point, we need carbon capture to be scaled up and efficient. I don't think it's premature or greenwashing for technologists to support early efforts to get this tech ready. I don't think many supporters of carbon capture think the goal is to offset all the current emissions. They mostly think of carbon capture as a way to eventually deal with historical emissions.