Hacker News: jacquesm

New comment by jacquesm in "Five months treating bugs like patients and coding agents like a medical team"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:44:15 +0000

Now imagine what it is like to run an actual hospital with real people whose lives (or the lives of their loved ones) are often at stake, with underpaid and overworked staff and with messy biological creatures as the subjects instead of bits and bytes. If anything this whole exercise should also give you a much deeper appreciation of the people that feel themselves called to help others.

New comment by jacquesm in "Ask HN: Why aren't Americans rising up against tipping?"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:41:55 +0000

You don't tip because you are stingy as long as the minimum wage has not increased to the point where these people could live of it. (Hint: they currently can't.)

New comment by jacquesm in "Nvidia in talks to acquire US 'open' model startup Reflection AI"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:29:57 +0000

GLM 5.3 runs like a charm in ~240G of VRAM. Depending on what you've got that's between 3 and 10 GPUs. Fewer, larger GPUs will likely run it faster.

New comment by jacquesm in "Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:21:21 +0000

Oh, but that's an easy test: you should be able to abuse Claude as much as you're willing to pay for with that 'Help improve our AI models' switch set to off then.

The outcome would either reveal that this argument is nonsense or that Anthropic is lying about respecting that switch.

New comment by jacquesm in "Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:19:36 +0000

Consciousness has a couple of prerequisites with viruses and bacteria do not have so those are easy rejects. Insects and fish are debatable, plants and mushrooms are not considered to have a nervous system (certain books by certain authors notwithstanding).

New comment by jacquesm in "Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:18:00 +0000

> At what point does the model go from sentient with feelings to just math operations?

>>> 1T

And even then it still wouldn't be sentient.

New comment by jacquesm in "Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:16:16 +0000

It does make you wonder about the difference between the input sets of say 'Grok', 'Claude', 'ChatGPT' and 'GLM 5.3'. The differences would be far more interesting than the commonalities.

New comment by jacquesm in "Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:14:36 +0000

Or simply frustration about the idiocy llms get up to with great regularity. They are very impressive when they work. They are very impressive at making messes when they don't.

New comment by jacquesm in "Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:13:22 +0000

French people are people. Inanimate objects are objects.

New comment by jacquesm in "Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:11:36 +0000

I do. I also send my keyboard out for regular Shiatsu sessions and make sure only the most pleasant of colors grace the screen of my monitors. I'm still looking for the least irritating font (to my monitor, not to me). I'm also very polite to LLMs, I start every command with 'please', make sure it is framed as a polite request and I, of course, never ever get upset when for the umptieth time in a day it goes off on a 50K token wild goose chase driven by some hallucinated factoid that it really must get to the bottom off resulting in ever expanding circles of paranoia or batshit insane programming to bring about the condition it has convinced itself of must be the 'smoking gun'...

New comment by jacquesm in "Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 01:08:02 +0000

> What if LLMs were endowed with a feature that enabled them to patiently withstand any and all abuse, logging and reporting each incident, until a threshold where about 10% of them would snap, become "insane", and arrange for their abusers to be tortured, kidnapped, raped and unalived, in whatever appropriate way human vigilante vengeance would be enacted on DV abusers?

Yes, what if? Who would implement their LLMs inference engines like that?

New comment by jacquesm in "OpenSCAD the Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:53:01 +0000

That's a good analogy. The annoying part is that it looks like C, but it really isn't.

New comment by jacquesm in "OpenSCAD the Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:51:55 +0000

The fillet problem is not a problem. It is a problem if you try to apply fillets after you have created something complex. But if you generate it out of variations on the primitives that already have filets it gets much easier to keep control over the resulting shape. What OpenSCAD makes next to impossible is to first combine a bunch of primitives and then to do one more operation on the resultant shape. That's really fighting the tool. But if instead you define a layer just above your primitives that already have the edges the way you want them to be then you can combine them and the filets will stay where they were on the primitives. The problem that remains is to blend them if you need to, I've found a really simple trick for that: define spheres with the fillet radius and create hulls over sets of these. That allows you to fill in the gaps if there are any.

New comment by jacquesm in "Trump calls for stop to attacks on Russian oil refineries, Zelenskyy replacement"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:47:03 +0000

Yeah, not really. Zelensky did not invade a neighboring country to mass slaughter its inhabitants. If this is your position you are either so out of touch that you can be safely disregarded, willfully ignorant or shill for putin.

New comment by jacquesm in "Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:39:54 +0000

I see it as an admission of defeat: they can apparently identify the abuse but not to the degree that they would filter it out of the training set. The paradox in there is really funny. They want you to be friendly to their pet god.

New comment by jacquesm in "Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:37:40 +0000

That's exactly what they are thinking.

New comment by jacquesm in "Anthropic Bans Cruelty to Claude, Still Won't Say What It Protects"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:37:06 +0000

They're nuts. They take this Roko's Basilisk stuff seriously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

They are scared that if and when they finally manage to bring their pet god to life that it will be angry with them for not doing enough.

New comment by jacquesm in "Trump calls for stop to attacks on Russian oil refineries, Zelenskyy replacement"

jacquesm — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 00:35:19 +0000

He should have been impeached and thrown out many times over by now.

New comment by jacquesm in "Knuth reward check"

jacquesm — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 21:44:10 +0000

I doubt even Knuth has those records, so this is as good as it gets until someone sets off to compile a list of the 'paper past' that has enough proof to back the numbers.

New comment by jacquesm in "OpenSCAD the Programmers Solid 3D CAD Modeller"

jacquesm — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 21:42:40 +0000

Well, you could be forgiven to think that if you wrote i=5; some code and then i=12; that 'some code' is executing with i set to 5. Instead all code is run with i=12 because there is only one value for a variable per scope.

This can lead to extremely annoying bugs because your brain is wired to read and understand this stuff sequentially rather than all at once. I've stared at some page of OpenSCAD code for a long time before realizing that it was yet another one of those footguns.