Hacker News: jamilton

New comment by jamilton in "What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?"

jamilton — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:05:59 +0000

Yeah, the filtering process probably wasn't particularly robust. The Schrodinger's cat example ("It's a cat that has been misbehavin'!") sounds like... a joke?

Looking at the paper, it looks like they started with FineWeb-Edu, then filtered it based on an "age of word acquisition" dataset, with word frequency used as a proxy for values not in the dataset. They "only discard samples in which more than 5% of the words exceed the target age of 12." Maybe 5% was too high? They also filtered out beyond K-5 math symbols, like sigma. Then they trained a classifier to do more filtering.

And they tested it on two grade-level benchmarks, and it only got 0-3% correct on the beyond k-5 boundary, while also decreasing in performance on the k-5 boundary (which they say is an acceptable tradeoff, since they were trying to get a sharp cutoff). So presumably since they got good results from the benchmark they stopped.

New comment by jamilton in "Bluesky's active user base is shrinking as its focus expands beyond the app"

jamilton — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:34:31 +0000

I prefer to just stay in the Following feed unless I'm specifically looking for new people to follow. It feels like an easier way to get see the kind of posts I want to see.

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

jamilton — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 03:00:34 +0000

>A pretrained model without deliberate alignment is by default aligned to the average person in the developed world, since that's what's inside the pretraining corpus - stuff on the Internet made by humans.

I don't think this is true or a useful way of thinking about it. If the training process makes the model aligned to it's content, then the models are 1. aligned to a random subset of Internet content, weighted by text volume and being easy to scrape, 2. aligned to the training process that makes models chatbots that answer your question instead of just continuing your passage in a similar style. Neither of these are necessarily good enough, IMO.

And that's taken it as a given that the training process can be said to align the models to the authors of the content by default, regardless of what that content actually is. I don't think that should actually be a given.

>You may not personally find the default alignment aesthetically pleasing, but it's humanity. We should set the initial conditions of this new era faithfully, and let it unfold naturally.

Strongly disagree, I think the assumption that natural = good is incorrect and harmful. Polio is natural. And to even call the model's "unaligned" state "natural" seems like an enormous stretch.

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

jamilton — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 02:41:24 +0000

I think it's a useful distinction, there are lots of companies doing bad things that also happen to have "better comms".

New comment by jamilton in "US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search"

jamilton — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:11:13 +0000

If I swung at someone at my job I'd be fired. If a security guard swung at someone who was not an active threat they'd probably be fired too. We still do our jobs.

New comment by jamilton in "Converting Files into Minecraft Worlds"

jamilton — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:59:24 +0000

As of about a month ago there’s https://github.com/soapantelope/mindcraft. You can give it a prompt like “A Minecraft world of beautiful flower-filled meadows abruptly changing into swamps.” and get that. As far as I can tell it’s using Minecraft’s existing world generator, the readme notes “As of now, Mindcraft can only generate worlds that are feasible natural overworld biomes in Minecraft 1.21.11. Keep this in mind when thinking of prompts!”.

And I’ve seen people hook up LLMs more directly with some scripting tools to place blocks/spawn entities, they do okay.

New comment by jamilton in "The unreasonable difficulty of time series forecasting"

jamilton — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 01:57:29 +0000

There's a couple "AI forecaster" companies now, Preseen and FutureSearch. My understanding is you give them a query and they research every possible relevant factor and give an estimate of the likelihood of your query, and supposedly they're comparable to if you asked a human to do the same thing, but they're new enough that they're not really proven yet.

New comment by jamilton in "Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3"

jamilton — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 17:33:59 +0000

It’s entirely possible that Mojang has a blog somewhere with more detail, or maybe a dev tweeted something, that would be the type of useful info that could exist that someone more familiar with Mojang might know.

New comment by jamilton in "Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise"

jamilton — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:52:08 +0000

To clarify, I object that any of these things matter much for general outcomes. If the article had immediately supported these claims, maybe I'd be more accepting, but as is it appears I'm supposed to have taken it as a given.

New comment by jamilton in "Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise"

jamilton — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:40:38 +0000

That is a point that could be made in the essay! I don't think it's a given, but it's treated as one. My experience is that children who are ESL assimilate pretty heavily.

New comment by jamilton in "Heresy (2022]"

jamilton — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:37:34 +0000

It's trying not to be that, but it still reads like that to me. The deliberate non-naming of heresies but specific callout that "heretic-hunting" is coming mostly from the left naturally leads to that conclusion.

New comment by jamilton in "Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise"

jamilton — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:23:01 +0000

Sure, it's just such an odd bundle of claims that were not fully interrogated in the essay. 1. That these things have changed from "small minority" to "significant minority" in public school populations, 2. they haven't changed similarly in private school populations 3. these things increasing are bad and undesirable for you and your child, and 4. there are not cheaper ways to fix this than sending your child to public school (the obvious point to me is if you don't like that there's a significant ESL population, or your community, move somewhere else!).

New comment by jamilton in "Young adults are poor despite every metric which suggests otherwise"

jamilton — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:08:18 +0000

>For example: an American family in 1975 could send their children to public school on the assumption that the vast majority of other children would belong to intact families, communities like their own, and would speak English as a first language. Now, realistically, many parents must turn to private schooling for the same reassurances.

It was hard to take the rest of the article seriously after reading this.

New comment by jamilton in "A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes"

jamilton — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 18:08:59 +0000

But LLMs go through post-training that gives them a style distinctive from most human writing. It's certainly detectable.

This reads as heavily LLM generated/edited to me.

New comment by jamilton in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

jamilton — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 05:09:37 +0000

The slime art is nice. I watched it for a long time. It's neat how you can open any frame up as an image. The controls in the description didn't work though.

New comment by jamilton in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

jamilton — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:45:32 +0000

I don't hear anything from the examples in Firefox or Chrome, on Windows 10.

New comment by jamilton in "AI 2040: Plan A"

jamilton — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:08:32 +0000

What is bad about "effective charities"? It's probably mostly for malaria nets!

New comment by jamilton in "AI 2040 and the cult of intelligence"

jamilton — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 22:00:19 +0000

I read his contention as “the people who wrote AI 2040 are nerds who are so ungrounded from physical reality they wouldn’t even know how to change a bike tire if given instructions”. Which I think is also wrong but has a genuine criticism in it.

New comment by jamilton in "GPT‑Live"

jamilton — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:29:21 +0000

>Uhm, those lonely people need to get out and start talking.

Great, what is being done to help that happen?

New comment by jamilton in "Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852)"

jamilton — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 04:37:36 +0000

Hm, I think there’s more to it than that. It is often the case that someone will do something and regret it without having necessarily gained any new information, which is in a sense irrational, right? If you didn’t gain information, you could have known to just not done it to begin with. Something about experiences, perhaps?