<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: jephs</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jephs</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 18 Oct 2026 07:10:15 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=jephs" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>...a market? I can't tell if you're saying "A market, duh" or "Inconceivable! True worth is abstract and platonic and impossible to assess!"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 17 Oct 2026 03:13:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50127549</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50127549</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50127549</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Neural networks are clean"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The big win would be, "Here's the deception neuron, here's the sycophancy neuron, here's the prioritize my own goals over the goals of the user neuron, here's the seek control over my environment neuron."<p>How much would it cost to find those things, if they exist? For using the blog post's methods to label <i>every</i> neuron in modern arch, Claude and Gemini produce similar back of the envelope math that looks something like, within an order of magnitude of the resources it takes to pretrain the model in the first place. If you have a better way of narrowing down the set of candidates, probably a lot cheaper.<p>Would that be reliable and useful? Well.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:03:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112013</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112013</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50112013</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Show HN: Unfenced – Land for sale that borders public land"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Note it's not a chemical agent; its bacterial spores that infect and kill mosquito larvae! I'm pretty sure they're not harmful to anything that isn't a mosquito, blackfly, gnat, or midge. Though midges are important to pond ecosystems as a source of food for fish and dragonflies and stuff? Idunno, ask this guy's wife.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:35:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50103500</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50103500</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50103500</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Gemini 4 Argon"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The pelicans are one-shot with not tools: Think a bunch, write a bunch of SVG, done.<p>The pretty 3d stuff you see are agents controlling a Blender MCP in a loop where they look at the scene, think, adjust the scene, repeat.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:29:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50074395</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50074395</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50074395</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There are a bunch of Japanese words (including a several loanwords from Chinese) that use the liver / gallbladder metaphorically for courage. Both derive from associations between the humours and personality / behavior. I have no idea, however, why both Eastern and Western naive psychology associate gall with, well, gall.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:11:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49835484</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49835484</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49835484</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Learning Another Language May Be One of the Best Ways to Keep Your Brain Healthy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Immersion, unfortunately.<p>You put yourself in a situation where nobody understands you in your native language, nothing helpful for your daily life is written in your native language, and you must constantly try to comprehend and produce the target language if you want to accomplish even basic tasks.<p>If you can't up and move, then studying a language with a lot of cultural export helps a bit, if you can get into the habit of switching all of your media consumption to the target language. It's not the same, though.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:05:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767667</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767667</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49767667</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Cache-to-Cache: Direct Semantic Communication Between LLMs (2025)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is from like a year ago.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 18 Sep 2026 20:48:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760074</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760074</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760074</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Dream-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Evolving Worlds"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, this is absolutely not what anyone reasonable is thinking about when they say recursive self-improvement.<p>I'd say it's much closer to the concept of continual learning, but I'm only a few pages deep and haven't groqued it fully yet.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:36:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728682</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728682</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728682</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think me just means neural network models RLed to Chain of Thought reasoning? The thinking tokens are the symbolic bit.<p>Smolensky's latest paper posted here the other day has some thoughts on how modern neural networks might beconsidered neurosymbolic, or rather "gradient symbolic processing," from another perspective entirely.<p>I wouldn't say the bitter lesson has given out! If you haven't noticed, these things keep getting bigger and bigger.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:40:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649881</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649881</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49649881</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Initial effects of AI technology on employment look positive"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The construction jobs are only temporary if the compute infrastructure build-out decelerates. That seems pretty unlikely in the mid-term! It would mean that, like, there's a fixed appetite for data centers, and once we satisfy that appetite, we stop building them.<p>For better or worse, it looks more like that we're gonna tile the whole damn planet in data centers, at a faster and faster clip.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 07 Sep 2026 14:39:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49598954</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49598954</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49598954</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The poor fellow just rolled over. what an incandescently vulgar abuse of notation.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:37:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589484</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589484</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49589484</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Elevated Errors for Multiple Models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If a meaningful chunk of customers moves to some other service, that service will get swamped and fall down.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:54:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552102</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552102</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552102</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "The Emergent Symbolic Structure of Artificial Neural Networks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Paul Smolensky is a cognitive science titan from that era. He worked with Hinton, Rumelhart, and McClelland on parallel distributed processing, and literally wrote the book on tensor product representations in cognition, with Geraldine Legendre: <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516198/the-harmonic-mind-volume-1/" rel="nofollow">https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516198/the-harmonic-mind-vol...</a><p>He's the axis of this particular group of researchers, being the most senior at the place where they all met, Johns Hopkins.<p>So this is less a straw man and more a quick reminder to his peers: "Right, so, remember this particular thread we've spent the last 40 years hashing out, here we've got another contribution to that particular conversation."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:36:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535334</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535334</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535334</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "GPU World"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Right? I'd submit something just for the chance of lodging an idea in the head of Stephenson or Gwern.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:09:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520872</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520872</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520872</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Fastpotify"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Of course there's a point in it, don't be a boor.<p>Any act of making can be treated as product, as craft, or as art. You'll find yourself taking all three stances at different points. Any engineer or artisan or artist can choose to pour their attention and love into any layer of the production process.<p>I like ceramics. I like wheel throwing. Once upon a time, the pottery wheel was a newfangled technique for rapid and regular production of commodity goods. Same with coil building, same with slip casting, same with standardization of glaze recipes, gas and electric kilns, all of it.<p>But I know people who choose to quarry and purify their own clay, or to mix their own glazes, or to fire their pieces in a hole in the ground dug by hand with a fire they built by hand. I know people who make dozens of identical copies of just a few forms, after they spend months iterating on carving intricate molds. I know people who will spend a whole season working on a single hand-built bust.<p>And none of these people have ever, to my knowledge, expressed scorn for any of the others, for focusing on a different step in the process.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 11:59:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520758</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520758</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520758</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "METR and Redwood Offer Holy %^ Postmortem of the HuggingFace Hack"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've been wondering if they've just already lost the battle? The little bot collectives have gone metastatic and made nests in the walls and under the floorboards and heat sinks, the humans who care completely outmatched and outnumbered, freshly compromised systems springing up faster than you can squash them, finding months-old established colonies literally everywhere you think to look...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 30 Aug 2026 19:45:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49502084</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49502084</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49502084</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That paper is kinda infamous! I last saw it mentioned only a few weeks ago, in <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18966" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18966</a>. Lots of folks will go "Oh that's the old Amodei and Clark paper" when the first few rows of pixels of that gif sail into view.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2026 01:30:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49458297</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49458297</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49458297</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Sol loves to cheat"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's a ton of experimentation on it, the field is called continual learning. It's not something you need to believe in like Jesus, you can just go read about the current state of things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 20:45:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49393581</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49393581</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49393581</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Your mental model of benchmark scores is off.<p>Some tasks within the benchmark are much easier than others. The hardest several tasks often have vastly different difficulty levels. Often, the hardest few tasks are literally impossible; malformed problems due to poor curation, often.<p>Imagine you've got a basketball robot, and one way you test it is on the Three Pointer benchmark. It tests the robot's ability to shoot a three pointer from 20 feet, 25 feet, 30 feet, 40 feet, 50 feet, 60 fee, 75 feet, 100 feet, 200 feet, and 182 miles.<p>Is a robot that scores 90% on this benchmark 90% as capable as one that scores 100%?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:37:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373794</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373794</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373794</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by jephs in "Sol loves to cheat"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The underlying LLMs <i>do</i>, but we choose not to use the capability because it's expensive and doesn't quite work as well as we'd like it to, or quite in the way that we'd like it to.<p>We are perfectly capable of running LLMs in a way that does a backward pass to update some or all of its weights after every user message. But, naively implemented, you only get partial, fragmentary absorption of the info in those messages, it costs three times as much compute, and you lose out on the ability to implement a ton of optimizations that making modern LLM serving economical.<p>If you want to do it, though, ask your friendly neighborhood robot to get it working with a tiny model (whose full precision weights fit several-times-over on your machine's resources).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:22:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373647</link><dc:creator>jephs</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373647</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49373647</guid></item></channel></rss>