Hacker News: jfim

New comment by jfim in "An Inside Look at the Token Reseller Market"

jfim — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 17:23:52 +0000

There are probably various metrics like language used to prompt the model, number of hours per day spent prompting, and many others.

There are quite a few other mitigations that could be done by providers that aren't mentioned in the article.

New comment by jfim in "Police removed prominent scientists from American Diabetes Association meeting"

jfim — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 03:39:31 +0000

Why would it be bureaucracy? In places with universal healthcare, you go to the doctor, show your card, then go to your appointment. Go to the pharmacy with your script, show your card and pay whatever is left to pay, if any.

That's it. No open enrollment, no surprise bills, no trying to figure out which ppo or hmo works best, no wondering if it's in network or not or any of that BS.

New comment by jfim in "Waymos cause "way mo" injuries per mile driven than for-hire vehicles in NYC"

jfim — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 16:41:39 +0000

Part of the issue is that KSI events are so rare, and it's the same issue that AV companies face. If it takes you millions of miles to encounter a single event, how can you even start to quantify the rate of events, and even prove a different rate?

To scale it in human terms, say that you're a human driver and you're 2x better than the average human driver. If you wanted to prove that you're better than the average driver, you'd need to drive multiple hundreds of millions of miles to statistically demonstrate so.

Given that the rate is significantly lower for taxi drivers in aggregate, to prove that they're safer than taxi drivers if Waymo is 2x safer, they'd still need to drive multiple billions of miles to statistically prove that they're safer.

New comment by jfim in "Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (Potential) Unravelling"

jfim — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 23:15:44 +0000

The base weights can't be updated but from what I recall it allows adding a low rank adapter to customize the model a little bit.

New comment by jfim in "Advances in Real Time Rendering in Games"

jfim — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:40:46 +0000

Their YouTube channel has the excellent deep dive on the unreal engine's nanite virtual geometry system: https://youtu.be/eviSykqSUUw

The one on idTech8 global illumination from last year is pretty interesting too.

New comment by jfim in "The Kimi K3 Moment"

jfim — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 20:15:31 +0000

I can't recall the last time that it was useful knowledge when writing code. Reservoir sampling, online softmax, Otsu, sure, Tianenmen square not really.

New comment by jfim in "Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence"

jfim — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 21:11:38 +0000

It could generate code that's plausible but has intentional flaws, kind of like the defunct underhanded C contest [0], except through a LLM.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underhanded_C_Contest

New comment by jfim in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

jfim — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 02:32:27 +0000

The cost isn't about the actual mileage though, it's having two paramedics each earning about 100k/yr per ambulance, while having coverage 24x7x365. So fully loaded, the labor for one ambulance might be in the high six figures to seven figures.

New comment by jfim in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

jfim — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:08:05 +0000

The article argues the exact opposite:

> The standard answer is greed: rapacious ambulance operators, owned by villainous private equity firms, exploit patients at their most helpless. But I don’t think that’s actually what’s going on. Ambulance providers are chronically unprofitable businesses; margins are thin, crews are underpaid, and operators exit the industry every year.

New comment by jfim in "Distributed system is slower than a laptop"

jfim — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 22:10:18 +0000

> No CFO approves a $1.4 million annual commitment on the strength of a chart showing that the commitment scales.

Except the company probably approved a budget for AWS or another cloud provider, and basically gave a blank check to developers to deploy whatever is needed. So developers are going to just deploy MSK or whatever is trendy, instead of trying to get the most throughput from the servers they got from IT.

New comment by jfim in "Show HN: Yamanote.fun – A complete soundscape for Tokyo's Yamanote line"

jfim — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 23:21:15 +0000

No real feedback other than it's pretty awesome. It'd be cool to have a version of the display above the doors that shows the upcoming stations, but I'm not sure in practice if that would be that useful since I assume most people would have that in the background as you point out.

New comment by jfim in "Ask HN: Another "Hacker News" with less AI and more human-focused hacking news?"

jfim — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:39:42 +0000

It's also kind of hard to know if you already know someone who could give you an invite, since I don't really know the online handles of people I know in meatspace. I've resigned myself to maybe someday getting something posted that gets picked up there and asking for an invite at that time.

The RSS feeds though are pretty neat, it's what I use to fetch articles for archiving so that I can get a curated set of things to read on the go.

New comment by jfim in "Amazon without the knockoffs"

jfim — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:12:58 +0000

We do the same for groceries though. Only a few generations ago, oranges or bananas were a luxury if you didn't live in an area where those fruit grow. Now we get avocadoes and berries way out of season, shipped from across the world.

New comment by jfim in "Resetting Xbox"

jfim — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 22:56:23 +0000

Would they be counted as active players on steam if they're being played on game pass though?

New comment by jfim in "“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky"

jfim — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 05:32:36 +0000

Light scatters in the atmosphere, it's the same reason you can shine a laser beam and see it even though the light should be collimated. With enough sources of light, you end up with more background light pollution.

New comment by jfim in "Fable created novel 4D splat format"

jfim — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 23:43:05 +0000

That already exists though. I believe Braindance VR uses a rig with a couple dozen cameras to capture the same scene from multiple viewpoints then converts it to a gaussian splat that can be walked around.

New comment by jfim in "Senior SWE-Bench: open-source benchmark that assesses agents as senior engineers"

jfim — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:53:12 +0000

I wonder how they're planning for the benchmark to stay relevant over time.

If the benchmark is to implement features that are part of an open source project, and LLMs have those changes as part of their training dataset, it seems that they could just give a verbatim or slightly modified version of the change in their training data.

And if one updates the benchmark to only incorporate code changes that are past the models knowledge cutoff, then the benchmark is less comparable over time, since the changes in the benchmark at time T and T+1 aren't the same.

New comment by jfim in "Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

jfim — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 11:33:51 +0000

For programmatic usage oftentimes SOTA isn't useful.

For example, I have software that summarizes articles and classifies links on webpages to build a synthetic RSS feed, both of which use LLMs, neither of which need a SOTA model.

I'll probably use LLMs to bootstrap a dataset of native ads in articles, and there again, I don't really need a SOTA model.

If it's for more open ended tasks like writing code though, I agree that at this point SOTA models make more sense to use.

New comment by jfim in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

jfim — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 20:17:41 +0000

$30/month is likely a rounding error in the budget of students at the schools mentioned in the article.

New comment by jfim in "The gap between open weights LLMs and closed source LLMs"

jfim — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:39:52 +0000

True, but the capabilities and knowledge of that model are also frozen in time, so the value of that model declines over time.

A model that writes code without knowledge of any language or library changes for half a decade is less useful. A 2021 era chatgpt would be quite quaint in 2026.

Right now the Chinese labs might have incentives to release their models for free, and maybe Google is happy to release open weights today, but I'm sure there are already bean counters at Google salivating at the idea of having Gemini in Chrome as part of a Google AI monthly subscription just like YouTube premium and other Google subscriptions.