Hacker News: jmmcd

New comment by jmmcd in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

jmmcd — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:22:44 +0000

But euros spent on tokens is a tiny fraction of the overall costs of the project.

New comment by jmmcd in "AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing"

jmmcd — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:02:10 +0000

> Since these companies can’t improve their AI models without fresh data created by human beings

Totally wrong. Self-play dates back to Arthur Samuel in the 1950s and RL with verifiable rewards is a key part of training the most advanced models today.

New comment by jmmcd in "The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador with the Avignon Papacy"

jmmcd — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:14:49 +0000

> Anglo

Please, write US-American. These people are not coming from any other place.

New comment by jmmcd in "Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists"

jmmcd — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:31:42 +0000

I understand your point, but in response to GP (they should spend this money on houses for other poor people instead), the reduced reliance on other social welfare is totally legitimate to count.

New comment by jmmcd in "Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists"

jmmcd — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:39:15 +0000

You didn't read the article. The scheme gave positive return on investment.

New comment by jmmcd in "GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers"

jmmcd — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 22:50:43 +0000

Google Scholar provides imperfect citations - very often wrong article type (eg article versus conference paper), but up to and including missing authors, in my experience.

New comment by jmmcd in "Postal Arbitrage"

jmmcd — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:08:23 +0000

Jokes are one of the good parts of human existence, so - while I see your side of the story - there is another side.

New comment by jmmcd in "“Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead” (2016)"

jmmcd — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 14:05:24 +0000

The best example of all is Prolog. It is always held up as the paradigmatic representative of logic programming, a rare language paradigm. But it doesn't need to be a language. It is really a collection of algorithms which should be a library in every language, together with a nice convention for expressing Prolog things in that language's syntax.

(My comment is slightly off-topic to the article but on-topic to the title.)

New comment by jmmcd in "Gemini 3"

jmmcd — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 12:19:06 +0000

But he actually uses frontier LLMs in his own work. Probably that's stronger evidence.

New comment by jmmcd in "Gemini 3"

jmmcd — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:06:49 +0000

Yes. But "the gold standard" just means "the most natural, easy and dumb way".

New comment by jmmcd in "Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf]"

jmmcd — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:05:19 +0000

This is on the semi-private set

* https://x.com/arcprize/status/1990820655411909018

* https://arcprize.org/guide

New comment by jmmcd in "Gemini 3"

jmmcd — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 16:04:21 +0000

"Pelican on bicycle" is one special case, but the problem (and the interesting point) is that with LLMs, they are always generalising. If a lab focussed specially on pelicans on bicycles, they would as a by-product improve performance on, say, tigers on rollercoasters. This is new and counter-intuitive to most ML/AI people.

New comment by jmmcd in "Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf]"

jmmcd — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 12:26:54 +0000

About ARC 2:

I would want to hear more detail about prompts, frameworks, thinking time, etc., but they don't matter too much. The main caveat would be that this is probably on the public test set, so could be in pretraining, and there could even be some ARC-focussed post-training - I think we don't know yet and might never know.

But for any reasonable setup, if no egregious cheating, that is an amazing score on ARC 2.

New comment by jmmcd in "Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music"

jmmcd — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 08:26:27 +0000

On HN it's very common to see a blog post along the lines of "I found this old piece of equipment with no brand name, I used some network traffic inspection to figure out what it does, I hacked around a bit, I got it working and turned it into a self-ringing doorbell with wifi" (or whatever). All of that is anecdotal, N=1, "I did what worked for me, I hope it's interesting to you". And those posts are highly prized and rightly so.

New comment by jmmcd in "Quantitative AI progress needs accurate and transparent evaluation"

jmmcd — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:27:17 +0000

(a) no it's not

(b) your comment is miles off-topic, as he is not addressing doom in any sense

New comment by jmmcd in "'Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers"

jmmcd — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 18:33:23 +0000

But they're submissions to ICML.

New comment by jmmcd in "The 'white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI hype machine"

jmmcd — Fri, 30 May 2025 14:54:49 +0000

It could certainly replace the author of this article.

New comment by jmmcd in "Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine"

jmmcd — Tue, 27 May 2025 12:24:53 +0000

Modern LLMs can one-shot code in a totally new language, if you provide the language manual. And you have to provide the language manual, because otherwise how can the students learn the language.

New comment by jmmcd in "Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine"

jmmcd — Tue, 27 May 2025 12:20:34 +0000

> The fact that AI can do your homework should tell you how much your homework is worth.

A lot of people who say this kind of thing have, frankly, a very shallow view of what homework is. A lot of homework can be easily done by AI, or by a calculator, or by Wikipedia, or by looking up the textbook. That doesn't invalidate it as homework at all. We're trying to scaffold skills in your brain. It also didn't invalidate it as assessment in the past, because (eg) small kids don't have calculators, and (eg) kids who learn to look up the textbook are learning multiple skills in addition to the knowledge they're looking up. But things have changed now.

New comment by jmmcd in "The Leaderboard Illusion"

jmmcd — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 11:45:17 +0000

Absolutely devastating for the credibility of FAIR.