Hacker News: johnfn

New comment by johnfn in "Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages"

johnfn — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 16:59:03 +0000

I responded directly to your point. How do we kill the industry without international cooperation, and what is your plan there?

New comment by johnfn in "Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages"

johnfn — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 16:24:10 +0000

Ok, so the plan is to stop z.ai, DeepSeek, and all other non-American labs from developing models entirely, full stop? How do you plan to enact this large scale system of international coordination? Asking politely?

New comment by johnfn in "Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages"

johnfn — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 15:42:23 +0000

How do you plan to solve z.ai distilling Anthoropic’s model into a cyber-capable open source GLM-5.5?

New comment by johnfn in "Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster"

johnfn — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 17:26:05 +0000

As I already stated, it's only against your personal interpretation of the rules -- an interpretation that has curiously few other subscribers. Saying "the community guidelines mean what I want them to mean, now stop talking" is not a way to argue your point.

New comment by johnfn in "Show HN: PS2 games statically recompiled to WebAssembly"

johnfn — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 17:18:18 +0000

I mean I’m kind of curious why you left this comment about WASM decomp, which is about as malware safe as one could possibly get!

New comment by johnfn in "Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster"

johnfn — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 21:31:44 +0000

Who said I was "ideologically charged"? I like AI and I use it every day. I simultaneously hate AI writing. It is impossible to parse. If you can read it fine, good on you, but you seem to fundamentally misunderstand that other people perceive the world differently than you do. No one is "dissecting" this article under a microscope, it's obvious.

New comment by johnfn in "Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster"

johnfn — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:59:40 +0000

Curious how you see low-effort writing as a "shallow dismissal" or "tangential"

New comment by johnfn in "Why are coding agents so dumb?"

johnfn — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 22:21:41 +0000

All these problems are solved.

> Agents can’t manage tasks

Say "use subagents".

> Agents can’t delegate

Say "use subagents that are Haiku/Sonnet"

> Agents have never heard of agents

This isn't even a problem: the author is just confused why Anthropic didn't bake all of Claude Code documentation into the harness, but of course it makes no sense to pollute context like that.

> Agents suck at communicating plans

True, communication could be better.

> Agents take any excuse to stop working

Just use /loop.

> Agents are only useful when they take unnecessary risks

Just use a sandbox. OK, technically, this one isn't literally solved by Anthropic/OpenAI, but it is solved by a million agent sandbox startups.

New comment by johnfn in "Typesafe AI raises $870M at $7.5B"

johnfn — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:42:24 +0000

Isn't this the exact opposite? When people were saying that saying, the connotation was that IBM was an old, stodgy company that had been around forever. (These days I often think "No one got fired for choosing AWS"). Typesafe is a hot new startup that could, to my eyes, easily burst into flame or die in the next year.

New comment by johnfn in "Decisions API is in public beta"

johnfn — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:06:47 +0000

This implies you didn’t run any sort of evaluations? It is not realistic for any sort of production use case to do this.

New comment by johnfn in "Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?"

johnfn — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:16:30 +0000

You are correct, I softened the wording a bit. And thanks for the heads up on the typo!

New comment by johnfn in "Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?"

johnfn — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 23:58:03 +0000

Sorry, you are correct - I modified my original post. I get frustrated every time there's a model release and 1 week later everyone is saying NERF! NERF! 99.9% of the time these people are wrong, but you are right that it's technically not 100% due to a few edge cases.

I am more skeptical about the compute provider claim - do you have any evidence of that?

New comment by johnfn in "Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?"

johnfn — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 23:46:58 +0000

It's not about doing more complex things - complexity is more dictated by how large your codebase is, etc.

> It’s not a crazy conspiracy that the same model can be stupider

Sorry, I really do think it's a conspiracy. If nerfing were real, it would be trivial to prove. DeepSWE, SWEBench, and other benchmarks are all available for anyone to run. A "nerfing" hypothesis has to survive the fact that a statistically significant dip in benchmarks has never been observed.

New comment by johnfn in "Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?"

johnfn — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 23:36:38 +0000

"Nerf"ing models isn't real in the vast majority of reported cases. Benchmarks like this or the 100 other "let's see if nerfing is real" copies would have shown it by now if it was.

I made a graphic to explain why people feel like the models get nerfed:

https://x.com/thesilenceturns/status/2103551351825543610

The idea is that new models can handle up to a certain level of complexity, at which point they fall apart. Every new model can handle more complexity, so there's a wonderful time upon release when you feel like you can do anything, only for you to hit the complexity ceiling a few days later when you saturate it. Rinse and repeat for the next model.

New comment by johnfn in "Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi"

johnfn — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:56:46 +0000

I mean pixel art is kind of weird, in that I rarely just look at a single screen of pixel art and say, wow, I feel more connected now. It’s often taken in context of a larger whole, like a game or animation where the artist is usually trying to express something, and the specific art is some small part of the overall expression. It’s kind of like how no individual still image from Spirited Away will convey the meaning of the whole movie.

New comment by johnfn in "Show HN: Lofi Cities – Pixel-art city nights with browser-generated lofi"

johnfn — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:19:48 +0000

I use a compiler to perform a task. I don’t use pixel art to perform a task, other than to feel connection to another human —- something AI makes more challenging.

New comment by johnfn in "Claude Opus 5.5"

johnfn — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 22:25:05 +0000

Did no one in this entire HN thread read past the headline of the post from Amodei? He wrote a very clear set of actions Anthropic is taking.

New comment by johnfn in "I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago"

johnfn — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 02:55:03 +0000

I just typed dash twice into iPhone. Hardly a “non-standard” web interface. Also, I’d like to think my comment was higher quality than anything an LLM could generate! At least, yet.

New comment by johnfn in "I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago"

johnfn — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 18:44:12 +0000

It’s a tale as old as time — people don’t understand that marketing and branding are just as important, if not more so, than the product. Jev is exceptionally-well branded. Anyone can look at the webpage and understand it, and the implications, instantly.

OPs “marketing” is a single post on Reddit titled “ Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means? I can’t, and I consider myself reasonably technical. Is it obvious it has the same implications as Jev? Again, no idea. And it was just a single post on a subreddit that I don’t even browse! I see people on this thread saying “Jev is just BERT”. Sure, and Dropbox is just a ftp account mounted with curlftpfs!

I do feel bad for the author for finding something cool and being unable to brand it. But the full definition of “product” INCLUDES being able to coherently communicate it. In some sense the branding is just as much the “breakthrough” as the model.

New comment by johnfn in "Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap"

johnfn — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 14:32:54 +0000

Pretty impressive to accuse the author of not knowing formal verification when even minutes of research would immediately prove the opposite (https://x.com/victortaelin/status/2100942399132312059?s=46, https://x.com/victortaelin/status/2100374221671051472?s=46).