Hacker News: johntb86

New comment by johntb86 in "Muse Spark 1.3"

johntb86 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:38:43 +0000

Someone studied this (among other thigns): https://dylancastillo.co/posts/pelicanmaxxing.html . Pelicans on bikes always face right in this test, but other animals on other transportation methods sometimes face left.

New comment by johntb86 in "Wellington second-hand bookstore's mysterious orders"

johntb86 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 07:19:54 +0000

Destroying the original makes it easier to justify that scanning the books is fair use, because you haven't increased the number of copies. See page 16 of https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar... : "This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one)"

Patterns and problems in emerging multiagent systems

johntb86 — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:33:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.anthropic.com/research/multiagent-systems

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49302812

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by johntb86 in "2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out"

johntb86 — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:25:34 +0000

AI companies aren't fabbing processors. They're buying capacity at fabs to make their own designs. To make more RAM, they'd need to invest in making more DRAM fabs, which is a slow process.

New comment by johntb86 in "Be skeptical of OpenAI's rogue hacker agent story"

johntb86 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:35:54 +0000

Intent often matters in the law (aside from certain laws with strict liability). You intentionally drive your car into someone you hate and kill them => murder, go straight to jail. You're driving along normally and someone who's chasing their pet cat suddenly runs into traffic and you hit them => no charges. Sometimes you can be charged with negligence for not taking enough care to prevent something, but then you have to deal with the tricky question of how much care is enough.

Rare Autopsy Finds Alzheimer's Drugs Only Work in Some Parts of the Brain

johntb86 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:47:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sciencealert.com/rare-brain-autopsy-hints-at-why-alzheimers-drugs-are-failing

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48923632

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

SpaceX – AI Satellite

johntb86 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:29:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.spacex.com/spacexai/starmind

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48862139

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

New comment by johntb86 in "Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI"

johntb86 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:22:10 +0000

> Nevertheless one has to feel very strongly to share such a take here in this manner unless they are gaining something from it.

Do they really? What does it cost them if they're wrong?

New comment by johntb86 in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

johntb86 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 19:11:31 +0000

If they leave at all info about security patterns, you get an AI that knows how to code, but doesn't know what can make code insecure. That doesn't seem like a great idea.

New comment by johntb86 in "Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6"

johntb86 — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:34:59 +0000

Must have been https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mrGMMmrVNE from Welch Labs.

New comment by johntb86 in "FFmpeg 8.1"

johntb86 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:25:43 +0000

"JPEG" is short for Joint Photographic Experts Group, an ISO/ITU group that creates a lot of imaging standards. The JPEG image format you're thinking of is only one of the formats they've created.

New comment by johntb86 in "Judge finalizes order for Greenpeace to pay $345M in ND oil pipeline case"

johntb86 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:22:07 +0000

Does anyone know what assets Greenpeace USA has? I imagine Greenpeace international will set up Greenpeace USA 2.0, all the volunteers/employees will move over, and the original will just go bankrupt.

New comment by johntb86 in "10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?"

johntb86 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:18:45 +0000

> Imagine being a vim or emacs user and have those replaced by something you have to type entire sentences for functionality.

As a former vim user who uses cursor, I've found that as the models get better I'm typing less and less. I appreciate the vim key bindings, but eventually I can imagine not missing them.

New comment by johntb86 in "Arm wants a bigger slice of the chip business"

johntb86 — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 03:37:40 +0000

Qualcomm won in court, so that doesn't seem to be the case.

New comment by johntb86 in "Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net"

johntb86 — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 07:59:36 +0000

> The travel to/from Taiwan was statistically riskier than the climb.

That doesn't seem plausible. What's the number of free soloists who have died in climbing accidents vs in commercial aviation accidents?

New comment by johntb86 in "Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence"

johntb86 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:06:52 +0000

In theory you could generate a bunch of code that seems mostly correct and then gradually tweak it until it's closer and closer to compiling/working, but that seems ill-suited to how current AI agents work (or even how people work). AI agents are prone to make very local fixes without an understanding of wider context, where those local fixes break a lot of assumptions in other pieces of code.

It can be very hard to determine if an isolated patch that goes from one broken state to a different broken state is on net an improvement. Even if you were to count compile errors and attempt to minimize them, some compile errors can demonstrate fatal flaws in the design while others are minor syntax issues. It's much easier to say that broken tests are very bad and should be avoided completely, as then it's easier to ensure that no patch makes things worse than it was before.

New comment by johntb86 in "Signs of introspection in large language models"

johntb86 — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:19:56 +0000

That's a fair point. Normally if you injected the "dog" token, that would cause a set of values to be populated into the kv cache, and those would later be picked up by the attention layers. The question is what's fundamentally different if you inject something into the activations instead?

I guess to some extent, the model is designed to take input as tokens, so there are built-in pathways (from the training data) for interrogating that and creating output based on that, while there's no trained-in mechanism for converting activation changes to output reflecting those activation changes. But that's not a very satisfying answer.

New comment by johntb86 in "A definition of AGI"

johntb86 — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 17:31:21 +0000

But LLMs have been measured to have some theory of mind abilities at least as strong as humans: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z . At this point you either need to accept that either LLMs are already conscious, or that it's easy enough to fake being conscious that it's practically impossible to test for - philosophical zombies are possible. It doesn't seem to me that LLMs are conscious, so consciousness isn't really observable to others.

New comment by johntb86 in "Old Stockholm Telephone Tower"

johntb86 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:01:37 +0000

Is that East Germany or West Germany?

New comment by johntb86 in "Two Amazon delivery drones crash into crane in commercial area of Tolleson, AZ"

johntb86 — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 16:18:13 +0000

https://www.theverge.com/news/790636/amazon-prime-mk30-drone... gives more information, including that

* No one was injured directly, but someone was treated for smoke inhalation

* The drones "were flying back to back"

* They hit the cable of a crane (including a link to a video showing the crane). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_ZpY6qHcTk