<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: johntb86</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=johntb86</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 16 May 2026 03:08:47 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=johntb86" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Must have been <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mrGMMmrVNE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mrGMMmrVNE</a> from Welch Labs.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:34:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784102</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784102</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47784102</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "FFmpeg 8.1"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"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.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 16:25:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414871</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414871</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414871</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Judge finalizes order for Greenpeace to pay $345M in ND oil pipeline case"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>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.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:22:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220974</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220974</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47220974</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "10 years building vertical software: are we cooked?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Imagine being a vim or emacs user and have those replaced by something you have to type entire sentences for functionality.<p>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.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:18:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041657</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041657</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47041657</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Arm wants a bigger slice of the chip business"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Qualcomm won in court, so that doesn't seem to be the case.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 03:37:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030600</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030600</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47030600</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Alex Honnold completes Taipei 101 skyscraper climb without ropes or safety net"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> The travel to/from Taiwan was statistically riskier than the climb.<p>That doesn't seem plausible. What's the number of free soloists who have died in climbing accidents vs in commercial aviation accidents?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Jan 2026 07:59:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46751783</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46751783</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46751783</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Cursor's latest “browser experiment” implied success without evidence"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>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.<p>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.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Jan 2026 19:06:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650647</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650647</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46650647</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Signs of introspection in large language models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>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?<p>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.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:19:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45778148</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45778148</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45778148</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "A definition of AGI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But LLMs have been measured to have some theory of mind abilities at least as strong as humans: <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z</a> . 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.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2025 17:31:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45723885</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45723885</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45723885</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Old Stockholm Telephone Tower"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Is that East Germany or West Germany?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:01:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45477825</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45477825</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45477825</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Two Amazon delivery drones crash into crane in commercial area of Tolleson, AZ"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/790636/amazon-prime-mk30-drone-delivery-crash-arizona-pause" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/news/790636/amazon-prime-mk30-drone...</a> gives more information, including that<p>* No one was injured directly, but someone was treated for smoke inhalation<p>* The drones "were flying back to back"<p>* They hit the cable of a crane (including a link to a video showing the crane). <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_ZpY6qHcTk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_ZpY6qHcTk</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2025 16:18:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451702</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451702</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45451702</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Pixel 10 Phones"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How do you get your tickets? Do you just buy in person at the theater or ballpark?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 Aug 2025 19:38:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965525</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965525</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965525</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "The Claude Bliss Attractor"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They aren't being told to be evil, though. Maybe the scenario they're in is most similar to an "evil AI", though, but that's just a vague extrapolation from the set of input data they're given (e.g. both emails about infidelity and being turned off). There's nothing preventing a real world scenario from being similar, and triggering the "evil AI" outcome, so it's very hard to guard against. Ideally we'd have a system that would be vanishingly unlikely to role play the evil AI scenario.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:09:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44273324</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44273324</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44273324</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "The Halting Problem is a terrible example of NP-Harder"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It needs to be a decision problem (or easily recast as a decision problem). 
"given a number as input, output as many 1's as that number" doesn't have a yes or no answer. You could try to ask a related question like "given a number as input and a list of 1s, are there as many 1s as the number?" but that has a very large input.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Apr 2025 18:40:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43720615</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43720615</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43720615</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Does it actually go to the US corporation, or to some European subsidiary?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2025 21:25:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43638176</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43638176</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43638176</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Requesting formal removal of all anaconda posts for copyright violation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't see any reason to believe this was requested by the Anaconda developers. For example, it refers to the Anaconda developers in the third person: "For example adding a footnote in a 2014 answer to state Anaconda has started restricting commercial usage is insufficient and misleading, as they have restricted nearly all usage later."<p>This seems more likely to have been written by some third party who'd annoyed about the license change.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 30 Mar 2025 16:50:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525550</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525550</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43525550</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "4o Image Generation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Meta has experimented with a hybrid mode, where the LLM uses autoregressive mode for text, but within a set of delimiters will switch to diffusion mode to generate images. In principle it's the best of both worlds.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2025 19:35:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43474981</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43474981</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43474981</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Honda's F1 engine technologies that enable >50% thermal efficiency"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If they cared they could probably use a DEF system to reduce them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Mar 2025 23:45:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43430345</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43430345</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43430345</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Claude can now search the web"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've found that OpenAI's Deep Research seems to be much better at this, including finding an obscure StackOverflow post that solved a problem I had, or finding travel wiki sites that actually answered questions I had around traveling around Poland. However it finds its pages, they're much better than just the top N Google results.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Mar 2025 19:43:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43427971</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43427971</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43427971</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by johntb86 in "Ladder: Self-improving LLMs through recursive problem decomposition"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'd be curious what would happen if you SFTed a larger model with successful reasoning traces from the smaller model. Would it pick up the overall reasoning pattern, but be able to apply it to more cases?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 07 Mar 2025 20:25:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43294175</link><dc:creator>johntb86</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43294175</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43294175</guid></item></channel></rss>