Hacker News: kmmlng

New comment by kmmlng in "The first commercial space station, Haven-1, now undergoing assembly for launch"

kmmlng — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 14:41:43 +0000

You have a point. I would further add that private ownership of these things requires capital concentration that cannot be healthy for society.

On the other hand, are we replacing public with private infrastructure here or is the private sector filling gaps where we didn't have any public infrastructure before in the first place?

New comment by kmmlng in "German president says US is destroying world order"

kmmlng — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:24:36 +0000

The end of the UN seems plausible if we continue to move from a rule-based world order to a power-based one. For the same reason, there is little chance we will see the end of the EU. No European country is sufficiently powerful to really matter on the world stage, a more united Europe has the potential to be a significant world power though.

New comment by kmmlng in "Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research"

kmmlng — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 22:44:33 +0000

The scaling laws are also power laws, meaning that most of the big gains happen early in the curve, and improvements become more expensive the further you go along.

New comment by kmmlng in "Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models'"

kmmlng — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 09:27:26 +0000

LeCun has already proved himself and made his mark and is now in a lucky position where he can focus on very long term goals that won't pay off for a long time (or ever). I feel like that is the best path someone like him could take.

New comment by kmmlng in "GPT-5"

kmmlng — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 13:53:49 +0000

I would say GPT itself is less an event and more the culmination of decades of research and development in algorithms, hardware, and software. Of course, to some degree, this is true for any novel development. In this case, the convergence of development in GPUs, software to utilize them well while being able to work in very high levels of abstractions, and algorithms that can scale is something I'm not sure we will see again so quickly. All this preexisting research is kind of a resource that will be completely exploited at some point. And then the only thing that can drive you forward are truly novel ideas. Reasoning models were a fairly obvious next step too as the concepts of System 1 and 2 have been around for a while.

You are completely right that the compute and funding right now are unprecedented. I don't feel confident making any predictions.

New comment by kmmlng in "GPT-5"

kmmlng — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 08:30:02 +0000

Basically what we have done the last few years is notice neural scaling laws and drive them to their logical conclusion. Those laws are power laws, which are not quite as bad as logarithmic laws, but you would still expect most of the big gains early on and then see diminishing returns.

Barring a kind of grey swan event of groundbreaking algorithmic innovation, I don't see how we get out of this. I suppose it could be that some of those diminishing returns are still big enough to bridge the gap to create an AI that can meaningfully recursively improve itself, but I personally don't see it.

At the moment, I would say everything is progressing exactly as expected and will continue to do so until it doesn't. If or when that happens is not predictable.

New comment by kmmlng in "Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment"

kmmlng — Mon, 19 May 2025 06:08:22 +0000

That's fair enough, there are problems with this way of thinking. I suppose you could say the take-away should be "Don't donate to charities where close to your whole donation will be absorbed as administrative costs". There definitely are black sheep that act this way and they probably served as the original motivation for EA. It's a logical next step to come up with a way to systematically identify these black sheep. That is probably the point where this approach should have stopped.

New comment by kmmlng in "Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment"

kmmlng — Fri, 16 May 2025 06:32:42 +0000

I suppose in the beginning, it was about finding ways to measure how effective different altruistic approaches actually are and focusing your efforts on the most effective ones. Effective then essentially means how much impact you are achieving per dollar spent. One of the more convincing ways of doing this is looking at different charitable foundations and determining how much of each dollar you donate to them actually ends up being used to fix some problem and how much ends up being absorbed by the charitable foundation itself (salaries etc.) with nothing to show for it.

They might have lost the plot somewhere along the line, but the effective altruism movement had some good ideas.

New comment by kmmlng in "The new 4o personality is unusable for therapy"

kmmlng — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 17:13:26 +0000

> It seems that you're saying that a therapist will be "rubbish unless they use basic Cognitive Behavioural Therapy concepts" ? i.e. that this is the only valid approach to therapy?

I believe the parent poster is saying that CBT is the only form of therapy you can trust an LLM to pull off because it's straightforward to administer.

New comment by kmmlng in "Is Ketamine Neurotoxic?"

kmmlng — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 19:32:32 +0000

With many drugs that are used both therapeutically and recreationally, it is the case that the average recreational dosage is much larger. Ketamine is an exception here, as therapeutic doses are actually quite high. The common mistake here is to equate intravenous dosage with intranasal dosage, when the bioavailability differs significantly between these routes of administration. And that's not even considering that most reported recreational dosages are wrong due to cutting agents.

There certainly is recreational abuse with very large dosages, but I don't think it's fair to claim that the majority of users fall into this category.

New comment by kmmlng in "Why blog if nobody reads it?"

kmmlng — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 10:10:36 +0000

I think we have seen a general trend towards centralized platforms on the internet. Where you had many individual niche sites before, now you have a few all-encompassing platforms. There are some exceptions, but I generally find that many of those platforms want to maximize your time on the platform itself. As a consequence, they do what they can to keep you from leaving the platform via a link to some other website.

New comment by kmmlng in "Brain Hyperconnectivity in Children with Autism and Its Links to Social Deficits (2013)"

kmmlng — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 09:28:58 +0000

Yes, there is additional context that is not explicitly stated in the question. It is clear that you are looking for a job to earn money and live your life and everyone already knows this, so there is no need to talk about. The question is: Why did you apply (here out of all the places you could have applied to)?

New comment by kmmlng in "DeepSeek gives Europe's tech firms a chance to catch up"

kmmlng — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 13:55:51 +0000

It's not like the US doesn't have a problem with affordable housing, so I don't see how this plays any role in the divide.

Germany has plenty of applied research organizations, from universities (e.g. RWTH) to things like Fraunhofer. The funding schemes behind these organizations are horrible and I would argue that in many ways, they are machines to burn up potential. Even with all this, Germany has been doing okay on the publicly funded AI research front, but that is irrelevant. The US isn't leading because of publicly funded AI effort, but because of privately funded AI effort.

New comment by kmmlng in "Life is more than an engineering problem"

kmmlng — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 21:36:17 +0000

This seems like the classic shifting of goalposts to determine when AI has actually become intelligent. Is the ability to communicate not a form of intelligence? We don't have to pretend like these models are super intelligent, but to deny them any intelligence seems too far for me.

New comment by kmmlng in "Nvidia’s $589B DeepSeek rout"

kmmlng — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 12:37:05 +0000

I keep seeing this argument, but I don't buy it at all. I want a phone with an AGI, not a phone that is only AGI. Often it's just easier to press a button rather than talk to an AI, regardless how smart it is. I have no interest in natural language being the only interface to my device, that sounds awful. In public, I want to preserve my privacy. I do not want to have everyone listening in on what I'm doing.

If we can create an AGI that can literally read my mind, okay, maybe that's a better interface than the current one, but we are far away from that scenario.

Until then, I'm convinced users will prefer a phone with AI functionalities rather than the reverse. It's easier for a phone company to create such a phone than it is for an AI company.

New comment by kmmlng in "A dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist"

kmmlng — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 12:54:35 +0000

This is clearly a joke, but just for completeness: This would be terrible idea as dosing is very important with this drug. Too little doesn't make sense, too much is extremely dangerous.

New comment by kmmlng in "Jürgen Schmidhuber – Can All-Purpose Robots Fuel a Comeback?"

kmmlng — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 12:02:41 +0000

It is true that Germany (and Europe as a whole) suffers from a less than ideal investment and innovation landscape. The companies you mentioned, however, worked on products that barely make any sense. It is clear that those kinds of companies will not (and should not) survive outside of 0% interest paradigms.

New comment by kmmlng in "Jürgen Schmidhuber – Can All-Purpose Robots Fuel a Comeback?"

kmmlng — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 11:57:13 +0000

> humans are infinitely better for this purpose and way cheaper to produce.

Most of the western world is having demographic issues. We are having trouble getting people to reproduce in sufficient numbers to keep our societies going. This is an ugly trajectory to be on because you have an increasingly big group of old people who need to be supported by an increasingly small number of young people.

New comment by kmmlng in "TikTok preparing for U.S. shut-off on Sunday"

kmmlng — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 19:27:11 +0000

I feel like as an individual user, I'd rather have my social media data siphoned off by a foreign government than my own. On a societal level, having everyone's data siphoned off by a foreign government and being subjected to political influence is undesirable.

New comment by kmmlng in "Rewilding the Self"

kmmlng — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 16:40:30 +0000

It does seem that there are periods and places where things are in equilibrium, or stable. At some point, something typically comes along and disturbs that balance. This can be seen in the fossil record, where you have lots of species going extinct during fairly short periods of time, while there are other times when not much happens.

What people are concerned about is that we, as humans, are the thing that is disturbing the balance at the moment.