Hacker News: mbeavitt

New comment by mbeavitt in "Show HN: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021"

mbeavitt — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 10:54:43 +0000

Bring back DVD rentals!

In the US, you don't even need to pay a licensing fee when you buy a DVD with intent to rent it out to people (this is not the case in the UK), thanks to the "First-sale doctrine" - Bobbs-Merrill v. Straus (1908).

New comment by mbeavitt in "AlphaGenome Atlas: a high-resolution map of human DNA"

mbeavitt — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:38:06 +0000

They did benchmark the model and beat the SOTA on every metric though

New comment by mbeavitt in "You Don't Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, US Court Rules"

mbeavitt — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 09:54:11 +0000

This headline is not correct. The ruling was that a constitutional lawsuit was not successful, not that the the US government has carte blanche to poison its citizens drinking water…

So, the correct headline would be “safe drinking water ruled not to be covered by the US constitution”. There are other binding agreements and regulations than the constitution in the US.

New comment by mbeavitt in "He Said He Was the Healthiest Man. Then Came a Diagnosis"

mbeavitt — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 14:04:46 +0000

I don't have an NYT subscription but I'm familiar with this story. I think it's a bit blown out of proprtion... autoimmune gastritis is not a death sentence. I think Mr Johnston will probably find plenty of ways to cope with his vast wealth

New comment by mbeavitt in "Chinese robot runs 100M sprint quicker than Usain Bolt's world record"

mbeavitt — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 14:02:24 +0000

It's crazy how these records are just quietly being broken by humanoid robots. What's next? What a time to be alive.

New comment by mbeavitt in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

mbeavitt — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:18:21 +0000

From their perspective, it's training data that their competitors don't have. If they make it available, they fill in their moat.

New comment by mbeavitt in "Olo (Color)"

mbeavitt — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 12:13:55 +0000

Wtf does this mean? “Their square display of olo occupied an angular width of 0.9°[1], around twice the diameter of the moon[7].”

New comment by mbeavitt in "Using GCC's Nested Functions with Wide Pointers and No Trampolines II"

mbeavitt — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:50:12 +0000

Why would someone want to use a nested function, practically speaking?

New comment by mbeavitt in "Show HN: Rotating torus in terminal (but with kitty graphics protocol)"

mbeavitt — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 15:52:44 +0000

Reminded me of this recent post: https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/s/ko1Jv1Qxhw

Improving Fable 5's biology safeguards

mbeavitt — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:14:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.anthropic.com/news/improving-fable-5-s-biology-safeguards

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49216854

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by mbeavitt in "What 2026 looks like (2021)"

mbeavitt — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:47:55 +0000

Anyone brave enough to make predictions about 2030? FYI the predictions in the comments of the blog post are just as interesting, this prediction from Dan Hendrycks is particularly relevant this month:

"2026

Machine learning systems become great at using Metasploit and other hacking tools, increasing the accessibility, potency, success rate, scale, stealth, and speed of cyberattacks. This gets severe enough to create global instability and turmoil. EAs did little to use ML to improve cybersecurity and reduce this risk."

What 2026 looks like (2021)

mbeavitt — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:46:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212263

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by mbeavitt in "Artificial Intelligence used to design new viruses"

mbeavitt — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:52:16 +0000

Didn’t see anything about how they are treating the model confidentiality - will this be released to select orgs or made open? I guess this could one of the few things I would not want to be open sourced.

New comment by mbeavitt in "Study: People prefer stories written by AI"

mbeavitt — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:40:54 +0000

People also like superhero films but they are not exactly lauded as the pinnacle of cinema. I don't think this proves anything about AI being better or equivalent to human writers in terms of style and content - more that broadly appealing works appeal broadly...

New comment by mbeavitt in "Security Incident INC-2026-07-28-01 – UK AI Security Institute [pdf]"

mbeavitt — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:23:22 +0000

The developer safeguards were off, the models had unfettered access to the internet, and were solving cybersecurity challenges. This happened _after_ the recent OpenAI incident, and the subsequent Anthropic one. What the hell were they thinking?

New comment by mbeavitt in "Which streaming service was that on again?"

mbeavitt — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:05:23 +0000

Honestly, I’ve gone back to dvd rentals! CinemaParadiso sends me as many films and boxsets as I can handle by post and it’s the same price as a standard Netflix subscription…

And it’s in blissfully high bitrate 4k! Anyone else notice that even the high quality options of streaming services are compressed to hell?!!

New comment by mbeavitt in "Our Approach to Bioresilience: Isomorphic Labs and Google DeepMind"

mbeavitt — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:31:59 +0000

One thing I really admire about isomorphic and DeepMind in general is that they really try and encode human ingenuity into their models. The only reason that AlphaFold worked wasn't because they had better hardware or more money to train models - it's because they used every bit of information they had access to.

The same goes for AlphaGenome - it only takes a few hours to train the model, but it's freaking amazing what it can predict.

New comment by mbeavitt in "How to sequence your own DNA at home"

mbeavitt — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 10:24:51 +0000

This is simply not true, advances in basecalling and using Duplex give you >Q25

New comment by mbeavitt in "CT scans of BYD car parts"

mbeavitt — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:05:25 +0000

I really don’t understand why this social credit concept has become so widespread. It does sort of exist but not in the big government breathing down your neck kind of way.

Here’s an example - you can rent e-bikes and power banks at low cost, they are everywhere. If you don’t return an e-bike or power bank after using it, not only will that company charge you, but you’ll likely get blacklisted from renting more, even at other companies.

This is a good thing, no???

SSH-Keysign-Pwn: Reading Root-Owned Files via a Ptrace Logic Bug

mbeavitt — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:39:15 +0000

Article URL: https://needhelp.icu/blogs/ssh-keysign-pwn/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48150037

Points: 2

# Comments: 0