Hacker News: mkolodny

New comment by mkolodny in "Show HN: OCR Arena – A playground for OCR models"

mkolodny — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 04:48:33 +0000

This is super helpful :) Curious about Grok as well!

New comment by mkolodny in "US AI Action Plan"

mkolodny — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 16:18:47 +0000

Even if it’s not perfect, I’m happy to see there’s a focus on AI Security. NIST has been a reliable producer of quality international standards for cybersecurity. Hopefully this action plan will lead to similarly high quality recommendations for AI Security.

New comment by mkolodny in "Media's AI Anthropomorphism Problem"

mkolodny — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:47:35 +0000

Humans have limited ability to self-introspect, too. Even if we understood exactly how our brains work, answering “why?” we do things might still be very difficult and complex.

New comment by mkolodny in "Grok: Searching X for "From:Elonmusk (Israel or Palestine or Hamas or Gaza)""

mkolodny — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 15:52:14 +0000

Biases can lead to opinions, goals, and aspirations. For example, if you only read about the bad things Israelis or Palestinians have done, you might form an opinion that one of those groups is bad. Your answers to questions about the subject would reflect that opinion. Of course, less, biased information means you’d be less intelligent and give incorrect answers at times. The bias would likely lower your general intelligence - affecting your answers to seemingly unrelated but distantly connected questions. I’d expect that the same is true of LLMs.

New comment by mkolodny in "Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta"

mkolodny — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 00:05:12 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by mkolodny in "Leaked data reveals Israeli govt campaign to remove pro-Palestine posts on Meta"

mkolodny — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 23:24:34 +0000

Are you saying you think human editors handpick what goes on billions of people’s Facebook feeds?

New comment by mkolodny in "Meta got caught gaming AI benchmarks"

mkolodny — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 21:50:13 +0000

“Got caught” is a misleading way to present what happened.

According to the article, Meta publicly stated, right below the benchmark comparison, that the version of Llama on LMArena was the experimental chat version:

> According to Meta’s own materials, it deployed an “experimental chat version” of Maverick to LMArena that was specifically “optimized for conversationality”

The AI benchmark in question, LMArena, compares Llama 4 experimental to closed models like ChatGPT 4o latest, and Llama performs better (https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard).

New comment by mkolodny in "US Securities and Exchange Commission beginning to bring on DOGE staff"

mkolodny — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 22:23:19 +0000

Is that what DOGE is doing? Helping decide the SEC’s policies?

New comment by mkolodny in "US Securities and Exchange Commission beginning to bring on DOGE staff"

mkolodny — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 22:11:16 +0000

> The SEC has its budget set by Congress, but the actual funding comes from transaction fees imposed on the financial sector, meaning its operations ultimately cost the taxpayer nothing, according to the agency.

How do you make something that costs nothing more efficient?

New comment by mkolodny in "Anthropic raises $3.5B at $61.5B valuation"

mkolodny — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 19:28:12 +0000

The same government where the head of the department of efficiency is also the owner of Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s competitor, xAI?

New comment by mkolodny in "DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data"

mkolodny — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 17:42:19 +0000

> security reasons later

What about security reasons now? The federal government includes the military. Giving DOGE “God mode” on the federal government is a national security risk right now.

New comment by mkolodny in "Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance"

mkolodny — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:59:07 +0000

A vague “stuff is happening behind closed doors” isn’t enough of a reason to build AI weapons. If you shared a specific weapon that could only be countered with AI weapons, that might make me feel differently. But right now I can’t imagine a reason we’d need or want robots to decide who to kill.

When people talk about AI being dangerous, or possibly bringing about the end of the world, I usually disagree. But AI weapons are obviously dangerous, and could easily get out of control. Their whole point is that they are out of control.

The issue isn’t that AI weapons are “evil”. It’s that value alignment isn’t a solved problem, and AI weapons could kill people we wouldn’t want them to kill.

New comment by mkolodny in "Tsunami Warning for Northern California"

mkolodny — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 19:11:35 +0000

PRELIMINARY EARTHQUAKE PARAMETERS ---------------------------------

* The following parameters are based on a rapid preliminary assessment of the earthquake and changes may occur.

* Magnitude 7.3 * Origin Time 0944 AKST Dec 05 2024 1044 PST Dec 05 2024 1844 UTC Dec 05 2024 * Coordinates 40.3 North 124.7 West * Depth 8 miles * Location 45 miles SW of Eureka, California 215 miles NW of San Francisco, California

New comment by mkolodny in "Z-Library Helps Students to Overcome Academic Poverty, Study Finds"

mkolodny — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 07:14:37 +0000

One vendor on VirusTotal flagged the domain currently linked from their Wikipedia article as malicious.

New comment by mkolodny in "Z-Library Helps Students to Overcome Academic Poverty, Study Finds"

mkolodny — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 04:48:47 +0000

On VirusTotal, 5 different vendors flag Z-Library as malicious. Are they just flagging the site because of IP issues, or is the site full of malware?

New comment by mkolodny in "Meta does a U-turn, will share its technology with Five Eyes members"

mkolodny — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 15:55:58 +0000

The Internet was largely developed by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) [0]. Tools like the Internet and AI can be used for many things, good and bad.

[0] https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/br...

New comment by mkolodny in "Prevention of HIV"

mkolodny — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 04:37:37 +0000

“You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vac...

New comment by mkolodny in "Prevention of HIV"

mkolodny — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 00:11:27 +0000

I'm surprised people are still making that argument even after the pandemic showed us the risk is nowhere near worth the reward. Regardless you need to create a vaccine for the discovered virus (which can take less than a week, as was the case with covid). And then you still need to go through months of human trials.

I was hoping we were done risking starting pandemics by purposefully creating new deadly viruses.

New comment by mkolodny in "Open source AI is the path forward"

mkolodny — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 17:10:22 +0000

I disagree. The file I linked to, model.py, contains the Llama 3 model itself.

You can use that model with open data to train it from scratch yourself. Or you can load Meta’s open weights and have a working LLM.

New comment by mkolodny in "Open source AI is the path forward"

mkolodny — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:59:11 +0000

Llama’s code is open source: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/blob/main/llama/model.p...