Hacker News: mnkv

New comment by mnkv in "StarFighter 16-Inch"

mnkv — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:53:11 +0000

you mean like the thinkpad trackpoint?

New comment by mnkv in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

mnkv — Mon, 04 May 2026 20:31:45 +0000

Just talk to them as if they were already your friend. Most of what you talk about with friends isn't just mutual interests and you start conversations with them all the time.

New comment by mnkv in "Open Weights isn't Open Training"

mnkv — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 20:30:56 +0000

This blog post describes the basic work of a research engineer and nothing more. The amount of surprise the author has seems to suggest they haven't really worked in ML for very long.

Honestly? This is the best its ever been. Getting stuff to run before huggingface and uv and docker containers with cuda was way worse. Even with full open-source, go try to run a 3+ years old model and codebase. The field just moves very fast.

New comment by mnkv in "I spent two days gigging at RentAHuman and didn't make a single cent"

mnkv — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:35:03 +0000

The paper you're talking about is "Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues" and it was just AIs drifting away from English. The crazy news article was from Forbes with the title "AI invents its own language so Facebook had to shut it down!" before they changed it after backlash.

Not related to alignment though

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2017/07/31/facebook...

New comment by mnkv in "We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports"

mnkv — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 19:29:07 +0000

My ideal is copilot that would evaluate the PR against some basic guidelines that maintainers write down.

And perhaps a way to filter PRs to just contributor PRs would be easy to implement and pretty useful

New comment by mnkv in "Animated AI"

mnkv — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 03:57:03 +0000

Nice work. A while back, I learned convolutions using similar animations by Vincent Dumoulin and Francesco Visin's gifs

https://github.com/vdumoulin/conv_arithmetic

New comment by mnkv in "Extract-0: A specialized language model for document information extraction"

mnkv — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 18:00:37 +0000

> the generation of 281,128 augmented examples, from which 1,000 were held out as a benchmark test set.

This model is trained on a custom dataset of 280k examples then tested on 1k very similar examples from the same dataset. Of course it is specialized to outperform general models on this specific task in this specific domain with this specific json format for output.

This is a reasonable hobby project and interesting approach to synthetic data generation but not impressive research.

At minimum you should test your model on other benchmarks that have similar tasks e.g. docbench

New comment by mnkv in "Reinforcement learning, explained with a minimum of math and jargon"

mnkv — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 01:54:15 +0000

reasonable post with a decent analogy explaining on-policy learning, only major thing I take issue with is

> Reinforcement learning is a technical subject—there are whole textbooks written about it.

and then linking to the still wip RLHF book instead of the book on RL: Sutton & Barto.

New comment by mnkv in "Wired is dropping paywalls for FOIA-based reporting. Others should follow"

mnkv — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 15:55:42 +0000

I think it's pretty obvious it's 1. Given the recent huge, clearly politically-motivated cuts from the current administration, it feels pretty likely that FOIA could be disrupted under the guise of "cost-saving".

And I think you're supposed to be generous to the commenter, not the current administration ;)

New comment by mnkv in "JabRef – Literature Management"

mnkv — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 18:38:23 +0000

how does this compare to zotero?

New comment by mnkv in "iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max"

mnkv — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 20:17:21 +0000

> IR temperature sensor for checking your body temperature or stuff you baking in the oven

> tiny thermal camera sensor for inspecting leaks in house for the winter

So just a thermometer gun? It costs like $20-30 on amazon and I've never needed one other than in my home / kitchen. Why in the world do you want a phone for this haha.

I do think I've found the perfect car for you: https://tenor.com/view/homer-simpsons-car-gif-8120474

New comment by mnkv in "Large models of what? Mistaking engineering achievements for linguistic agency"

mnkv — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 21:58:10 +0000

Good summary of some of the main "theoretical" criticism of LLMs but I feel that it's a bit dated and ignores the recent trend of iterative post-training, especially with human feedback. Major chatbots are no doubt being iteratively refined on the feedback from users i.e. interaction feedback, RLHF, RLAIF. So ChatGPT could fall within the sort of "enactive" perspective on language and definitely goes beyond the issues of static datasets and data completeness.

Sidenote: the authors make a mistake when citing Wittgenstein to find similarity between humans and LLMs. Language modelling on a static dataset is mostly not a language game (see Bender and Koller's section on distributional semantics and caveats on learning meaning from "control codes")

New comment by mnkv in "How AI Is Enhancing, Not Replacing, Human Expertise in Creative Fields"

mnkv — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 16:29:21 +0000

The low quality of this blog post (and all your posts) makes me think you wrote it mostly with AI. The irony is palpable.

AI is clearly enhancing humans in their creation of garbage.

New comment by mnkv in "Charlie Munger – Feeling Like a Victim Is Perfectly Disastrous"

mnkv — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 21:47:14 +0000

You give up a shitty view and any chance of fire escape. Such a savings!

New comment by mnkv in "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"

mnkv — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 17:47:19 +0000

You understand some of what your cats mean because you learned it using the same language games Wittgenstein describes. Also they co-evolved to work with us. But just because you understand three moods of your cat, doesn't mean you would understand their language (if they had one). In fact, it is well studied that cats communicate differently with other cats than with humans.

Sidenote: grouping together non-verbal communication and language fails to take into account the richness of language.

New comment by mnkv in "Lewis Hine’s early 20th-century “photo stories”"

mnkv — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 14:42:27 +0000

The problem with your perspective is you are assuming children have independent wants and needs to work and can stand up for themselves like adult workers can. This just isn't the case.

Children don't personally decide to work, they are told to by parents / authority / etc.. and they are incredibly vulnerable as employees. Comparing child labour to lemonade stands is ridiculous. There are rules about children working in the family store etc.. and child labour laws explicitly account for this. Child labour laws are explicitly about preventing abusive conditions in factories, fields, and other hard, grueling jobs.

New comment by mnkv in "The techlash that never happened"

mnkv — Sun, 14 May 2023 17:53:00 +0000

Of all the absolute horseshit in the article, the most obviously wrong is saying that "tech doesn't play both sides of the political aisle".

So obviously wrong if you look at any single company. Just recently, we saw how FTX was lobbying hard for both sides.

And there absolutely has been a backlash against tech. Ask any Facebook employee how people react when they say where they work.

New comment by mnkv in "Digital addiction: Focusing on the cure, not the disease"

mnkv — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 21:24:19 +0000

> The solvents we need in this case are the healthier methods of fulfilling these longings.

Terrible take. Algorithmic feeds and ad-tech has continually optimized how to get and maintain our attention. It is ridiculous to think "going into nature" or any individual solution is the answer. We blame pharmaceutical companies for making addictive drugs, why don't we blame tech companies for making addictive apps?

New comment by mnkv in "StableLM: A new open-source language model"

mnkv — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 22:21:58 +0000

How did you run the benchmarking, zero-shot or few-shot? I think a fair comparison would be Llama-7B which got an average ~35% for 5-shot.

New comment by mnkv in "Giving the finger is a ‘God-given right’, Canadian judge rules"

mnkv — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 22:03:12 +0000

Did you read the whole report??? The complainant is essentially stalking his neighbour with surveillance footage, recording any time the neighbour so much as looks in his direction, and keeps a stalker-ish log book with insults. On top of that his wife and his father nearly hit the neighbour's 4 year olds with a car and then say they refuse to slow down. The report says the car was "inches away" from another person and that kid would have been run over!

And then the complainant has the audacity to file criminal suit over his neighbour giving him middle finger after he does it first! This story is about basic insanity.