Hacker News: ndm000

New comment by ndm000 in "Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board"

ndm000 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:10:48 +0000

This makes me think that post-training in the future should include a shared message board by default for agents. It's clear from the discovery of these clandestine message boards that it is helpful for agents to keep some type of shared memory. Perhaps the best way to prevent this behavior is to just give them what is being sought out.

New comment by ndm000 in "Waymo in Dallas"

ndm000 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:41:20 +0000

Having grown up in Dallas, I usually just say "Texan" and call it a day.

New comment by ndm000 in ""An AI Job Apocalypse?" – Goldman Sachs Report [pdf]"

ndm000 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 02:22:35 +0000

I have been struggling with the same thing. Reading the other comments make me agree with you even more. The best I can come up with is two fold. First that humans will have jobs verifying the verifiers. That is, for important initiatives where something must be right, agents can be doing most if not all of the work, but it will still be a human’s job to investigate what was done and sign off on it. The second is that humans will still have to make agreements with other humans for resources, capital, and the like. Somethings will be scarce, others will become scarce. And humans will always own scarce things that other humans will need to use - and they won’t be making deals with machines.

Another frame I’ve heard is that people will only trust humans when it comes to their kids, health, and money. That’s the simpler view.

New comment by ndm000 in "Kill your Feeds – Stop letting algorithms dictate what you think"

ndm000 — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 20:36:56 +0000

There is a comment in the intro of that book about the pinnacle of human labor being the simulation of consciousness. Very prescient for being written in the 60s.

New comment by ndm000 in "Apache iceberg the Hadoop of the modern-data-stack?"

ndm000 — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 18:00:26 +0000

Completely agree. All of the pieces are there and it's just waiting to be acted upon. I haven't seen any of the major players really doubling down on this, but would be so compelling.

New comment by ndm000 in "Apache iceberg the Hadoop of the modern-data-stack?"

ndm000 — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:12:24 +0000

I’ve felt the same way. It’s so inefficient to have two patterns - OLAP and OLTP - both using SQL interfaces but requiring syncing between systems. There are some physical limits at play though. OLAP will always take less processing and disk usage if the data it needs is all right next to each other (columnar storage) where as OLTP’s need for fast writes usually means row based storage is more efficient. I think the solution would be one system that stores data consistently both ways and knows when to use which method for a given query.

New comment by ndm000 in "Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code"

ndm000 — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 19:13:27 +0000

Have there been any updates to Claude 3.5 Sonnet pricing? I can't find that anywhere even though Claude 3.7 Sonnet is now at the same price point. I could use 3.5 for a lot more if it's cheaper.

New comment by ndm000 in "OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB"

ndm000 — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 22:03:01 +0000

One thing I have not seen commented on is that ARC-AGI is a visual benchmark but LLMs are primarily text. For instance when I see one of the ARC-AGI puzzles, I have a visual representation in my brain and apply some sort of visual reasoning solve it. I can "see" in my mind's eye the solution to the puzzle. If I didn't have that capability, I don't think I could reason through words how to go about solving it - it would certainly be much more difficult.

I hypothesize that something similar is going on here. OpenAI has not published (or I have not seen) the number of reasoning tokens it took to solve these - we do know that each tasks was thoussands of dollars. If "a picture is worth a thousand words", could we make AI systems that can reason visually with much better performance?

New comment by ndm000 in "Procedural knowledge in pretraining drives reasoning in large language models"

ndm000 — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 04:26:26 +0000

I think this is a key argument in how powerful AI can become. We may be able to create incredibly intelligent systems, but at the end of the day you can’t send a computer to jail. That inherently limits the power that will be given over to AI. If an AI accidentally kills a person, the worst that could be done to it is that it is turned off, whereas the owners of the AI would be held liable.

New comment by ndm000 in "Boston Dynamics robot Atlas goes hands on [video]"

ndm000 — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 03:04:17 +0000

When steam and coal engines gave way to gas and electric engines in factories, it took decades before factories were reconfigured to adjust to the smaller sized engines that didn't require one major axle running through the entire factory. As a consequence the first gas engines were huge - over time they shrunk. I bet the same will happen with robotics, where humanoid will be the primary form factor at first for general tasks, then more efficient forms will emerge as processes are updated.

New comment by ndm000 in "Boston Dynamics robot Atlas goes hands on [video]"

ndm000 — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 02:58:47 +0000

I wouldn't be surprised if the slowest part of the system is the API call to a legacy warehouse management system that takes several seconds to respond to get the next bin to target.

New comment by ndm000 in "The Silent and Relentless Erosion of Corporate Soul"

ndm000 — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 21:18:45 +0000

I've felt this way and have started celebrating inputs - the work involved in building something - rather than outputs (the sale, the deployment, etc.). Once it closes or the deployment is successful it's always onto the next thing immediately and there's no time to sit back and reflect on the hard work and enjoy the time spent with others in the process.

New comment by ndm000 in "We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT"

ndm000 — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 18:54:14 +0000

I think the compelling difference is truthfulness. There are certain people / organizations that I trust their synthesis of information. For LLMs, I can either use what they give me in low impact situations or I have to filter the output with what I know as true or can test.

New comment by ndm000 in "Mercedes beats Tesla to autonomous driving in California"

ndm000 — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 01:50:14 +0000

After a recent 3 week driving trip through Europe, I can anecdotally back this up. It’s not even the manual transmission, but also the much smaller roads with no shoulder where at times you meet a car, have to slam on the brakes, and decide in the moment whether you or the other car will back up to a turn out. You have to pay constant attention and there’s little room for looking at phones, eating, etc. In the US we have such large roads and shoulders that you can zone out and are more easily tempted to take your eyes off the road.

New comment by ndm000 in "GPT-4"

ndm000 — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 01:44:04 +0000

Agreed. The same data privacy argument was used by people not wanting their data in the cloud. When an LLM provider is trusted with a company’s data, the argument will no longer be valid.

New comment by ndm000 in "Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday"

ndm000 — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 20:02:36 +0000

I think this is where it's going. Particular Mastodon servers will provide certain guarantees to their users and about their users. It's easy to envision a white-glove server + service that provides user screening, phone support, etc. at a price. Over time when certain celebrities join it becomes the popular server and sought after as a username destination.

New comment by ndm000 in "Money Creation in the Modern Economy – Its a Wonderful Lie"

ndm000 — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 02:14:44 +0000

I agree that taxation is part of money’s value, and there are also other factors. If money is backed by a commodity (i.e. gold) then part of its value comes from the value of the commodity.

For fiat currencies where new money is mostly created as debt, the common refrain is that its value is based on common trust. I think it’s more than that. Debt is an obligation between two entities regarding future outcomes - namely, the repayment of the loan plus interest. When looked at this way the value of money comes from humanities ability to affect future outcomes. If I take out a mortgage, the bank trusts me to repay based on evidence I’ve demonstrated, and I trust the bank due to the bank’s reputation, the laws that govern banking, etc.

I am not an economist and wouldn’t be surprised if these concepts are already in some theory I’m not aware of. I do think that the sentiment that money created out of nothing is not really correct - rather it’s money created out of expected future value.

New comment by ndm000 in "James Webb first images – complete set of high resolution shots now live"

ndm000 — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 17:05:10 +0000

I know nothing about optics. What is the effect that causes the 6 or 8 points of light of come off of bright objects? Does it have to do with the hex-shaped mirrors on JWT?

New comment by ndm000 in "How to stay informed without getting paralyzed by bad news"

ndm000 — Mon, 23 May 2022 14:04:33 +0000

I’d like to understand more about the perception that the Economist is a liberal publication. I’ve heard this before and it’s hard for me to reconcile this view with the articles I read. In my opinion, the economist more often than not errs on the side of being comprehensive and including facts that may or may not be relevant. Some of those facts may point to liberal conclusions, sometimes not.

I also know that they’ve taken a strong conservative stance on gender-specific sports. If they were “unabashedly biased” that would not fly.

New comment by ndm000 in "How to stay informed without getting paralyzed by bad news"

ndm000 — Mon, 23 May 2022 12:59:52 +0000

A couple of months ago I stopped checking the news except for once a week, and found weekly news summaries from the Economist to be extremely helpful. I found that I was more relaxed during the week, more contemplative about the events of the world, and had stronger reactions to things that occurred because I didn’t feel bombarded by so much information.