Hacker News: svnt

New comment by svnt in "DeepSeek planning to significantly raise prices"

svnt — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:00:59 +0000

If you log and view your "Usage" page there is a blue banner near the top in a blue box saying:

> We plan to raise the overall pricing for DeepSeek API services in the near future, with a significant increase expected. Please plan your usage accordingly. The specific pricing plan will be subject to official notice.

New comment by svnt in "Benchmarking Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench"

svnt — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:04:14 +0000

There are few conspiracies where the vectors between "capitalist organization makes more money" and "user can't reliably distinguish tiers of product quality" overlap.

New comment by svnt in "Benchmarking Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench"

svnt — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:01:19 +0000

I replied to the user above that referenced marginlab, but I believe marginlab uses the API. It is possible (arguably likely, in MBA-land) that the API and subscription accounts hit different sub-models.

Even if they use a subscription account, surely Anthropic can tell which one it is.

New comment by svnt in "Benchmarking Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench"

svnt — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:59:10 +0000

Is this using the api or using a subscription, though? The incentives are different for each, and it isn't the least bit unexpected that they would maintain API access quality while 'optimizing' the subscription experience to improve their margins (or losses)

It seems to do really this you would need to crowdsource it -- users individually give the lab access to a body of subscriptions normally used by average people, and the lab occasionally runs some masked version of the task through on diverse accounts.

New comment by svnt in "For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides"

svnt — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 05:06:30 +0000

It's because really what they are doing is using chemistry to split a cell. Adamala is a chemist.

They have just bolted an unsynchronized physicochemical process onto the boundary of the cell. It doesn't coordinate with anything to do with the cell. Both cells don't get half of the dna. They built stochastic chemical scissors that only work if you make the cell less cell-like.

New comment by svnt in "Nvidia Halos"

svnt — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:51:01 +0000

18,600 engineering years sounds impressive to someone because it is the bulk of a career for 1,000 engineers. But it is less than two years for 10,000 engineers. The depth of understanding really hinges on which version is closer to reality.

Meta Horizons World probably puts up similar numbers if you sum up the hardware/software tech stack to get this number.

New comment by svnt in "The room the economy can't see"

svnt — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:00:06 +0000

It has very human aspects, such as the beginning. So people switch off. And then it has long stretches where it is bulked up by claude and opus-4.8’s obsession with “honestly true,” “narrower” claims, how concepts “rhyme” etc.

I guess it is also possible this person has internalized claude, but I think their writing pattern is: short pieces: fully human voice; long pieces: ai-supported.

As to my personal views, I am sad to have lost the emdash and the antithesis, among other things, to the llm-cliche dustbin.

New comment by svnt in "The room the economy can't see"

svnt — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 13:48:31 +0000

Right, this is cyborg text. The opening is in human voice. I am acknowledging that. Then it ebbs and flows over llm rocks.

The piece would be maybe 6-8 grafs without claude, and much of claude is papered over.

New comment by svnt in "The room the economy can't see"

svnt — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 08:31:41 +0000

The one they claim is in their voice [1] has zero of the tells I am referring to. You can compare and contrast it with your fully/generated reference 0 (although that is fable and I have little experience reading its writing it seems to use many similar comventions) and the title piece and see what I mean.

[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/07/labor-is-a-market-distor...

New comment by svnt in "The room the economy can't see"

svnt — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:47:10 +0000

Parts of it seem not to be, but the bulk of it is. Here is a particularly clear example of opus-4.8-speak.

> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.

New comment by svnt in "The room the economy can't see"

svnt — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 13:39:44 +0000

It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.

New comment by svnt in "How to earn a billion dollars"

svnt — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:49:34 +0000

Founders are often synonymous with their businesses. In the case of celebrities the relevant exploitation is carried out by others in the value chain, they are just the lure/source.

New comment by svnt in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

svnt — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:06:10 +0000

It makes the government stupider so there are more excuses to bring in better private solutions.

Handicap the public services if they are working well, then talk about how bad they are to justify for-profit replacement.

Or don’t and just exploit the gaps directly with better private data, whatever increases proximate wealth inequality.

New comment by svnt in "New pancreatic cancer drug might open the door to much longer survival times"

svnt — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:34:50 +0000

They are all about science and research. What they don’t want is for scientific discoveries to be publicly available, because then it is harder to leverage them for absurd profit margins.

New comment by svnt in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

svnt — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:19:46 +0000

Which they anticipated, which is why they were flagging and dropping back to opus on anything they could even potentially be called on.

New comment by svnt in "Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public"

svnt — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:28:31 +0000

Not sure but a green screen version of AWS for $500 is totally plausible and a decent metaphor for what you’d get with AI anyway.

New comment by svnt in "Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public"

svnt — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:24:49 +0000

I have found that on long-running tasks, many of the communication (and other) invariants get dropped at seemingly arbitrary points along the way. It probably just stopped doing the log.

New comment by svnt in "OpenRouter raises $113M Series B"

svnt — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 05:50:44 +0000

As I see the perspective of a typical vp champion/customer/middle manager at a large org that buys their services: if my vendor increases their prices that is usually an indication they have something of value and things are going well. It is a negotiation, buy or build business choices, not embarrassing. If my vendor doesn’t raise, and then they cease to exist, or become so weak that a competitor of mine can buy them out, then I am actually in an embarrassing place.

My main job in this conception is to not be in an embarrassing place, and grow my budgets and headcount. Prices rising can even help with this, perversely.

New comment by svnt in "OpenRouter raises $113M Series B"

svnt — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:44:46 +0000

They are because they can, because it serves as social proof, which convinces their customers that they are doing something of deeper value. Then in reality they will use it to develop channels preparing to use their customers (and the data customers trust them with) as the product in the future.

New comment by svnt in "OpenRouter raises $113M Series B"

svnt — Sun, 31 May 2026 00:42:41 +0000

The play is the same as it always was, I assume: your data is the long term product.