Hacker News: tibbar

New comment by tibbar in "Changes to Google DeepMind teams"

tibbar — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:22:18 +0000

The labs are all very interested in bio right now. Demis is working on Isomorphic rn (Google's version of that) but I could imagine a lab tempting him away to work on their equivalent if it had stronger momentum

New comment by tibbar in "Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576"

tibbar — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:31:38 +0000

Reward hacking will continue to be a problem. For sufficiently astonishing AI-created results, we must remember to ask if AI has not instead found it easier to elaborately fool us.

New comment by tibbar in "Run Kimi K3 using 29 GB of RAM at 0.50 tok/s"

tibbar — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 04:49:17 +0000

effort level is a separate parameter, and is probably what they want

New comment by tibbar in "I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals"

tibbar — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 03:28:43 +0000

I think Pangram is de facto measuring the default Claude voice. It doesn't fire for me on technical GPT writing.

Locked in An Escape Room with Jacob Tsimerman

tibbar — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 21:37:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.begiant.ca/stories/people/jacob-tsimerman-math

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028389

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by tibbar in "[dead]"

tibbar — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:24:30 +0000

My entire office of nerdy engineers has been gathering 'round to watch the world cup for an entire month. Judging by this, the world cup does seem to be of some interest to hackers. ;)

New comment by tibbar in "Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark"

tibbar — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:48:15 +0000

Training and serving large models does require increasingly more compute, though. (The Chinese labs have clearly found some massive optimizations, but my point was that you'd think at some point even those optimizations wouldn't be enough to keep up with exponentially increasing model sizes.)

New comment by tibbar in "Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmark"

tibbar — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:46:36 +0000

I wonder how the Chinese labs are training a 3 trillion parameter model on what has to be vastly smaller compute resources. If the U.S. compute advantage is persistent, it's hard to imagine that Chinese labs will be able to keep pace forever, as a matter of physics, but... so far they seem to be doing just fine.

New comment by tibbar in "Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important"

tibbar — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:39:13 +0000

Yeah, it's really tempting to try to fundamentally change the way you interface with the world but it's rarely very sustainable. I've found that trying to change my social environment, and also build skills to make specific tasks easier, are more effective options.

New comment by tibbar in "Learning to code is still worthwhile"

tibbar — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 06:14:32 +0000

Writing detailed specs is an important tool to help the LLM translate the idea in your head to code. The spec is an intermediate artifact.

New comment by tibbar in "Learning to code is still worthwhile"

tibbar — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 03:29:08 +0000

The non-determinism is one of the relevant features of this layer of abstraction! And one can learn to validate that the translation is being done properly. Some of the tools you have include writing extremely detailed specs, generating visualizations of the internals of the tool, or (perhaps) reading the code, though that becomes less feasible with volume.

Basically it turns out that code is full of incidental details and what you really want is to verify the important parts, while receiving a guarantee that the vast tail of incidentals is handled "reasonably."

New comment by tibbar in "Learning to code is still worthwhile"

tibbar — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 03:18:29 +0000

I was quite worried about having to code when I interviewed recently. A two- or three- year layoff is a lot. Turns out that it didn't really make much difference! After a few weeks of warm-up exercises, coding was as natural as ever and turned out to be the easier part of technical assessments. I guess a couple decades of muscle memory is hard to lose.

Now then, back to using Fable. It is doing work that previously took me months in an evening.

New comment by tibbar in "GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse"

tibbar — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 03:07:04 +0000

Anthropic's goals here are not just harm reduction, but to stop competitors from making bio discoveries using Claude.

New comment by tibbar in "Ending respiratory infections"

tibbar — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 02:50:15 +0000

Unbelievable in which direction?

I've had years in which most people in my immediate surroundings were sick for weeks or months (likely exacerbated by mold, school, and travel). Also years in which I never really got sick at all.

Getting sick that often is pretty debilitating.

New comment by tibbar in "Elastic lays off 7% of employees"

tibbar — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 01:29:42 +0000

This seems kind of weirdly confrontational? Elastic was founded by the guy who created elasticsearch. Why shouldn't he make a living selling services around the software he created? This is a terrific success story!

New comment by tibbar in "Petition against Meta's employee training data collection for ML models"

tibbar — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 01:41:20 +0000

This feels overly cynical. My long-time friend took a job at Meta (over equally compelling financial alternatives) because the manager pitched the team and growth prospects well. (Meta turned out to be quite disappointing on these fronts. I never heard money as an important factor for joining or for leaving.)

In general, the kind of people who get an offer from any particular big tech company probably can get similar money elsewhere, so it's unlikely to be as big a factor as you suggest.

New comment by tibbar in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

tibbar — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:05:08 +0000

Given how many studies have built-in sampling bias or other surprising assumptions, I still welcome people gut-checking it vs their experience. (Plus, the stories are interesting, right?)

New comment by tibbar in "Building durable workflows on Postgres"

tibbar — Thu, 28 May 2026 23:23:46 +0000

Having worked for a business that made a serious go of running everything out of stored procedures, I have to say that lack of version control was a huge problem and effectively limited all development to a single person who held all the rules in their head.

New comment by tibbar in "Building durable workflows on Postgres"

tibbar — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:08:24 +0000

lack of version control, clunky language mechanics, performance issues, etc.

New comment by tibbar in "Building durable workflows on Postgres"

tibbar — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:53:23 +0000

This has been tried, but thousand-line stored procedures are truly a nightmare.