Hacker News: tomjohnneill

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Astra and Fable still hack on simple variants of alignment evals from 2025"

tomjohnneill — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 06:40:03 +0000

Now you've successfully trained the next model not to put anything suspicious in its chain of thought. And unfortunately that's exactly what OpenAI and Anthropic seem to be doing (sometimes accidentally)

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Launch HN: Skope (YC S25) – Outcome-based pricing for software products"

tomjohnneill — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 16:38:33 +0000

Did the agents you built work? I think we're doing something similar in the UK and intrigued to know how it went for you (https://www.plinth.org.uk)

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Launch HN: Skope (YC S25) – Outcome-based pricing for software products"

tomjohnneill — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 16:20:21 +0000

I'd be very interested to hear more about how the non-for-profit agents platform went/anything else you learnt.

Major breakthroughs in UK munitions production

tomjohnneill — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 12:29:27 +0000

Article URL: https://www.baesystems.com/en/article/major-breakthroughs-in-uk-munitions-production

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43761348

Points: 46

# Comments: 40

New comment by tomjohnneill in "The industry structure of LLM makers"

tomjohnneill — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 20:28:48 +0000

And it's ASML more than TSMC.

Or maybe there's a highly profitable role for all the different parts of the value chain.

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2024)"

tomjohnneill — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 17:10:03 +0000

Plinth (https://plinth.org.uk/) | London (UK) | Senior Engineer (mostly Frontend) | Onsite

At plinth, we've built a software/AI platform for charities to help them measure their impact and get more funding for the work they're doing. We work with both charities and funders (e.g. foundations, Government), providing a way to easily collect, visualise and report on client and impact data.

We're looking for an engineer with experience with React, NextJS etc, who wants to spend almost all their time heads down writing code, and not spending time in meetings.

To apply, try our puzzle: https://www.plinth.org.uk/puzzle

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Paragraph Pollution: AI is (probably) greener than you typing on a laptop"

tomjohnneill — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 14:55:31 +0000

I think it's a case of tech bubble vs the rest of the world. Most people are not subscribing to the paid version of ChatGPT, but a lot of people who spend a lot of time with these things are.

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Paragraph Pollution: AI is (probably) greener than you typing on a laptop"

tomjohnneill — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 14:22:15 +0000

It's the default for the free version of ChatGPT no? That's what the majority of people use.

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Paragraph Pollution: AI is (probably) greener than you typing on a laptop"

tomjohnneill — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 14:09:16 +0000

I'm not sure. The figures I've seen suggest that GPT3 required 10x more energy to train than GPT2 (e.g. https://www.nnlabs.org/power-requirements-of-large-language-....), so I think a roughly 1-2 order of magnitude increase in energy usage from GPT2 to GPT3.5 makes sense.

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Paragraph Pollution: AI is (probably) greener than you typing on a laptop"

tomjohnneill — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 13:53:42 +0000

I can definitely imagine they're not covering the amortised cost of the training with the cost per individual inference request. It seems less likely to me that they're making a significant loss on each subsequent request, but again no source from me on that either.

Looking a bit more into this, I found this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.16863.pdf. It references a table saying that text generation uses 0.047 kWh per 1000 inferences, which is 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than my estimate. Though that is for GPT2, so possibly tracks to something roughly in the ~0.001 kWh per inference for GPT3.5.

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Paragraph Pollution: AI is (probably) greener than you typing on a laptop"

tomjohnneill — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 13:02:44 +0000

That's fair about ignoring the training cost. I did write a bit more going into that in a follow up piece here: https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/ai-is-good-for-the-pl...

Do you have any better sources for the power usage stats? It would be good to get a bit closer on that front. Having said that, even if the cost share is closer to 80%, that still puts it on par with a laptop for an average person.

Paragraph Pollution: AI is (probably) greener than you typing on a laptop

tomjohnneill — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 12:43:57 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.plinth.org.uk/paragraph-pollution-ai-is-greener-than-you-typing-on-a-laptop/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39479856

Points: 3

# Comments: 12

Cocytarchy – By Kulak – Anarchonomicon

tomjohnneill — Sat, 04 Mar 2023 22:18:51 +0000

Article URL: https://anarchonomicon.substack.com/p/cocytarchy

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35025042

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Hiring tech lead to help solve major historical puzzle"

tomjohnneill — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 21:56:34 +0000

Maybe decoding Herculaneum scrolls? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herculaneum_papyri#Virtual_unr...

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Slack’s brand-new feature has an unexpectedly rich backstory"

tomjohnneill — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 23:01:43 +0000

It's been done (unsurprisingly): https://www.theaccessgroup.com/en-gb/products/mosaic/

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Stripe App Marketplace"

tomjohnneill — Wed, 25 May 2022 00:42:29 +0000

That's actually not correct. Stripe invoicing charges 0.4 or 0.5% on top of the normal payment transaction fee (for either card payments or bank transfers). Essentially, you are paying a % fee for a nice PDF (plus some reconciliation/reporting etc)

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Mark Zuckerberg on Messenger (2013)"

tomjohnneill — Sat, 21 May 2022 23:43:25 +0000

They fixed that fairly recently.

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Launch HN: Hyperbeam API (YC W22) – Multiplayer embeds of any website"

tomjohnneill — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 20:54:59 +0000

I'm not sure the API docs are publicly accessible?

New comment by tomjohnneill in "Ask HN: Career change for elderly UK ex-convict?"

tomjohnneill — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 13:00:00 +0000

It's very likely organisations in the charity sector will need to run DBS checks, even just for looking at back-end systems/data.

Optimum Wordle Solver

tomjohnneill — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 17:15:03 +0000

Article URL: https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/wordle-solver

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29811762

Points: 1

# Comments: 0