Hacker News: wernam

New comment by wernam in "Quadrillion-parameter transformers and how to train them"

wernam — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 16:04:06 +0000

The grandparent comment is: "humans aren’t born with randomly initialised neural weights", with commenters throwing around harebrained hypotheses about those weights.

Most biologists will fully disagree with the whole premise, and support the reverse claim that we are born with random weights, we learn to walk/speak English/etc after we're born. Not from weights seeded from our DNA.

New comment by wernam in "Quadrillion-parameter transformers and how to train them"

wernam — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 14:55:26 +0000

> If DNA has everything encoded

It is not. There are many biological examples of random processes generating patterns and weights, such tiger stripes, fingerprints, etc. DNA only encodes the reaction, but the pattern itself is seeded by initial position of random molecules, not the DNA.

> that it influences the initial state of the brain.

You've gone from "DNA is probably the seed for the random initialization", as in the deterministic seed for a PRNG, to "influences". Those are 2 different claims.

Most scientists will agree that DNA encodes the large-scale connectivity in the brain, ie from region to region, thickness of corpus callosum etc.

Most scientists will disagree that it is "probable" that DNA encodes/seeds the weights of each and every synapse.

New comment by wernam in "Quadrillion-parameter transformers and how to train them"

wernam — Sun, 08 Nov 2026 14:42:14 +0000

It's nice to throw around claims like that, or like "microtubules connect the brain the quantum realm" (Penrose). Fortunately that's not how science works.

New comment by wernam in "Anthropic IPO buyers see valuation as low as $1.1T"

wernam — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 20:56:24 +0000

AMD Ryzen AI/Strix Halo is for running locally on your hardware. Openrouter is for evaluating the models you'll be running locally, before buying the hardware.

In any case, 128-256GB unified memory systems running MOE models is the "cheap" option, RTX6000 is the step above it.

New comment by wernam in "Anthropic IPO buyers see valuation as low as $1.1T"

wernam — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 19:57:46 +0000

12GB GPU is useless. The good experience is with 128-256GB unified memory architectures like strix halo etc. You don't need to buy any hardware, you can experience the latest open weight MOE (flash) models from DeepSeek, qwen, or GLM on openrouter using a local agent like kilo.