Hacker News: zaptrem

New comment by zaptrem in "AI that copied musical artist files copyright claim against artist [updated]"

zaptrem — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 05:38:04 +0000

YouTube et al's automated copyright systems put way too much trust in the hands of those making the claims.

New comment by zaptrem in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

zaptrem — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:31:34 +0000

Many of the games that actual kids spend time on are the purest expression of gaming slop (half-broken microtransaction gambling hell with schizophrenic flashing colors). Roblox and Fortnite's Islands system are both guilty of this. The problem is kids don't know any better and don't yet understand the value of money. The obvious response is "parents should handle this" and while I agree, there is no system to let them say "here are Robux/V-Bucks you can spend on quality content (e.g., Fortnite's Battle Pass is very well designed, quality content), but gambling slop is disabled".

New comment by zaptrem in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

zaptrem — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:19:59 +0000

In my experience, the Epic Games Store downloads faster, installs more efficiently, and launches games faster than Steam. The social features I actually use (i.e., add a friend, join them in a game) work fine. I'm not aware of any features Steam has that EGS lacks that I actually use frequently (Valve's VR, streaming tech, and Proton are great, but I don't use those frequently). It's not just me, many indie game developers are also big fans of EGS (most recent example that comes to mind are Jeff Kaplan's remarks during his 10 hour stream a week or two ago). Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.

New comment by zaptrem in "1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6"

zaptrem — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:00:18 +0000

I have Max 20x and they're still separate on 2.1.75.

New comment by zaptrem in "xAI joins SpaceX"

zaptrem — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:37:36 +0000

Data centers don't do anything other than sit there and turn electricity into heat. They only emit nothing but heat (which could be useful to others in the building).

New comment by zaptrem in "Margin Call"

zaptrem — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 22:03:33 +0000

What did Epic do?

Wikipedia: Sandbox

zaptrem — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:12:01 +0000

I was learning about Wikipedia recently and thought it was interesting there was a global, public page specifically for writing random stuff to learn how to use their editor. I assumed there would be something like this on a per-user, invisible to the public level, but not a global level like this page.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829965

Points: 93

# Comments: 37

New comment by zaptrem in "mRNA cancer vaccine shows protection at 5-year follow-up, Moderna and Merck say"

zaptrem — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 03:05:23 +0000

"Previous data from the trial reported that 107 participants received the mRNA vaccine and Keytruda treatment, while the remaining 50 only received Keytruda. At the two-year follow-up, 24 of the 107 (22 percent) who got the experimental vaccine and Keytruda had recurrence or death, while 20 of 50 (40 percent) treated with just Keytruda had recurrence or death, indicating a 44 percent risk reduction"

Statistically, if those in the control group had gotten the treatment, then in expectation 9 of those people wouldn't have had their cancer return or died. It must be exciting to run these sorts of trials with super promising drugs, but also a little bittersweet/dark.

New comment by zaptrem in "AI generated music barred from Bandcamp"

zaptrem — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 20:12:15 +0000

See here for a truly random sample of human music: https://0xbeef.co.uk/random/soundcloud

Thankfully, most of it doesn't reach your Spotify feed. I think most of it is garbage, but I'd fight for the right of people to continue posting it. All things algorithmic have this exploration/exploitation, diversity/fidelity tradeoff and Spotify has theirs tuned very heavily toward exploitation/fidelity. I think there is a cool opportunity for someone to put the tradeoff dial into users hands.

New comment by zaptrem in "AI generated music barred from Bandcamp"

zaptrem — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 19:29:20 +0000

I’m a founder of one of these AI music companies and that noise you’re describing (it differs between co’s for us it’s loud vocals, for Suno it’s vocal aliasing/sandiness and mushy instrumentals, etc) is exactly why I think these songs should not be going on Spotify/etc.

We’ll have this (and the corny lyrics issue) mostly fixed in a month or so, then it mostly becomes a recommendations problem. For example, TikTok is filled with slop, but it’s not a problem - their algorithm helps the most creative/engaging stuff rise to the top. If Spotify is giving you Suno slop in your discover weekly (or really crappy 100% organic free range AI-free slop) blame Spotify, not the AI or the creators. There are really high effort and original creations that involve AI that deserve to be heard, though.

I suggest going back and listening to some of the first experimental electronic music. The tools have improved a lot since then and people have used them to do really cool things, even spawning countless genres.

New comment by zaptrem in "MiniMax M2.1: Built for Real-World Complex Tasks, Multi-Language Programming"

zaptrem — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 02:21:03 +0000

Not sure it’s a cultural thing since most of the copy coming out of DeepSeek has been pretty straightforward.

New comment by zaptrem in "McDonald's removes AI-generated ad after backlash"

zaptrem — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 12:16:27 +0000

This sounds like the same basic voice systems we’ve had for 15 years. Idk if that counts as modern “AI”

New comment by zaptrem in "Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research"

zaptrem — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 05:31:05 +0000

Not sure where that math is coming from. Assuming it's true, you're ignoring that some users (me) already pay 10X that. Btw according Meta's SEC filings: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2023/q4... they made around $22/month/american user (not even heavy user or affluent iPhone owner) in q3 2023. I assume Google would be higher due to larger marketshare.

New comment by zaptrem in "Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research"

zaptrem — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 04:10:03 +0000

I've fed thousands of dollars to Anthropic/OAI/etc for their coding models over the past year despite never having paid for dev tools before in my life. Seems commercially viable to me.

New comment by zaptrem in "TiDAR: Think in Diffusion, Talk in Autoregression"

zaptrem — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 18:49:15 +0000

Latency may be better, but throughput (the thing companies care about) may be the same or worse, since every step the entire diffusion window has to be passed through the model. With AR models only the most recent token goes through, which is much more compute efficient allowing you to be memory bound. Trade off with these models is more than one token per forward pass, but idk the point where that becomes worth it (probably depends on model and diffusion window size)

New comment by zaptrem in "Apple's iPhone overhaul will reduce its reliance on annual fall spectacle"

zaptrem — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 09:49:48 +0000

iPhone X’s removal of the home button was a pretty big change, made navigation more fluid and felt very futuristic.

New comment by zaptrem in "Nevada Governor's office covered up Boring Co safety violations"

zaptrem — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 21:26:05 +0000

I read the daily breeze article and can’t find where they claim the released water was cleaner than it was before?

New comment by zaptrem in "Cerebras Code now supports GLM 4.6 at 1000 tokens/sec"

zaptrem — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 09:27:53 +0000

They don't have prefix caching? Claude and Codex have this.

New comment by zaptrem in "BERT is just a single text diffusion step"

zaptrem — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 19:29:42 +0000

The problem with that is we want the model to learn to deal with its own mistakes. With continuous diffusion mistakes mostly look like noise, but with what you’re proposing mistakes are just incorrect words that are semantically pretty similar to the real text, so the model wouldn’t learn to consider those “noise”. The noising function would have to generate semantically similar text (e.g., out of order correct tokens maybe? Tokens from a paraphrased version?)

New comment by zaptrem in "BERT is just a single text diffusion step"

zaptrem — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 15:09:54 +0000

When text diffusion models started popping up I thought the same thing as this guy (“wait, this is just MLM”) though I was thinking more MaskGIT. The only thing I could think of that would make it “diffusion” is if the model had to learn to replace incorrect tokens with correct ones (since continuous diffusion’s big thing is noise resistance). I don’t think anyone has done this because it’s hard to come up with good incorrect tokens.