Hacker News: zetazzed

New comment by zetazzed in "CERN and Mistral sign a statement of intent to establish a strategic partnership"

zetazzed — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:20:56 +0000

I'm not at all anti-AI, but I'm still holding my breath to see real scientific contributions coming from modern (LLM/CoT/agent) AI. Much of the premise behind "AI will make superabundance a reality" hinges on getting AI-driven science that affects everyday lives Anthropic's quasi-CRISPR-like discovery did not seem super compelling, and that is still the best I have seen. If anyone has more heartening stories that could convince me to be an optimist, please do share ;)

New comment by zetazzed in "How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving"

zetazzed — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 05:03:40 +0000

It’s such a good movie. Go with a friend and you can spend hours picking apart the layers.

New comment by zetazzed in "Things to know when you get cancer"

zetazzed — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:38:58 +0000

As a fellow cancer-haver, I would give a piece of proactive advice for those (in the US) who do NOT have cancer or even suspect they have it:

Find a decent primary care doc who is not impossible to schedule with. Someday, if you do have a problem, the primary care doc will be able to send you off for scans, etc. much more easily when you are an existing patient. Getting appointments as an existing patient is much easier.

New comment by zetazzed in "China Overtakes U.S. For First Time as Top Spender on R&D in 2024"

zetazzed — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 03:12:00 +0000

I'm ready to blame the current admin, federal funding cuts, and cuts to immigration, but we all do need to check that the year for this change is clearly 2024... (But I am also ready to be even more depressed by 2025 stats!)

New comment by zetazzed in "Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too"

zetazzed — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 17:21:18 +0000

Ok, but how do the economics of this work? Based on its settlement, Anthropic paid an average of $3000 per work they scanned based on their settlement (https://tech-insider.org/au/anthropic-copyright-settlement-2...). They and OpenAI pay billions per year for a mix of experts and normal people to label or create data. Why would they continue doing this if the value of this is immediately copied by open models? If your goal is to end the economics of generating and buying data for AI (and I recognize for some people this is really the goal) then sure, but if you want AI for various subfields of interest to continue improving then it's not workable.

Back when people made arguments for software privacy, the argument was usually "big business will still pay and consumers wouldn't have paid anyways so it's ok for us to pirate" - I actually think that was fine for business software but terrible for indie games, whose market was 0% businesses.

But in the AI case, it's not like they get to keep some of the value of their investment - it all gets cloned into models that businesses and consumers alike are happy to use. If someone knows how labs could continue to fund data creation and acquisition in this model, please do share!

New comment by zetazzed in "Watching TikTok and Instagram deactivates the cognitive control network: Study"

zetazzed — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 19:44:52 +0000

I uninstalled basically all of these EXCEPT youtube, and that's what I struggle with sometimes now. I find so much great long- and medium-form content on Youtube that I want to keep it around. But I have to admit that I can sometimes fall down a time-wasting rabbit hole with shorts.

The Youtube app now has a "shorts feed limit" under "time management" that will limit your access to the auto-scroll shorts feed to a certain amount per day. Worth checking out!

New comment by zetazzed in "Study links coffee consumption to metabolic health and sex hormones"

zetazzed — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:25:53 +0000

I'm a good target market for pro-coffee writing, but this is just an observational study of a drinks habit. No one in the general public should have any interest in studies of this kind.

Maybe if you're deep in working in this research space it could help generate hypotheses for more meaningful research? But "we cross sectionally compared two groups with different behaviors and found they were different" is not really a result.

New comment by zetazzed in "I've yet to see any"My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union"

zetazzed — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:34:11 +0000

The NYT just did a story on Andon: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/us/ai-boss-san-francisco-...

Their AI "boss" appears to be pathologically chill and worker-friendly. Has never denied a request for a day off.

New comment by zetazzed in "“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”"

zetazzed — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:21:51 +0000

Who will invest in generating data for the frontier of AI if their output will immediately be used to train a competing model? Forget China vs. US, this applies within-country too. After exhausting all the publicly-accessible data on the internet, the frontier labs started spending hundreds of millions of dollars to generate data across a variety of fields. Just look at Mercor doing $1.2bln/year with 90% coming from the top labs (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mercors-fast-growth-...). That pushes ahead what AI can do in medicine, science, coding, and math. But if other companies are going to free ride on this investment, it doesn't make sense to continue. So AI will largely hit a wall, frozen at the current level and work will all shift to cheaper inference.

New comment by zetazzed in "A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks"

zetazzed — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 23:02:18 +0000

It's like the Victoria 3 combat system. You just send an army and a general to a given front and let them get to work with no micro. Easy! But of course some percentage of the time they do something crazy like deciding to redeploy from your existential Franco-Prussian war front to a minor colonial uprising...

New comment by zetazzed in "Transparent leadership beats servant leadership"

zetazzed — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 17:40:00 +0000

This is actually not such bad advice for a manager who manages other managers, though I can see why ICs find it very frustrating. If you are giving high level platitudes and counseling-disguised-as-coaching to a junior new hire, they can rightly ask WTF. But managers, especially those recently moved from IC tech roles, often do benefit from this kind of forced introspection. If they have an underperforming employee, they should bounce ideas around with a more experienced manager, but the first line manager ultimately needs to be the one deciding how to rebalance work to maximize learning or to ultimately make the call to part ways with the employee. If a servant senior leader over them is actually doing the slog of working through the hardest issues (interpersonal conflict, serious direction change needed for team, firing people, top performers at risk of leaving), the first line manager is never going to grow. Similarly "cut out the middleman" advice in the article is great for senior ICs/quasi-architects or sub-managers but potentially toxic for junior engineers who may get steamrolled by the classic "1000 urgent requests issue" that managers or potentially very senior ICs need to drive.

New comment by zetazzed in "Claude for Excel"

zetazzed — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 23:18:14 +0000

The total profit of ALL US health insurance companies added together was $9bln in 2024: https://content.naic.org/sites/default/files/2024-annual-hea.... This is a profit margin of 0.8% down from 2.2% in the previous year.

Meta alone made $62bln in 2024: https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...

So it's weird to see folks on a tech site talking about how enormous all the profits are in health insurance, and citations with numbers would be helpful to the discussion.

I worked in insurance-related tech for some time, and the providers (hospitals, large physician groups) and employers who actually pay for insurance have signficant market power in most regions, limiting what insurers can charge.

New comment by zetazzed in "Sora 2"

zetazzed — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 23:50:57 +0000

Is it easy to record a voiceover or add chosen audio? (Sorry I don't have an invite code so I can't try.) I could see some room for human jokes or short human-driven songs that could use a video backdrop.

New comment by zetazzed in "YouTube says it'll bring back creators banned for Covid and election content"

zetazzed — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 23:10:00 +0000

Does Disney have a positive obligation to show animal cruelty snuff films on Disney Plus? Or are they allowed to control what people say on their network? Does Roblox have to allow XXX games showing non-consensual sex acts on their site, or are they allowed to control what people say on their network? Can WebMD decide not to present articles claiming that homeopathy is the ultimate cure-all? Does X have to share a "trending" topic about the refusal to release the Epstein files?

The reason we ban government censorship is so that a private actor can always create their own conspiracy theory + snuff film site if they want, and other platforms are not obligated to carry content they find objectionable. Get really into Rumble or Truth Social or X if you would like a very different perspective from Youtube's.

New comment by zetazzed in "Amazon RTO policy is costing it top tech talent, according to internal document"

zetazzed — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 22:26:34 +0000

Their revenue is like $670bln. If you come up with an innovation that increases that by 0.01%, say by better optimizing prices or targeting adds, you've added $60m of revenue. If you pay a star engineer $1m per year and they have even a reasonable chance of an improvement on this scale, or a similar reduction in costs, then you have a super profitable deal.

New comment by zetazzed in "A power shortage could short-circuit Nvidia's rise"

zetazzed — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 01:56:53 +0000

Ok but telling someone they can have GPUs online in a mere 5 years if they build as fast as SK is still going to be a very painful pill. How do we get a DC in a year?

New comment by zetazzed in "‘I witnessed war crimes’ in Gaza – former worker at GHF aid site [video]"

zetazzed — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 22:59:36 +0000

I see an increasing number of politicians taking the position: "I supported Israel's government's actions when they first attacked, given the goals of destroying Hamas' leadership and freeing hostages, but now that it has turned into a brutal siege with mass civilian casualties on a horrific scale, I'm strongly against their actions." E.g. Macron, Angus King, and many people I know personally. And I think we need to say "Great!" The dumbest reaction is "screw you, you were for Israel's invasion and you're an asshole." Movements that want to grow should accept people who change their minds when the situation changes, they get new data, or they learn a new perspective.

New comment by zetazzed in "US companies, consumers are paying for tariffs, not foreign firms"

zetazzed — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 01:03:42 +0000

Manufacturing output has more than doubled in the US since 1980: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMAN#

New comment by zetazzed in "Intel to boost gross margins – new products must deliver 50% gross profit"

zetazzed — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 02:49:48 +0000

Companies can choose their gross margins! Just take the cost of manufacturing, double it, and call that your price. You now have 50% gross margins. But you can't choose your total profit. Maybe almost nobody buys at this crazy price you've set. Now your margins don't seem so clever...

New comment by zetazzed in "The Hollow Men of Hims"

zetazzed — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 05:24:59 +0000

In the models I've seen, they still require and bill insurance. The monthly fee is a supplement for the doc practices.