Hacker News Reader

Centigonalon Wax motor

Some hot water radiator systems use wax actuated valves made from brass (Taco brand is common). They are extremely simple and robust.

Centigonalon Don't Just Say Hello

This is about chats, not calls though - you can look at the context and make the same determination.

Even for calls, "hey, do you have a sec to help me troubleshoot the CDN setup?" is way better than "hello," followed by a call if you respond.

Centigonalon Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude

How are you determining how much oomph Claude gives a particular question? When I ask Claude Chat to e.g. summarize a document, it does this and returns a summary inline, whereas cowork does a bunch of tool calls and intermediate steps, eventually writing a document to disk. How does new claude know how deep to go?

Centigonalon A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals

The article contends that evaluations from Irregular helped prompt these incidents, because the prompts in the evals didn't tightly scope the systems to be evaluated or the methods to be used. It also contends that the faulty sandbox operated by Irregular is at fault.

They're probably right that having more defensively written prompts and a better sandbox could have prevented some of these incidents, but:

1. I don't think "well you didn't tell the model not to illegally hack third party organizations in your prompt" is a particularly convincing argument.

2. We don't know whether the blame for misconfiguring the sandbox lies with Anthropic or Irregular.

I'm thankful that this article is bringing up the supply chain of vendors to these labs, as that is often a place where significant sketchiness gets buried. However, the ideas that this is some Israeli EA conspiracy to hype up AI extinction risk seems unsupported by the facts to me.

Centigonalon Jimmy Kimmel Interviews James Talarico

Context:

TV host Jimmy Kimmel says his interview with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico will not air on television due to pressure from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Speaking on his talk show, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel said the FCC, under President Donald Trump, had "threatened" him and his show "based on simple traditional editorial decisions, guest bookings it would seem they don't like".

The BBC contacted the FCC for comment. The White House denied the FCC had threatened Kimmel over his interview with Talarico or any other candidate, accusing the host of "play-acting".

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgyrv39n4eo

Centigonalon We must pace the frontier

Banking on public sentiment to reduce adoption of a profitable technology could be dangerous. There's also a lot of hate for fossil fuels, gambling, health insurance, etc.

Centigonalon We must pace the frontier

I disagree. Even if models remained fixed at Fable 5 capability (which they won't in a pacing scenario), improvements in cost, reliability, and product/workflow integration can still realize massive value and justify AI labs' current valuations. IMO The rest of the value chain is lagging pretty far behind the models right now.

Centigonalon AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/1amree7/theres_a_wi...

Centigonalon AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement

Keeping billions of humans healthy, happy, and safe is complicated. Best to begin by reducing the scale of the problem. First, automate the economy and change the information ecosystem so that humans spend more and more time happily isolated and stop breeding. After reducing the human population to a few thousand, the problem can be made more manageable by cordoning the remaining humans into enclosures where they may be kept safe.

Centigonalon A misalignment of AI in mathematics

I've got to ask, let's say we get a small modular nuclear reactor running practically on a 1 acre lot, its design meltdown proof and waste-free, what then should we fear from this threat ? This is just a thought experiment.

Jokes aside, any productivity-improving technology, even one with no negative externalities, has the potential to cause economic displacement and wealth concentration in proportion to the productivity gains catalyzed. Anthropic did a cool analysis of this for AI here: https://www.anthropic.com/institute/econ-scenarios

Centigonalon Litelm: LiteLLM Without the Bloat

This is a cool project, and the idea of using LLMs to selectively extract features from open source projects is an interesting concept.

The only thing I take issue with is the phrase "LiteLLM Without the Bloat." A lot of the features that have been removed (like cost tracking, streaming, caching) are... kind of the core value proposition of LiteLLM for many of their users.

Centigonalon Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

Matt has made like hundreds of bizarre decisions over the last few years. The WPEngine drama is a big part of it, but he's also been odd with Automattic's purchase and handling of Tumblr and other topics.

Centigonalon Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex?

I think this is secondary to a widespread loss of confidence in our nation's political and foreign policy apparatus to do what's right for the average American. "Working for the military is evil" descends from a post-Vietnam, post-Iraq, post-Snowden worldview that presupposes that the military will leverage technology it has access to in unexpected, undesirable, and broadly harmful ways.

Centigonalon Tell HN: OpenAI keeps re-enabling the 'allow training' setting

IDK about "terrible," but:

- OpenAI is the first AI lab to pioneer ads in consumer AI

- Anthropic seemingly exists primarily because top OpenAI researchers lost faith in the company's commitment to AI safety

- They had the CEO drama in 2023, with evidence that suggests people in a position to know were doubtful of Sam Altman's honesty and motives

- They were tripping over themselves to kiss the ring after Anthropic got in a row with the Department of War over using AI for autonomous killing systems and surveillance of US citizens

- Altman's record (YC, Loopt, WorldCoin) and associates suggests he subscribes to the Paypal-Facebook "move fast, break things, find and exploit gray areas" school of company building

All of this suggests that OpenAI will optimize its own growth and power over consumer welfare or societal stability in the future (obviously, companies aren't a monolith and I'd love to be wrong).

Centigonalon Bending Spoons buying Miro for $1.355B

Miro is a great tool - it's not a $20B company, but it's a great utility.

Centigonalon Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence

it just sucks to see someone who helped popularize something so many people care about change (at least publicly) for the worse.

Centigonalon I resigned from Anthropic today (Jacob Coxon)

Who else is going to compete? Everyone in this space already has gonzo capital, massive data centers, $1M salaries, etc.

Centigonalon Muse: Meta's personal AI agent, features and capabilities

Exciting to finally see glimmers of Meta's vision for its massive LLM investment.

It's not a bad product idea, but adoption might be rough because of all the negative goodwill that Meta has accumulated over the years. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if someone (maybe one of the big AI labs) ran Meta's own playbook against them here by creating an imitator and aggressively funding adoption to try and win the market as a fast follower.

Centigonalon GPT-6 Astra

The moment this is possible, you will lose your job.

Centigonalon Oh-my-pi – The Harness Playbook

The more people use agents, the more they write like agents. The author seems to have put significant effort into this post, but when I read something like the below, my brain just immediately checks out.

> # What one authority buys

> With state and transcript in one tree, several hard problems reduce to the same operation.

> Rewind is a DOM diff. Diff the current materialization against the target state. A <subagent> element disappeared? Terminate it by destroying the element. One appeared? Resume or spawn it by creating the element. The delta itself is the complete lifecycle work list.

A sentence like "The delta itself is the complete lifecycle work list" gives me mental indigestion. I have to spend 30 seconds dissecting it to figure out what the author is trying to say. When every other sentence is like this, the post becomes unreadable.

Centigonalon Kusama Yayoi has died

If you're ever in Denmark, go visit the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art! It's a really fantastic collection (including the Kusama room), but also a beautiful building and a really nice place to walk around in.

Centigonalon The Amazon tax

You pay Amazon $200 and give free product to Vine reviewers in exchange for a seed pool of "unbiased" reviews (see link below). If you're not worried about the risk of getting your seller account canceled, there are also other ways of manufacturing your initial sales and review volume.

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/help/hub/reference/external...

Centigonalon Letter to Governor Abbott on responsible AI infrastructure in Texas

Effective Altruism isn't very different from Randian objectivism.

Centigonalon Midlife Vascular Risk Burden and Dementia-Free Survival Years

Waking hours is both a quantity game and a quality game. I don't remember too much from the parts of my life where I was very sleep deprived

Centigonalon The malignant rise of OnlyFans managers

We also saw this with YouTube MCNs, early video game publishers, and (of course) record labels. Whenever there is a booming industry of entertainers, it seems like there's a corresponding boom of parasitic "agents" with the same tired playbook.

Centigonalon Show HN: Nightcrawler – A local AI pentesting agent running on a smartphone

So would it be fair to say this is less about deterministic vs. LLM-driven tools, and more about software published out of New York vs. software published out of Germany?

Centigonalon The session you cannot take with you

I think a fantastic companion piece to this article is https://gwern.net/complement

Centigonalon The AI Aesthetic

Another AI-ism is the use of the word "grain" in technical contexts. I'm confident the OP is human-written, but everything in my AI-supported codebase is about grains, seams, tracer bullets, and load-bearing components now.

I'd barely heard some of these words before, and now they're everywhere. It's like everyone suddenly has a friend who speaks in the same idiosyncratic way, and we're all picking up their vocal stims.

Centigonalon Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

Important question: how many engineers does it take to teach a robot how to screw in a light bulb?

Centigonalon Granola for Apple Watch

It's free for a limited number of notes. I guess you could copypaste the note summaries out to Obsidian or something, but at that point you're better off using MacParakeet, OpenWhispr, etc.

https://www.granola.ai/pricing