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JamesBarney

11,106 karma · joined July 16, 2014

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JamesBarney··on J.P. Morgan's OpenAI loan is strange
There are lots of restrictions and expirations around those IP rights.
JamesBarney··on J.P. Morgan's OpenAI loan is strange
Where are you getting these numbers? And how would you appraise the value of the windsurf IP which sold for 2.4b?
JamesBarney··on J.P. Morgan's OpenAI loan is strange
Inflation was stable and pretty low for the 10 years after the financial crisis.

Gold wasn't at $400 per oz before the financial crisis, and the spike in gold prices was fairly recent.

Basically the financial crisis response didn't cause inflation, the covid response did.

JamesBarney··on J.P. Morgan's OpenAI loan is strange
> However, there's no speculation about what their earnings will be because they're currently selling their services below cost and there isn't really any story as to how they'll turn this profitable.

Do we know they're selling their services below cost? I'm pretty confident they're making money on inference and burning through large piles of cash on capex and research.

JamesBarney··on J.P. Morgan's OpenAI loan is strange
Not to mention the risks that OpenAI even if it does goes bankrupt sells for less than 4b is not anywhere close to 90%.
JamesBarney··on J.P. Morgan's OpenAI loan is strange
Like he said Microsoft is the most likely person to want to acquire the IP and employees. Amazon could be a potential second. Google paid 2.4b to license Windsurfs technology, OpenAI would go for far more.
JamesBarney··on J.P. Morgan's OpenAI loan is strange
I don't think OpenAI will be one of those companies. I can't imagine a world where OpenAI sells for less than 4b.
JamesBarney··on OpenAI researcher announced GPT-5 math breakthrough that never happened
What questions are you asking LLMs where they're wrong 50% of the time?
JamesBarney··on New nanotherapy clears amyloid-β, reversing symptoms of Alzheimer's in mice
I think amyloid being the proximate cause of neural degeneration in moderate and severe Alzheimers is basically disproven at this point.

I still think it's more likely than not (70%) that it is a cause though farther upstream. There is a good amount of evidence tau is more likely the proximate cause due it more closely tracking disability in moderate to late stage Alzheimer's.

JamesBarney··on New nanotherapy clears amyloid-β, reversing symptoms of Alzheimer's in mice
I think the cure is going to be something that dissolves tau tangles, or something safe enough we can give as a preventative to people 10-20 years before they develop symptoms that helps with amyloid.
JamesBarney··on New nanotherapy clears amyloid-β, reversing symptoms of Alzheimer's in mice
It's very likely causative. There is just too much evidence for it not to be. All the genes related to amyloid processing are correlated with Alzheimer rates.

The most likely theory I've seen is amyloid causes tau buildup which leads to the majority of the damage. And by the time they give anti-amyloid drugs it's too late and the tau is doing the majority of the damage.

An analogy would be if you have a hole in your house which leads to getting a rat infestation. Once you notice the rat infestation patching the hole isn't going to solve your problem. The hole caused you to get rat shit on your counter, but by the time you fix the hole it's too late to stop the rats from shitting on your counter.

JamesBarney··on New nanotherapy clears amyloid-β, reversing symptoms of Alzheimer's in mice
There were some important papers that turned out to be fraudulent, but there is a large and broad body of knowledge supporting this link.
JamesBarney··on The collapse of the econ PhD job market
I'm pretty sure it's that professors skew left, and science professors skew less to the left than other professors.
JamesBarney··on Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
The OP said if the founder is getting paid a salary it shouldn't be called a non-profit.

That is literally what the OP is arguing that people who found non-profit organization shouldn't be paid even a modest salary for their work.

JamesBarney··on Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
A non-profit does not mean it does not spend money on anyone's salary. It means the corporate entity does not make a profit.
JamesBarney··on Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
The people in charge are getting a very modest salary for a developer, and a extremely modest salary for someone running a 10m/yr organization.
JamesBarney··on U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier
"key goods" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement.
JamesBarney··on Blue-collar jobs are gaining popularity as AI threatens office work
Who do you think is spending money lobbying politicians to ban this? Do you think it's a depressed patients activist group who is scared someone might try to sell them a cheap always available AI therapist?

Or do you think it's a therapist group who just so happens to be pushing for barriers that protect their jobs while gaslighting themselves into thinking it's to protect their patients.

JamesBarney··on Blue-collar jobs are gaining popularity as AI threatens office work
What problem does preventing companies from providing AI back mental health services does this legislation provide except?

> protecting the jobs of Illinois’ thousands of qualified behavioral health providers

JamesBarney··on GPT-5 for Developers
When we're being hunted down by nano-bots some of the last few survivors will still be surprised that a simple text predictor could do so much.
JamesBarney··on Anthropic revokes OpenAI's access to Claude
Oracle licenses 100% restrict reverse engineering it's product to build a competing once, which is probably the closest to what these AI giants are trying to restrict.
JamesBarney··on Steam, Itch.io are pulling ‘porn’ games. Critics say it's a slippery slope
Do you trust the government to determine what is and isn't political speech?

The left has been talking for years about how what would we have classified 20 as political speech 20 years ago is not really political speech but hate speech, and inciting people to violence.

JamesBarney··on Schizophrenia is the price we pay for minds poised near the edge of a cliff
If genes that increase schizophrenic risk increases cognitive abilities you should find people who have high polygenic scores for schizophrenia without having schizophrenia test well on these cognitive abilities. I'm not aware of any of data that shows this in a convincing matter. I think I've seen a few small studies but nothing that replicated this on a large scale. And most of the studies show they score worse on cognitive abilities.

The only conclusions I've come to are one of the following.

1. They improve cognitive abilities in some way we aren't good at measuring. 2. There is something about our modern environment that is more likely to trigger schizophrenia which has more recently increased the fitness penalty these genes confer.

JamesBarney··on Ask HN: How Do You Actually Use Claude Code Effectively?
If you posted some samples that would help us quiet a bit.

Claude successfully makes code edits for me 90% of the time. My two biggest pieces of advice blind are

1. Break down your task into smaller chunks - 30 minutes worth of human coding max. 2. On larger code bases git hints on what files to edit.

JamesBarney··on Microsoft Dependency Has Risks
And Microsoft is not unique in following court orders. You have to switch to businesses without an American presence to get around sanctions.
JamesBarney··on FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores
I know a few people that are really struggling on 20k a year where they can barely afford groceries and roof. But based on all the data that isn't the norm.
JamesBarney··on FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores
The median household income is 80k which is plenty to afford groceries and rent.

How did you come to believe that half the people in the richest country in the world can't afford to eat or have a roof over their head?

JamesBarney··on FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores
A family that makes 80k spends about

- 9400 on federal income taxes

- 12,000 on payroll taxes (including corp chunk b/c of economics)

- 3000-9000 on sales/property/stage income taxes

That's a pretty big chunk.

JamesBarney··on GitHub CEO: manual coding remains key despite AI boom
Right level for exactly specifying program behavior in a global domain without context.

But once you add repo context, domain knowledge etc... programming languages are far too verbose.

JamesBarney··on Guess I'm a rationalist now
Who are all the rationalists you guys are reading?

I read the NYT and rat blogs all the time. And the NYT is not the one that's far more likely to deeply engage with the research and studies on the topic.

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