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ThunderBee

89 karma · joined May 2, 2023

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ThunderBee··on GPT-6 Astra, looped transformers, and hidden reasoning
I work on small scale recurrent transformer architectures.

Better Multi hop reasoning is one of the most notable improvements of the architecture. The tricky part is figuring out a way to optimize the number of times you loop as it varies between tasks. Too few and you leave performance on the table too many and performance begins to drop.

ThunderBee··on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI
You aren’t missing anything. There isn’t an actual argument, this is strictly an attempt at regulatory capture.
ThunderBee··on Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers
I believe there’s been a number of investigative journalists/ YouTubers that have looked into this and it can be quite staggering. Not just human audible noise but infrasound and ultrasound as well. IIRC Ben Jordan’s video “ Datacenters Behaving Like Acoustic Weapons” would probably be a good place to start.

They could build these data centers to eliminate the noise but it’s cheaper to ruin the livability of surrounding areas.

ThunderBee··on GPT-5.6
IME it entirely depends on your work. I find myself using both daily for different things.

Codex with GPT 5.5 is much better at general SWE tasks but Claude Code with Opus is far better at complex reasoning tasks like reading and summarizing research papers, replicating experiments, identifying research gaps and proposing interesting follow ups.

ThunderBee··on DARPA Heavy Life Challenge
this competition was announced October last year. IIRC registration ended sometime Q1 this year.
ThunderBee··on Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds
X is excellent for following niche research interests but they’ve been pushing quite hard to force political news/opinions into the feeds which is really annoying.
ThunderBee··on Claude Opus 4.8
IME the most noticeable performance boosts are in complex multi-agent workflows.

EX. You call an orchestration agent and define an implementation plan with the help of a number of sub agents planning out different features. You and the lead agent review all of the plans and send them off to a set of agents that write tests which get send back to the orchestrator then passed along with the plan to a set of coding agents who implement the features in their own worktrees. That gets passed back to the orchestrator which hands it off to another set of agents doing the code review and merging the features before sending it back to you.

ThunderBee··on Claude Code as a Daily Driver: Claude.md, Skills, Subagents, Plugins, and MCPs
You could say the same thing about any always online software suite and it would be equally fair as we move into more agentic development workflows.

EX. Sure, you could go back to the old ways of using a drafting table for your engineering work if CAD went down but it would be exponentially slower…

Personally with my workflow I spend 30-60 minutes per Claude feature spec doc when I’m pair planning. If Claude goes down I would just prepare spec docs on my own until it came back online and then rapidly review them before calling the coding workflow.

ThunderBee··on U.S. will review social media for foreign student visa applications
This is basically what’s happening.

The left opened the doors of academic and internet censorship and the right went ‘two can play that game!’ And kicked it wide open.

ThunderBee··on 'The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen'
The researchers are doing what nation states have been a̶t̶t̶e̶m̶p̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ doing for decades. People have no idea what’s c̶o̶m̶i̶n̶g̶ happened.

States have been astroturfing internet for a long time. It’s gotten exponentially worse since the Ukraine and Gaza wars though.

ThunderBee··on Unauthorized Experiment on CMV Involving AI-Generated Comments
> None of that is true! The bot invented entirely fake biographical details of half a dozen people who never existed, all to try and win an argument.

Welcome to reddit Simon! Nothing ever happens and a large percentage of posts are faked.

You can find discord groups for every major subreddit that are dedicated to making up stories to see what the most outlandish thing people will believe is.

ThunderBee··on Meta Permits Its A.I. Models to Be Used for U.S. Military Purposes
Could you explain why you believe that the war in Gaza is a genocide?

I’m not discounting the fact that many people believe it’s a genocide, I’m saying that they think so because our adversaries propaganda has been incredibly effective. I frequently see posts from communities of people who would be executed in the ME for their beliefs supporting the regimes who would drop the guillotine.

Civilian deaths are a tragic but expected outcome of war. The real deaths counts are completely within the expected civilian death margin for a typical war. The only claims I have seen with numbers that would actually indicate a genocide come from propaganda rags.

I think Israel is showing a lot of restraint and is mitigating civilian deaths as best it can but Iran and their proxies have embedded their fighters within the civilian population and aid organizations to an extent that makes minimizing civilian casualties extremely challenging.

On a separate note, the bot problem on Reddit is arguably worse than anywhere else on the internet.

I’d encourage you to seek out some of the astroturfing services to get a sense of how bad it is as good botnets are basically undetectable nowadays. They use real looking accounts with post schedulers to simulate real activity and then mix in their clients messages.

I do agree that the actions taken to mitigate the bots can cause a siloing of opinions that can elicit an echo chamber effect but what else could they do? Reddit is completely uninterested in dealing with the problem because it boosts their metrics and bots can overwhelm any sub that doesn’t attempt to contain them.

ThunderBee··on Meta Permits Its A.I. Models to Be Used for U.S. Military Purposes
I would actually argue the opposite. r/worldnews is one of the few major subreddits that actively blocks the hordes of pro Palestinian bots.

The pro Palestinian propaganda campaign being run by US adversaries might be the most effective I’ve ever seen.

I could write a very lengthy post on this topic but it’s exceptionally rare to find anyone willing to have a discussion and not a yelling match.

ThunderBee··on Daily marijuana use outpaces daily drinking in the US, a new study says
One commonly overlooked facet of Cannabis is the big difference between indica and sativa. The cannabinoids, and ratios of them, can be vastly different which leads indica to be a ‘downer’ and sativa to be an ‘upper.’

An indica can put me into a lethargic state while a good sativa gives me as much energy as a cup of coffee but provides 2-4x the head rush.

I will frequently hit a sativa vape before going on a run or doing chores because it makes it a more pleasant experience with no downsides. If I were to swap to an indica it would not be enjoyable whatsoever.

ThunderBee··on Ask HN: Anyone following UAP disclosure and what are your thought?
Every credible claim that hasn’t been ruled a bird, balloon, etc. is likely just a classified test aircraft / drones or EW system.

It has been a running joke for 50+ years in the aerospace industry. People want to believe in fantastical theories so they lean into it.

ThunderBee··on Half of Americans say Public K-12 Education is Going In The Wrong Direction
I grew up in the religious south and the amount of stuff considered political is extremely disconcerting. The list includes:

- Climate science

- Evolution

- Geology

- History

- Sex ed.

Essentially they believe in banning anything contradictory to their narrow religious beliefs.

ThunderBee··on OpenAI: Start using ChatGPT instantly
The most surprising thing to me is that Opus is only slightly in the lead.

I was feeding multiple python and c# coding challenges / questions to both and Opus blew GPT4 out of the water on every single task. Didn’t matter if I was giving them 50 lines or 5,000 Opus would consistently give working/correct solutions while GPT4 preferred to answer with pseudo code, half complete code with ‘do the thing here’ comments, or would just tell me that it’s too complicated.

ThunderBee··on AI Doomsday Scenarios Are Gaining Traction in Silicon Valley
I’m far more afraid of what Big Tech will do if they get a state sponsored monopoly on the technology over some sci-fi level scenario where AI will kill us all.

If only one group gets access to advanced AI it’s a turnkey solution for totalitarianism. Preventing this should be our primary concern.

ThunderBee··on ChatGPT Now Losing Users
They nerfed the model’s capabilities and made it so that it won’t do many of the interesting things it would at launch. How is anyone shocked?
ThunderBee··on The A-10 is retiring and the Air Force has no close air support replacement
The US has a secure, jam resistant com link that will be used by the F35 to control a squadron of drones. I’m blanking on the name right now but it was displayed in a public demo so I’m sure someone else on here has seen it.
ThunderBee··on Lawsuit claims OpenAI stole 'massive amounts of personal data'
Sam is on record, and has even given lectures, stating the key to business success is monopolization.

It seems rather obvious under his perspective to do everything possible to restrict access to all information that could be used to train an LLM.

I understand Sam’s history with ycombinator gives him leniency around here but we seriously need to wake up to the fact that he’s attempting to monopolize the most powerful tool ever created. He talks a good game but if you pay attention to his actions it’s clear he is openly hostile towards the common good which he supposedly promotes.

I see him in the same regard as I see any oligarch vying for public favor by ‘stealing’ billions, donating a few million, and riding off into the sunset being praised by media for how much of the ill gotten gains he’s given back.

ThunderBee··on AI will soon be able to cover public meetings. But should it?
I think having LLMs watch/listen/read and summarize public meetings and legislation could present a path to saner discourse in our society. It will (hopefully) be far harder for news organizations and bad actors to pollute the discourse around an issue when you can instantly query exactly what was said or written and, if needed, add context and expand the conversation.
ThunderBee··on Spotify’s podcast plan went off the rails
As someone who has entirely replaced listening to music with listening to podcasts and audiobooks your post confuses me. I experience no more cognitive load than I would if I was having a conversation on the subject. If I have the mental bandwidth to listen to music while I’m working on a task then I have the bandwidth to listen to a podcast too.

Your last paragraph also seems to be painting people who listen to podcasts into a very narrow corner. You can find podcasts on everything from history and science to comedy and games. Personally one of my favorite podcasts right now is a comedy focused dnd campaign that I throw on when I drive to work.

ThunderBee··on Meta Reveals Twitter Competitor It Plans to Launch as Stand-Alone App
At this point they should launch a competitor for Reddit as well.
ThunderBee··on Twitter’s shrinking role as traffic source for news publishers revealed
I agree and think this is a good thing. Building bots good enough to fool humans has become so trivial a high schooler could do it. Something has to be done unless we want to give up on real human interaction on the internet.
ThunderBee··on Get a Tesla if you want to learn about AI trying to kill you, says Steve Wozniak
Musk was definitely overly optimistic on the FSD timeline but the hate is pretty wild.

Please correct me if I’m wrong but isn’t Teslas autopilot something like ~10x as safe as the average driver?

ThunderBee··on Ask HN: What tech is under the radar with all attention on ChatGPT etc.?
Meta released a near photorealistic avatar demo recently. So they’re definitely progressing still.

In the hardware space openBCI has partnered with Valve and they’re working on an BCI integrated immersive headset called Galea. It runs about $25k+ atm. They’ve begun shipping to researchers and developers and I’ve heard they’re aiming for a consumer line but don’t know of a planned release date.

ThunderBee··on Adult-use cannabis delivers $15B in tax revenues
Anecdotally speaking I definitely feel an effect by combining multiple minor cannabinoids. It’s not necessarily more potent per se but you get the benefit of having multiple effects and areas of effect (feeling a full head buzz, forehead only buzz, chest buzz, etc) at once.

I think what people should be more concerned about is the race to find the most potent cannabinoids possible. AFAIK THCp and HHCp hold the crown currently and they’re ~20-30 times more potent than THC (exact experienced potency is different for everyone). While you can buy it straight from a lab or bulk marketplace most products that hit store shelves only contain 2.5-5% because manufacturers are concerned about negative publicity and triggering panic attacks.