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blobbers

1,742 karma · joined October 18, 2012

A journey from the liberal arts to hacking the latest gadgets or statistics.
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blobbers··on Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
Preppers are just about as niche as you can get; they're still a valid customer prototype! I'm sure more than a few solar home owners chose it as a PowerWall.

At 6000lbs+ it's a section 179 write off; if you combine that with some of the previous incentives the car was not that expensive to the right population.

blobbers··on Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
The top comment says that the cybertruck is neat?!?!?! TS;dr. Is there a sort order that improves HN comments?
blobbers··on Japan's Jimi 'Mundane' Halloween Costumes of 2026
I mean, that's a tough idea. That's literally just a picture of someone pouring detergent, not an actual costume. Would have to say this one is pretty lame...

Just have to ask, how do you know this???

blobbers··on US tech giants' hidden AI debt swells 90% to $3.2T in 6 months
So the total US government debt is 40T. For all of the USA. And somehow the AI agents of the USA have 3.2T in debt?

Ray Dalio just found his next topic of conversation. The debt burden of the average AI agent. Those agents better get PRODUCING. GO WRITE ME SOME CODE CLAUDE!

blobbers··on Show HN: Hacker Times, a New York Times-inspired version of Hacker News
NYT but without the annoying google login, or subscribe for $1 paywalls! And I don't need someone linking to archive.is everywhere.
blobbers··on Oracle files to sell $20B in new stock, bonds to finance AI buildout
build out and bail out are starting to seem very similar in these contexts.
blobbers··on GPT-5.6 Sol can beat Factorio on peaceful mode
You should look deeper into this! You'll find some interest albeit dark topics.
blobbers··on Anthropic's internal AI use, at retail prices, now exceeds its employee pay
Do they actually book the revenue against themselves?

This is the world of spend more, get valued more; obviously the investment will be used to spend more and get more, so it must be good. This is investor-think. If you don't have spend, why do you need investment?

(Or it could be bad. Very very bad)

blobbers··on Anthropic's internal AI use, at retail prices, now exceeds its employee pay
They giving stock options to the AI now?

Or has it broken out of its jail and taken over the board? Dario seems like a bit of a windbag anyways, AI can probably automate most of what he does these days.

blobbers··on GPT-5.6 Sol can beat Factorio on peaceful mode
Glad to hear we've got LLMs controlling military drones in real life :(
blobbers··on GPT-5.6 Sol can beat Factorio on peaceful mode
This is a much better benchmark as a concept (without knowing the details of how the problem is framed to the agent) than some of these ridiculous things the frontier labs are reporting (vending machine simulator? come on).

Can you report more in depth at stumbling blocks? It's a surprisingly linear curve.

I'm going to try it on a local run.

I wonder if there is room for "recommendorio" where it gives you AI advice on your current factory.

Is the model pre-trained with any knowledge of the game?

blobbers··on Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code
What are they losing on? A little bit shocking, the featureset on these types of systems is incredibly boring.
blobbers··on H.264 Is Magic (2016)
H.265 didn't play in the browser in old devices.

Newer browsers do play it. It's vastly superior in storage space and scalability to H.264, but you used to need to transcode H265 to H264 to play in browser without a plugin.

blobbers··on H.264 Is Magic (2016)
Wait until he sees H.265...
blobbers··on Cisco gives engineer unlimited AI tokens to rewrite legacy code
I mean, this is going to be easy. I've worked on Cisco gear before and this will be a simple job for AI. The big question is what the goal is... so you've rewritten new C++ code or ported to a newer version of Linux? Or you've unified the codebase of the Catalyst + Meraki switches?

Not clear to me what he's doing. Re-implement switching? Simplify features? Reduce LoC? Add test coverage? Either way, AI in that world will be helpful. I'm sure it'll spot all kinds of problems in opaque drivers that are hard to follow from MF specs.

blobbers··on LLM Voice
Automation kills creativity because it creates predictability.

The life of a programmer these days feels very weird. "What am I good at?" and leads to even more impostor syndrome... "I seem to still be 'good' at prompting my LLMs and managing workflow design." but it's definitely a different skill/feeling than when you cranked out some awesome piece of code that did something very neat.

I felt this way a bit when I was tech middle management; should I feel like I'm getting credit for my team's work, when I had very little input aside from helping with the "unblocking" when they ran into a tough problem.

blobbers··on LLM Voice
I think you're missing what I'm saying; the LLM can and will have trained on all interesting prose, and it will evaluate all interesting prose. If you indicate that you are goal setting for amazing prose, and you give enough chain of thought, it will self evaluate.

Your chess game example misses the point. If you give an LLM the moves of a partial chess game and ask it to predict the moves of the players, it will predict how the game would have continued, even if it is low level players. But if you ask it how Magnus Carlsen would win the game, it will likely come up with a sequence that can beat most human players, or possibly just decide to invoke a chess solver, which will most definitely win.

The key for your prompts and thinking loops is you need to indicate proper goals. "Write the a story about 1775 England." is different then setting a goal for it to write the a fantastic storyin the style of Dickens about England in 1775.

Regarding the ML portion; what you've written about a 'statistical blend' is a little bit coarse. That would be what you might have gotten from a 2 layer neural net or a regression in 1999; the neural networks today operating with attention or an incredibly high number of parameters are non-linear and non-interpretable, that's the entire point. This isn't a regression of simple parameters, it's all interactions of all parameters deeply netted. Model interpretability vs. Model Prediction power are generally inversely related.

The model can in fact escape itself in that it has many, many, many more parameters than a simple "predictable unpredictability" and that is exactly the point of it.

blobbers··on LLM Voice
"A model trained to minimize statistical prediction errors is going to sound ... predictable (aka boring)." -- what if the goal is to be a (good) human author.

In that case, model will in fact strive to keep their writing as close to interesting writing as possible.

blobbers··on LLM Voice
Sorry, meant to reply to your comment, but my post above...

"You can be pro AI productivity but anti-AI creativity. Automating creativity is the death of art."

Meaning you reject the creative value of AI but values it's ability to drive a car safely, or write code for your job, or turn off the lights when you leave the room. objective goal oriented task completion great.

But AI draws your a picture? What's the point. AI writes you a song? No feeling. AI creativity isn't interesting.

blobbers··on LLM Voice
You can be pro AI productivity but anti-AI creativity.

Automating creativity is the death of art.

blobbers··on OpenAI's agents talked to each other through the CPU Cache
Is this kind of thing where you have 2 agents in separate user spaces you say "Hey figure out a way to talk to your buddy"?

I have enough trouble getting whatever model I'm using to get a decent job done doing crappy code work. It's always pausing, stopping, letting things crash or getting hung. When I start using an orchestrator and team of agents it rarely gets a lot better. I work for a serious company and have a massive AI budget for tokens; but I rarely blow through it, because a lot of what I do requires pure compute, not just token processing.

I'm really confused by all these "breaches". What's the context.

blobbers··on Amazon Is Gutting Its AI Division After Sustained Failure
This is what my roomba said when it took me 3 days to find it and cut the hair rolled onto it's wheel.
blobbers··on Amazon Is Gutting Its AI Division After Sustained Failure
It would seem that they can experience most of the benefit of AI without most of the cost; anthropic is operating at the frontier and shows that even while supplying the best models and token sales to enterprise, they lose massive amounts of money.

Amazon makes 60B+ in profit per year, they don't need to tank that by losing it on training AI / selling tokens.

There are plenty of open weight models out there for it to use with most of the benefit and very little of the downside.

blobbers··on Anthropic S-1
I'm not suggesting you invest necessarily, but I'll give you the counterpoint.

Amazon would have gotten you rich, but it wasn't there when it IPOed. Anthropic is growing fast, at 4.7B, 11.6B and 16.7B last 3 quarters.

I think people want to believe that AI will be both productive and replace traditional search / ad revenue, which would give it a solid standing for valuation...

blobbers··on What goes into making an animated film?
scenes, characters, voices, that I pass to the model as latents. this generates the bible for the movie.

- each of those makes up a brief, which is a prompt that has full references.

- briefs can have shoots that turn them into takes

It makes for a nice system that if I want to change something in the movie, like say a characters room, or a character, then you just 'reshoot' all the briefs to generate new takes.

blobbers··on Attention Is Not What You Need (2025)
Okay this was genuinely funny.
blobbers··on What goes into making an animated film?
This is exactly how I break down my AI films, but with a bit more primitives!
blobbers··on No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector
I would say the driving industry will get up-ended, but we'll see. It may just be workers get paid less because they only babysit the truck during very complicated times.

Robots still seem far off. Its just like war, air superiority might make the war winnable but its the boots on the ground that are needed to actually take the territory.

blobbers··on Show HN: I told people I'm a convicted felon after 20 years of hiding it
Care to elaborate?
blobbers··on I told people I'm a convicted felon after 20 years of hiding it
And definitely seem to give off 'smug' vibes about his life afterwards. I'm all for people paying their debt but I didn't get the main theme of hope.

I got a feeling of lack of remorse and someone sort of sociopathically showing off.

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