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christina97

794 karma · joined January 30, 2024

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christina97··on Claude Code sends your email address to websites
I cannot believe Anthropic’s official response to having presumably sprayed a significant portion of customers’ emails and private information straight out into the web willy nilly is basically “[it’s] highly non-trivial haha”.
christina97··on Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament
I’m not sure “brainy” people are that much more likely to think they can make good decisions than any other politician. So why do you feel this would exacerbate the hubris politicians already have?
christina97··on DeepInfer: High-performance inference framework for DeepSeek models
No, the absolute max power draw of these cards is like 1.5 kW, say 3 kW per card with mediocre cooling attached to a server. DCs get power in the 10c/kWh range at most. So 30c/card/hour, peanuts. And this is the most power hungry card at full tilt with mediocre cooling efficiency.
christina97··on DeepSeek search and fetch – $0.75 per 1000 successful requests
Payment for search flow!
christina97··on Muse Spark Open
The gears etc on bikes are customarily on the right, so almost all photos of bikes (eg for sale, by hobbyists) face to the right to show off that, and so it makes sense for LLMs to have such a preference.
christina97··on Submarine cable resilience
You probably can’t get under 500 km orbit, so 2000 km round trip is the shortest you can do between you and a ground based server. That’s 150 ms minimum round trip latency.
christina97··on Put a price on breakthroughs
I don’t know, I feel like there’s plenty of money to fund a lot of risky bets in AI right now, across the research-commercialization spectrum. Not sure there is a need for a new form of funding the field?
christina97··on Typesafe AI raises $870M at $7.5B
Everyone appears surprised by this news. It’s clear that they don’t have a product with some incredible moat. But they clearly have good engineering and product people that came up with a product people wanted. On top of that they have very strong marketing muscle that took the AI world by storm. And as far as I’ve seen, they still lead in some part of the latency-quality (-cost) curve?

They may well be a good team to throw money behind if you are hoping to bet on a new AI lab.

christina97··on OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics
It’s fine to dislike AI slop and not engage with it. But I would claim there is a difference between a human submitting a sloppy paper to a journal vs producing one with AI. The former is lazy and unprofessional, the latter is an interesting experiment. I appreciate not wanting to engage in an experiment you didn’t sign up for, but therein lies the difference between this with an attitude of embracing new technology and those wanting to stick to the old. I think Terrence Tao has had a very interesting attitude to AI recently and had also had some fruitful outcomes from it.
christina97··on Things that apparently cause cancer
No, because no correlation was proved. It’s just a flawed methodology.
christina97··on We're Missing a Key Reason Why Americans Hate AI
Strawman. It’s very obvious that people are frustrated by the combination of no perceived benefit with all kinds of perceived risks and downsides.
christina97··on Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met
That is the entire point of it. When it’s hard to tell what’s the machine and what’s a human, that’s precisely the definition of passing it.
christina97··on Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met
I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t think the AI labs are too concerned about bad press lately. It’s more likely that there actually are some tradeoffs where training on synthetic data gives the model tics but is the only way to improve intelligence.
christina97··on Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026
Yeah there is no such thing as selling a commodity below its market price on the open market. Someone else will come and arbitrage that away, or it’s not an open market.
christina97··on Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes
A huge reason for the US strength in tech is the R&D tax credit, and its entire purpose is to spur investment in next generation technologies. It doesn’t seem like an insane stretch to classify investments in AI hardware as R&D, especially given their high risk nature.

Taxes are also not a zero-sum game: more innovation increases the pie for all, including the government.

I feel like this is mainly yet another anti-AI hit piece.

christina97··on Footguns with Postgres “at time zone 'UTC'”
Presumably if the conversion logic changes. Eg user enters a future date in a place but the timezone in that place changes in the future.
christina97··on Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com
I use Claude Code often for entirely non-code things: the harness concept is super helpful for going through documents etc.

I think these Claw-type harnesses are basically this for somewhat less technical folks. If eg Muse has been able to make this work smoothly from your phone for completely non-techy people, then that seems like an incredible product.

christina97··on Saving another 100TB of RAM
I’m not sure why folks are finding this so revolutionary. There are teams of scientists at big techs with PhDs working on all kinds of optimization across compute fleets. This seems cute but its exposition of math is more along the lines of “look at how cool I am that I could do a bit of calculus”, and that makes me question the technical depth at CF.

I found the motivation pretty lackluster: nowhere does it actually explain why you use consistent hashing (dividing the item space naively/regularly would actually cause much more than 1/n items to move, which is unintuitive) and how you actually use it.

That said, it got me to spend a few minutes studying this and got me to understand the key bit I was missing.

christina97··on North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes
If they can’t build high speed rail along the corridor then surely they cannot geo engineer it either!
christina97··on How GLM built its own inference infrastructure
Nobody pretended that Chinese firms would just lay back and twiddle their thumbs when faced with import restrictions. The question was whether they would be far enough to be able to catch up without much issue or so far behind that they wouldn’t ever effectively catch up or that by the time they did, it wouldn’t matter.

Half-arsed export restrictions are the best of both worlds for these firms: enough of an incentive to take homegrown hardware seriously, yet not aggressive enough to cause meaningful handicap in the meantime.

christina97··on GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%
They’re trying to compete with open weight models here. It’s a very different customer segment.
christina97··on Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+
Do people feel Stripe APIs are really that good? I’ve always found them unintuitive, tons of options, weird edge cases, breaking occasionally, etc.

I’m sure payments are convoluted, but I’d still imagine they could be meaningfully easier for the bulk 80% of use case?

christina97··on Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk
GLP-1s seem like a night and day difference in intervention adherence though. For various obvious and non-obvious reasons, it’s very hard to produce an intervention that people will adhere to to make the test group lose weight.
christina97··on I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program
Is it not common knowledge that this is the entire purpose of loyalty programs? As far as I know, if you don’t give them your details and just swipe a card, they are not doing facial recognition and PCI stops them from linking your purchases too heavily.

I’m not really surprised by anything here but the fact that McDonalds disclosed all their predictions?

The bigger question here is whether it is good for large corporations to be run with such brutal profit motives, running on extremely precise data to uncover how to best make a bigger profit. It doesn’t appear good to me, but it is how the entire US economy operates. The lift from the per-customer loyalty timeseries and per-customer upsells is probably modest compared to the rest of the data driven work to understand how to sell more “product”.

christina97··on Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows
The GP is claiming Meta is an awful company for what they have done and how they continue to treat their employees. That’s a perfectly ok opinion to hold, and many seem to agree.

Have DeepSeek, Moonshot, or the other Chinese AI companies done such things that attract moral outrage?

christina97··on AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon
There’s some kind of tradeoff between speed, cost, and quality for every application. I would be perfectly happy with a model 6 months old that was 50x faster for many uses. Right now I use either Opus (for smart stuff) or Flash without thinking (for fast stuff). I would take an even dumber model for more speed (lower latency in particular).
christina97··on Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork
Copyright is an automatic protection (meaning you don’t need to register it, like registered trademarks), for certain types of creative works. Contracts are one way to dish out these rights (eg. for a fee).

If you have a work that is not copyrightable, and you give it to people lawfully, then you cannot protect it via copyright.

christina97··on Franken.domains: Stitched-Together Domains, Because Every .com Is Taken
This wouldn’t really reduce the scarcity though. Right now everyone wants a “.com”, because it’s the convention. If you could buy the TLD “widget” for the same price as “widget.com”, then you would just move up one level in the domain hierarchy and have the same scarcity? If anything, the fact that there are several legitimate TLD options reduces the scarcity a tiny bit?

As an aside (I’m also annoyed by domain squatters etc), it is a fascinating market study how domains are artificially scarce the way they are when everyone can easily and cheaply buy them. I am not sure there is any reasonable solution to it.

christina97··on Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models
I wonder what is happening behind closed doors for these companies to be issuing such a joint letter.
christina97··on Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth
It depends entirely on the time-to-failure distribution though whether used cards are a good deal or not. Often this kind of hardware has a bathtub shaped hazard rate, actually getting burned in cards may mean you get the weeded out solid specimens, and forgo the lemons.
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