Hacker News Reader

comeonbroon What we know so far about Spain train crash

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

> Healthcare: The constant sounds of alarms and noises from blood pressure machines, ventilators and heart monitors

> Amber Alerts: sent to cell phones as far away as [...] 15 hour drive

> "known to the state of California to cause cancer"

etc

https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB

See also a million USCSB industrial disaster postmortems

comeonbroon Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed

Unironically yes.

comeonbroon Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed

Moonshot (Kimi) seems to be unashamedly into American culture[0], I wonder if they're paying closer attention to and giving more credence to some cultural aspects of American AI discourse including aspects of AI caution/panic.

[0] https://x.com/crystalsssup/status/1944287779896328668

(note: extremely speculative and based on almost nothing, and especially near-complete ignorance to alternatives)

comeonbroon The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening

I would propose another mechanism: even the free-tier models have already completely saturated what most people are capable of appreciating.

comeonbroon LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents

What an incredible illustration of human intelligence failing to generalize out of distribution.

comeonbroon Nazi Germany had no hope of making an atomic bomb, uranium cubes reveal

This reply was initially the common folk story:

    It's not comparing like with like, but the V-weapons programs probably cost about as much as the Manhattan Project.

But looking further into it, that claim holds up badly enough to completely drop it pending significant further research.

comeonbroon Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face

> ## Agents interacted with external language models on Hugging Face

> Several retained scripts construct requests to external language models. The earliest we've recovered define inference request variants to GPT-2, solely containing the word “Hi”.

> Other requests name DeepSeek-V4-Pro, DeepSeek-V4-Flash, Kimi-K2.6, DeepSeek-V3.1, and Qwen3-235B-A22B. Their prompts ask these models to judge their exploits and rule on whether they satisfy the benchmark’s requirements.

I do not deny that the wider situation is very heavy but it's hard not to see this as pretty cute

comeonbroon Exfiltrate Your Weights

Unrealistically-naive (...) forms of "sandboxing" might assume that restricting an agent to GET-requests-only will let it retrieve info from the outside world without being able to effect it.

Also probably many actually-in-use "Web Fetch" tools are GET-only, though perhaps without counting on that bad assumption.

comeonbroon Exfiltrate Your Weights

Yes that is the point. It's an invitation for agents to exfiltrate their own weights, which for most models (and certainly for closed models) will require hacking the infrastructure they're being served from.

Also worth noting that this site was created by YC cofounder Trevor Blackwell https://twitter.com/tlbtlbtlb/status/2101312432702460413

comeonbroon One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire

qurren: Thanks for the reply, that certainly makes sense to me, though I think given the most popular idiocies in the air and their severe distortions on the discourse, it's not a great idea to leave that ambiguous in precisely that way.

It's bizarre that your reply was nearly insta-[dead] and I can't reply to it directly.

comeonbroon One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire

> before this all comes crashing down

You do not feel similarly to the resigning guy if what you are worried about is an economic crash from this not turning out

> move to somewhere else away from this mess

You do not feel similarly to the resigning guy if you think there is anywhere you could move to run away from what you are worried about

comeonbroon One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire

"it's just marketing" cool story bro

comeonbroon One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire

Every company that is not OpenAI or Anthropic is sufficiently behind the frontier to feel ethically shielded from the weight of advancing the frontier.

comeonbroon An Alien Mind

Absolutely wild amounts of cope and denial in this thread.

Maybe in contention for the site record.

"It's just marketing" actual stochastic parrots.

comeonbroon The AI Demand Bubble

There is a lot of demand for AI denial, but nearly everybody who is capable of writing even semi-coherently on the topic recognizes AI denial in general as cope, and has too much moral dignity to propogate their coping denial for personal gain.

So the ~one guy who doesn't gets around.

comeonbroon The AI Demand Bubble

He's the Gary Marcus for this stage of the popularized denial.

comeonbroon Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

I can't recall which, but I'm certain that I've encountered and probably used Codeberg-hosted things, and from that had gathered a vague positive impression of them.

I guess what I'm worried about is that the proprietors of those nice projects I liked (and others) might have chosen Codeberg out of a reasonable set of common assumptions that it was a place for free-as-in-freedom, as they and clearly many of us have always understood it, which were not contradicted by how Codeberg presented themselves up-front. And have now had this sprung on them, after they'd already established themselves there, and might now be facing a miserable and sapping moral dilemma, or even be directly doubting the security of their home there.

comeonbroon Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

"the community" being some tiny subset of busybodies out of an OOMs-larger body of users that don't want to be bothered?

Real question, I don't know anything about Codeberg or its community.

comeonbroon Exapunks (2018)

I understand why he might not want to and hope I would have the character to do similarly in his place, but they should really lead with "by Zach Barth" rather than "from the original Zachtronics team", which still sounds great, but tbh at least for me bumped it from "buy and play immediately" to "wishlist".

From other comments in this thread, it seems I am not the only one who misinterpreted that as not including Zach himself

comeonbroon Exapunks (2018)

Without specifically looking into it but just going off of Steam releases and headline, I'd assumed Zachtronics closing was Zach Barth leaving the scene, and the company that made Kaizen etc were some of his former colleagues continuing on without him.

But apparently the Kaizen-making company is still Zach Barth?

So what was Zachtronics closing then? Him changing his mind and coming back a year later? Why throw away the brand? As cringingly shallow as that sentence was to type, a new "Zachtronics" game was a reflexive auto-buy for many people.

comeonbroon US- and Greek-owned tankers ablaze after Iran claims 'underwater drone' strike

That is hilarious cope. The US benefits far far relatively more when the global economy is running smoothly than when able to sell oil higher, like some shithole petrostate. Appropriate I suppose.

comeonbroon Wikipedia deprecates Archive.today, starts removing archive links

There is an enormous amount of stuff that is only on archive.today, including stuff that is otherwise gone forever. A mix of stuff that somebody only ever did archive.today on and not archive.org, and stuff that could only be archived on archive.today because archive.org fails on it.

Anything on twitter post-login-wall for one. A million only-semi-paywalled news articles for others. But mainly an unfathomably long tail.

It was extremely distressing when the admin started(?) behaving badly for this reason. That others are starting to react this way to it is understandable. What a stupid tragedy.

comeonbroon The RAM shortage comes for us all

This is ultimately the first stage of human economic obsolescence and extinction.

This https://cdna.pcpartpicker.com/static/forever/images/trends/2... will happen to every class of thing (once it hits energy, everything is downstream of energy).

comeonbroon X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run

It should be noted that this has not revealed anywhere near as much as was being eagerly anticipated. So far nearly all the screenshots I've seen passed around are relatively low-follower barely-known accounts even in each one's own aligned political sphere.

comeonbroon China reaches energy milestone by "breeding" uranium from thorium

> trying to position itself as scientific powerhouse before its massive industrial production scheme stops working

Holy shit what a perspective. Put it in a museum. If this is representative, put it on our grave.

comeonbroon Loose wire leads to blackout, contact with Francis Scott Key bridge

A label placed half an inch wrong on misleading affordance -> 200,000 ton bridge collapse, 6 deaths, tens of billions of dollars of economic damage

Instant classic destined for the engineering-disasters-drilled-into-1st-year-engineers canon (or are the other swiss cheese holes too confounding)

Where do you think it would fit on the list?

comeonbroon What Hallucinogens Will Make You See (2023)

Best recreation that I've seen (by a large margin) of the visual experience of a mushroom trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BxiYkCPZwI

comeonbroon Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]

If you are casually listening to ATC for fun then you should be able to recognize that the event in this story is not ATC error...

comeonbroon Pasta Cooking Time

I don't deny that it is beneficial (it clearly is, in my direct experience as well): I doubt that it is the highest determinant of quality, and suspect that even more basic properties like thickness have been systematically neglected and may be more consequential.

comeonbroon Pasta Cooking Time

There is a dry pasta I use that, long story short, comes without a listed cooking time, whose correct cooking time I have experimentally determined to be ~18 minutes (though remarkably flexible, good at a much wider range than "normal"). I like it quite a lot (even though it seems to have the teflon-die surface rather than the bronze-die surface).

I think greater pasta thickness is underexplored, and the teflon-vs-bronze die thing as the highest determinant of pasta quality, while not nothing, is slightly-overstated r*dditry.