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rahimnathwani

16,463 karma · joined March 9, 2012

I've lived in San Francisco since 2019.

2010-2019 I lived in China.

Before that I lived in London, where I was born.

My personal web site: https://encona.com/

Random tools: https://tools.encona.com/

Other random stuff about me:

- English is my native language, but I also speak (to varying degrees of fluency) Mandarin, Gujarati and Spanish.

- My career so far has been a mix of startups/cofounding, big tech (I was a PM at Amazon and at Google), and exec roles.

- I'm a qualified accountant (CIMA), have two undergrad degrees (one in CS) and an MBA (sorry!).

- I got married in 2012 and our son was born in 2016 (I spend a lot of time thinking about how best to raise him to be a capable and kind adult)

Email: rahim AT encona DOT com

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/rahimnathwani

X: https://x.com/rahimNathwani/

submissionscomments
rahimnathwani··on Goodbye Claude, Hello Pi
Is that still needed now that Agent SDK usage is included in subscriptions?

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...

  Update October 7, 2026: Claude Max, Ultra, and Team plans now include monthly API credits. They cover the Claude API, Claude Managed Agents, and the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p when you run them with an API key from your linked Claude Console organization. Nothing changes for your plan: when you’re signed in with your Claude plan, the Claude Agent SDK and claude -p still draw from your subscription limits.
EDIT: I was mistaken. pi uses @anthropic-ai/sdk (the client for the Messages API), not @anthropic-ai/claude-agent-sdk (the Agent SDK).
rahimnathwani··on UV-5RM-Radio-Mod
5R and 5RM aren't the same.
rahimnathwani··on RealPage rent-pricing case wraps with nearly $360M to renters
Tacit collusion wouldn't work in this case, because most rental markets aren't oligopolies.
rahimnathwani··on Cuban: Facebook knowingly runs AI deepfake scam ads; docs say $16B fraud revenue
Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham of Reuters recently won The Pulitzer Prize for "Beat Reporting" for

  "inventive and revelatory reporting on Meta that detailed the technology company’s willingness to expose users, including children, to scams and AI manipulation"
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/jeff-horwitz-and-engen-tham...

The award was for a series of articles, one of which was published exactly a year ago: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

rahimnathwani··on Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?
I'm curious about the adb part. Are you running this over tailscale or similar? Or only when you're at home?
rahimnathwani··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (November 2026)
Outside of my day job, I've been working on:

- hermitator, a tool to run multiple isolated AI agents for WhatsApp on a single machine, with idle agents using no RAM: https://www.encona.com/posts/hermitator/

- showntell, which allows your coding agent to explain things to you with a video that starts playing within a few seconds of you asking: https://www.encona.com/posts/showntell/

- a philosophy tutor (testing in private for now) that does 2:1 live philosophy lessons, each exploring a single topic (aimed at ~10yo kids). I've tested this successfully (i.e. two kids did an hour and they want to do it again), and am trying to make improvements.

- some other education-related things

- a jmail-style mailbox viewer: https://www.encona.com/posts/mailbox-viewer/

rahimnathwani··on The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitive Mathematical Primer
I just emailed him. Fingers crossed.
rahimnathwani··on The Little Book of Generative AI Foundations: An Intuitive Mathematical Primer
Thanks.

But fyi for others this is one version behind and missing these updates:

  V1.3 (May 12, 2026)
  Many typos and phrasing fixes with the help of LLMs.
  Section 3.8. Added a section about large-scale training
rahimnathwani··on The first wired XR glasses powered by Android XR
Do they work well as a replacement for a monitor when you're travelling?
rahimnathwani··on Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop
I don't know what records I'm missing. I usually only know of the existence of a record once I've received it.
rahimnathwani··on Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop
"The work falls outside normal scope of the person's job."

Maybe in some cases, but not in this case with this agency (SFUSD).

The responses I've received so far from SFUSD (over several years) were each from someone whose whole job is/was dealing with public records requests.

One of the requests that was refused was for a Google Slides deck that was visible to all of SFUSD's ~10000 employees.

rahimnathwani··on Oregon Police Are Charging a Local News Outlet $2.5M for Records About One Cop
Some agencies have a different tactic: go really slowly.

I sent a public records request to my local school district on March 9th 2026.

They responded on 19th March 2026 saying they'd respond on in late April.

Since then, every month they've sent an email with some small portion of the records, with a PDF letter saying they'll send a follow up a month later.

I've received 8 of those responses so far, and there's no indication when, if ever, I will have received all the records responsive to my request.

rahimnathwani··on Root shell on Samsung TV
In the UK, 'pavement' doesn't refer to any paved road, but to what Americans call a 'sidewalk'.

Bicycles are ridden on the road, not the pavement.

Sometimes people ride bicycles on the pavement, but doing so with a long piece of wood would be very dangerous indeed.

rahimnathwani··on Using LLM for confidence scoring is a bad idea
Yes, the reward needs to include both correctness AND the Brier loss. Sorry if that wasn't clear from my comment. I was focused on the bit OP said was missing.
rahimnathwani··on Mortality Among People with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
This is marked on the page as an 'Original Investigation', but right below the title it says it's a 'Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis'.

I'm skeptical about meta analyses in general because, the times when I've dug into a meta analysis and traced the conclusions back to the original papers, I've always been disappointed, and ended up not being convinced of the conclusions of the meta analysis.

Anyway, I haven't done that exercise for this paper, but I will say:

- Although the authors say they did a "systematic review and meta-analysis of 19 studies", only 12 of the 19 papers are included in the meta analysis.

- Only one of the authors read all the studies they included ("Study quality was assessed by 1 reviewer.")

- That reviewer was Lucy Corrigan, BSc ("Full texts were screened (L.C.) against the same inclusion and exclusion criteria (165 articles)...")

Here is the abstract of one of the 12 studies they included (and marked as 'Good' quality, the highest rating they gave): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19485565.2021.2...

Here is what they found:

  Discrete-time hazard analysis indicates that the log odds of mortality were significantly lower among 18 and 19 year old adults ever diagnosed with ADHD and significantly higher among 46 to 64 year old adults ever diagnosed with ADHD, with a crossover occurring at age 33.
rahimnathwani··on Using LLM for confidence scoring is a bad idea
If you found this interesting, you should read section 5 of this article to learn about how LLMs can be trained so that they're good at confidence scoring: https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/i/217935364/51-on-cali...

OP says that LLMs were never scored against correctness. But that's an assumption about the optimization process.

This is sort of right:

- pretraining scores on next token, and says nothing about confidence

- RLHF and RLVR scores are binary (1=preferred/correct, 0=worse/incorrect) and the feedback doesn't do anything to push the weights in a direction that improves calibration/confidence

BUT you can ask the model to output its confidence, and then train it to be more correct. RLCR (mentioned in the article I linked above) adds a Brier penalty to the reward, so the model's performance isn't just measured on % correctness. (Presumably TypeSafeAI's RLCD is similar to RLCR, but they haven't published anything about it.)

This eliminates the "always say 30%" loophole OP mentioned. The Brier penalty, (q-c)^2, punishes a forecaster who ignores instance-level information. For example if we have a model that's right 60% of the time, it could use one of these strategies to give its confidence:

  Strategy A, always say 0.6:
  When right (60% of the time): (0.6-1)^2 = 0.16
  When wrong (40% of the time): (0.6-0)^2 = 0.36
  Expected penalty: 0.6×0.16 + 0.4×0.36 = 0.24

  Strategy B: the model can tell its answers apart. Half are 'easy' (right 90% of the time) and half are 'hard' (right 30% of the time), which still averages to 60%. It says 0.9 on easy ones and 0.3 on hard ones:
  Easy: 0.9×(0.1)^2 + 0.1×(0.9)^2 = 0.09
  Hard: 0.3×(0.7)^2 + 0.7×(0.3)^2 = 0.21
  Expected penalty: (0.09+0.21)/2 = 0.15
Both strategies are perfectly calibrated (60% is both the average confidence and thje average % of time it's right), but B gets a lower penalty. Of course these are not actual strategies used by LLMs. But I'm just trying to say why training can push the model toward optimizing instance-specific confidence.
rahimnathwani··on eMudhra to exit global SSL/TLS certificate business
"There were no end entity certificates issued out of the affected CA’s."

This seems like a weird statement given that anyone can issue certificates out of the affected CAs.

rahimnathwani··on Muse exposes users' personal and business secrets when they share conversations
Imagine I have a link of this format:

https://cf.metaaiusercontent.com/q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0

No one can guess that URL. The q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0 part is only ever shared with the Meta's server (protected by TLS).

Now imagine the URL is instead:

https://q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com/

The first step for my computer to open that link is to do a DNS query, which immediately shares the entire URL (minus the `https://` and the `/`) with my ISP's DNS server (and anyone sniffing traffic along the path, as DNS queries are usually sent in plain text).

rahimnathwani··on Ofcom concedes defeat in 4chan case
He also talked with Dwarkesh Patel: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dominic-cummings
rahimnathwani··on What shall I teach my son?
capable, tenacious, kind
rahimnathwani··on Retired Penn professor arrested for blocking Uber Eats robot
There may be no self-driving wheelchairs today, but they will probably exist in a year or two. If/when they do exist, and a self-driving wheelchair were returning to its owner's home after being repaired or tuned up, would it be OK for a pedestrian to block its path, since it's not human nor currently carrying a human?
rahimnathwani··on Retired Penn professor arrested for blocking Uber Eats robot
If an empty self-driving wheelchair were on its way to pick up its owner, would it be OK for a pedestrian to block its way?
rahimnathwani··on Jev meets the Trolley Problem
Does humanity design CPUs 'such that human life is super valuable'?
rahimnathwani··on Jev meets the Trolley Problem
Jev is trained towards "Calibrated decisions: answers with epistemically honest probabilities on System One tasks." [emphasis mine]

To me it seems like:

- Jev should be good at telling us 'what is'

- Jev isn't trying to tell us 'what should be'

e.g. if you want your software to assume each human life has the same value, then you should rely on Jev to tell you how many human lives would be lost in each scenario, and then your software can pick. But Jev is not trained on your value system, which is neither objective truth nor something that you can derive from the inputs.

rahimnathwani··on AWS Lambda Web Functions
I assumed you were talking about instance-based billing (what I've always used), but I think you're talking about request-based billing?
rahimnathwani··on AWS Lambda Web Functions
If you scale Cloud Run to zero and then send a request, won't you immediately wake it up and be charged until it powers down in at least 15 minutes?
rahimnathwani··on Gemini 4 Argon
Not available to me on gemini.google.com (Pro, USA).
rahimnathwani··on We turned EmbeddingGemma 2 into a speech-to-text model
It was your post yesterday that made me aware of granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc (which I guess you used as a comparator because it's already very fast).

Thank you!

  uv tool install mlx-audio
  mlx_audio.stt.generate \
  --model ibm-granite/granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc \
  --audio.wav \
  --output-path transcript
(Until now I've been using mlx-community/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3)
rahimnathwani··on Apple HomeView
When I read it was multi-user, I got excited, but then realized that it assumes each user already has an iPhone and/or iPad.

It's a shame that iPhoneOS, iPadOS and Omarchy are designed to be single-user devices.

Android phones (at least Pixels) support multiple users, each with their own apps and data.

rahimnathwani··on Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things
Right but the later questions are harder than the earlier ones.

From page 4:

  Problem difficulty increased across the experiment from one-step1 (problems 1–4) to two-step2 (problems 5–8) to three-step3 (problems 9–12).
From page 6:

  Problems increased in difficulty from one-step (problems 4-6) to two-step (problems 7-10) to three-step (problems 11-14) problems.
The fact that the AI group did worse on the harder problems than the non-AI group did on the easier ones doesn't tell us anything.
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