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skylerwiernik

80 karma · joined May 30, 2024

Founder Cyberonics skyler.cc skylerwiernik@gmail.com
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skylerwiernik··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
Amazing that they've managed to keep prices down. I paid $3300 for a base 15 inch in 2018. The 16 inch now starts at $3400 8 years later. Not bad...
skylerwiernik··on Incident with Issues and Webhooks – Resolved
This is extremely interesting how fast this happened. Either AI use surged massively in the last quarter, or this is a very sneaky move by Anthropic. Looking at my own stats, I don't think I'm using Claude Code much more than I used to, but my commits have gone way up. I have a feeling they've tuned the models recently to commit more often, which gives the illusion of more work being done.
skylerwiernik··on Youth Suicides Declined After Creation of National Hotline
Interesting. What causes this? Could it have to do with the type of person to keep a gun in a safe (has kids, is more cautious in general, etc) or have studies shown that this minor friction is actually enough?
skylerwiernik··on Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War
The quotes from those articles (short passages?) are

> He recalls meeting President Trump at an AI and energy summit in Pennsylvania, "where he and I had a good conversation about US leadership in AI,"

> "Unfortunately, I think 'No bad person should ever benefit from our success' is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on... This is a real downside and I'm not thrilled about it."

> "Throughout my time here, I've repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions. I've seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society too." (from a researcher at Anthropic)

I don't think that any of this is particularly damning. Even if you don't like the president, I don't think it's bad to say that you had a good conversation with them. I believe the CEO of NVIDIA has said similar. The Saudis invest in many public US companies, does that make those companies less trust worthy? What about taking private capital from institutions such as State Street and Blackrock? The last quote seems like more of a reflection than an allegation. It read to me as a desire to do better.

I'm all for not trusting companies, but Anthropic seems to be one of the few that's trying to do good. I think we've seen a lot worse from many of their competitors.

skylerwiernik··on Signal knows who you're talking to (2023)
> this feature is very technically complex, and totally useless

Now, to break your confidentiality, Signal would have to have a relatively complex system setup for trying to match up messages and deanonymize people. You could imagine many scenarios where a bad actor (agency) attempts to trick Signal into logging metadata. This now requires a lot more information, and if nothing else would give you a level of deniability.

skylerwiernik··on M4.6 Earthquake – 2 km ESE of Berkeley, CA
Not public, but some of the factors are listed here https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html (q2)
skylerwiernik··on Persona vectors: Monitoring and controlling character traits in language models
> In 2023, Microsoft's Bing chatbot famously adopted an alter-ego called "Sydney,” which declared love for users and made threats of blackmail. More recently, xAI’s Grok chatbot would for a brief period sometimes identify as “MechaHitler” and make antisemitic comments. Other personality changes are subtler but still unsettling, like when models start sucking up to users or making up facts.

Funny that they managed to call out all of their competitors without mentioning any of Claude's bad behavior

skylerwiernik··on Apple just released a weirdly interesting coding language model
Here's the paper that they wrote: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20639

It's notable that this was an intern project.

skylerwiernik··on Airlines are charging solo passengers higher fares than groups
I wonder if this could be abused by purchasing 2+ refundable tickets, and then canceling all but 1.
skylerwiernik··on OpenAI to buy Jony Ive's io Products for $6.5B
https://archive.ph/uSXx2
skylerwiernik··on So Much Blood
I imagine that they'd get blocked by CORS
skylerwiernik··on Launch HN: Exa (YC S21) – The web as a database
Do you find this to be worse than googlebot somehow?
skylerwiernik··on Internet in a Box
Someone already thought of this and uploaded all of the contents of the box to a website! You can find it at wikipedia.com
skylerwiernik··on Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons apparently hacked to imitate Musk, Zuck voices
Great video on how this works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvvVSTlbqEI
skylerwiernik··on NASA Gives 'All Clear' for Asteroid That Seemed to Threaten Earth
https://web.archive.org/web/20250225043633/https://www.nytim...
skylerwiernik··on DigiCert: Threat of legal action to stifle Bugzilla discourse
I don't believe that that's a legal filing. DigiCert never filed anything with the courts. That's just a letter to Sectigo threatening to sue.
skylerwiernik··on Launch HN: Promptless (YC W25) – Automatic updates for customer-facing docs
Looks cool! Super minor note -- your footer still says (c) 2024
skylerwiernik··on Large Language Models Show Concerning Tendency to Flatter Users
I imagine humans are just as likely if not more likely to do this.
skylerwiernik··on California bill would require bots to disclose that they are bots
This is clearly undisclosed promotion for vetto.app. alexd127's only other account activity is on this thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42901553] for the exact same bill.
skylerwiernik··on Launch HN: Pinch (YC W25) – Video conferencing with immersive translation
Cool idea, but just watching your demo it looks like it doesn’t work. Is there any change in the video? The lip movements certainly don’t look synchronized, and audio often continues after the person stops talking. It also doesn’t do any audio mimicking. It really doesn’t look like it does anything that Google Translate doesn’t.
skylerwiernik··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (January 2025)

  Location: Boston, MA
  Remote: No
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: Swift, Python, Java, Javascript, C++, Postgres
  Résumé/CV: https://skyler.cc/resume
  Email: skylerwiernik@gmail.com
- Shipped first iPhone app to 800+ DAU at age of 14

- Licensed LLM search engine for pitchdecks to large M&A firm

- Built open source robotics software and pitched to FIRST Robotics CEO, which they are evaluating.

- Interned at Apple

- Graduating in May, CS with focus in Robotics.

- Interested in dev tools and robotics. Open to other areas.

- Currently in Boston, willing to relocate to NYC or SF area.

skylerwiernik··on Ask HN: Predictions for 2025?
- Large release from Boston Dynamics

- Meta releases serious enterprise self-hosting Llama platform

- Apple Intelligence remains useless

- Trump begins to show serious signs of mental decline. Not tired like Biden, but overly paranoid and delusional like Putin.

- GPT-5 is almost the same as GPT-4, but it doesn't have a recognizable tone

skylerwiernik··on Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess
Couldn't we just make every human readable character a token?

OpenAI's tokenizer makes "chess" "ch" and "ess". We could just make it into "c" "h" "e" "s" "s"

skylerwiernik··on Private Cloud Compute Security Guide
I don't think they do. Your phone cryptographically verifies that the software running on the servers is what it says it is, and you can't pull the keys out of the secure enclave. They also had independent auditors go over the whole thing and publish a report. If the chip is disconnected from the system it will dump its keys and essentially erase all data.