HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

AnodicElegy

321 karma · joined June 8, 2026

submissionscomments
AnodicElegy··on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
Price/intelligence comparison with Opus 5.5 on Artificial Analysis:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=gpt-5-6-luna-low%2Ccla...

According to this, at Max it's better and cheaper than 5.5 Medium, but worse than 5.5 High. At Medium, it's better and cheaper than 5.5 Low.

AnodicElegy··on Jeeves. Reasoning improves Jev-like decision models
I'm surprised we haven't seen a "Jehovah" yet.
AnodicElegy··on What is the AI capex breakeven rate?
Requires free Financial Times account.
AnodicElegy··on Ember-1
I guess they figure "best bang for your buck" comes off a little too colloquial.
AnodicElegy··on MiMo-v2.6-Flash: on intelligence/price Pareto frontier
Intelligence/price graph: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=#intelligence-comparis...
AnodicElegy··on Anthropic says it's bio lab has found something big
The fawning and hyperbolic language used here is more extreme than in Anthropic's actual press release. Not a good look for the journalist.
AnodicElegy··on Space Bunny Alpha
Folks on Reddit seem to think this is the newest MiniMax model.
AnodicElegy··on The AI Build-Out Is Becoming the Biggest Economic Bet in U.S. History
Associated chart:

https://images.wsj.net/im-34529026

AnodicElegy··on We used an AI agent to fix an open-source bug. Someone asked to ban us
Your PR comment was clearly written by an LLM and you used it to advertise your platform. I think the user calling for your ban made a reasonable point:

"The project and the bug were co-opted into an 100% automated flow without asking permission. It forced you to detect and intervene in order to get a human to pay attention. Your [sic] were forced to dedicate human time, while they could choose whether to or not. That's exactly the unsustainable asymmetry that should be renounced."

AnodicElegy··on Stanford violated AI policy after race-swapping students in ad
'“It is Silicon Valley. I’m not as surprised given the culture of Stanford revolves heavily around AI usage,” he said of the face swap, noting that his professors also regularly use Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot.'

That's depressing. Why would a professor be using an AI chatbot regularly in class? What kind of example are they setting for their students?

AnodicElegy··on Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware
Do these historically respected folks not realize they are trashing their reputations by publishing this stuff?
AnodicElegy··on Xiaomi MiMo v2.6
Pretty sure that's Luna xhigh.
AnodicElegy··on Frontier AI on Your Own Hardware
'In one of my classes I asked the question I was afraid to ask but I just needed the answer to: “Who is afraid of not getting a job after graduating?” About eighty percent of the 150 people in the room raised their hands. That is roughly 120 students answering, in one motion, that they do not believe there is a place for them in the future.'

It's quite a leap to go from "I'm afraid of not getting a job after graduating" to "I do not believe there is a place for me in the future". Maybe it hasn't been the case for computer scientists in the past decade, but it's pretty normal to be worried about getting a job after graduating from one's college problem, even if one knows that most people get jobs when they graduate.

I stopped reading soon after that, when it became obvious that the article was LLM-written.

AnodicElegy··on Shopify partners with Muse for agentic checkout with Shop Pay
Agentic checkout? What does that even mean? It had never occurred to me that an online store checkout was something I might need help with.
AnodicElegy··on A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W
The most irritating way in which W is odd is that it requires three syllables to name, while all the other English letters are monosyllabic. This leads to many unfortunate situations where it takes substantially longer to say the acronym of a title than to say the title itself. Take for example, the World Wildlife Fund, which contains four syllables (or maybe five, depending how you pronounce "wild") and whose acronym contains seven. Given how many acronyms contain the word "World" in particular, this is clearly a massive inefficiency in the way we go about our lives. I've started a campaign to rename it something reasonable like "woo" or "woe", but neither Reuters nor the AP seem particularly interested.
AnodicElegy··on Stepfun Step 5 Preview (LLM): On AA Pareto frontier
https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=granite-4-2-3b%2Cclaud...
AnodicElegy··on Show HN: Jev vs. GPT-5.6 and Claude Haiku at Pong
The game is broken for me. The ball just sits in the middle.
AnodicElegy··on Our framework for reporting model misalignment
The #1 thing these frontier model companies can do to help alignment is to provide the user with the chain-of-thought traces, as the open models do. But let's be real, their commercial considerations are a much higher priority than alignment.
AnodicElegy··on Learning Programming in an Age of LLMs
"The same kind of argument was used when China was admitted to the World Trade Organization. And indeed, lots of new jobs were created, just not in the Western world."

China's entry into the WTO is really not a good evidentiary example for AI causing mass unemployment. Unemployment in the U.S. had already been increasing at the time, peaked soon after, decreased to well below the point it had been at China's entry, and only went up again during the Great Financial Crisis, which had nothing -- or at least very little -- to do with competition from China. That's not to say that jobs weren't lost, even en masse, but they were replaced, and U.S. unemployment has been near record lows in recent years. China's WTO entry is a supporting point, not a counterpoint, to the idea that jobs lost to AI will be replaced by new ones.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

AnodicElegy··on Who gets to define the rules for AI?
In many areas of criminal law, willful ignorance is not an excuse. One could potentially argue that the sandbox setup at OpenAI that led to the hacking incident at Hugging Face could fall into this category.

Beyond that, there's always tort law, which doesn't require intent.

AnodicElegy··on An Alien Mind
"OpenAI’s primary bet here has been chain-of-thought monitoring. It is based on an appealingly scalable idea: a lot of the model’s capability comes from a verbalized reasoning process (chain-of-thought). If we scale optimization on the outcomes of that process, but do not supervise the process itself, that chain-of-thought has no direct incentive in training to hide any misaligned ideas or objectives. This does not mean the model will learn to externalize misaligned tendencies that don’t rely on using the chain-of-thought; however, it can allow us to monitor exactly the capability increase from reasoning."

Yes, and it would greatly aid alignment if the user could monitor the chain-of-thought! The open models, including very powerful ones like Kimi K3, are delivering this. The fact that OpenAI and Anthropic are not clearly indicates that a commercial consideration (avoiding distillation) takes precedence over alignment -- regardless of how much they bloviate about the latter.

AnodicElegy··on The revolt of the reader
If someone uses an LLM to write and is able to tailor their writing such that it isn't obviously written by an LLM, then I'm fine with it! But two of my otherwise-favourite news sources -- the Hacker News front page and FT Alphaville -- are inundated by articles where the LLM usage is blindingly obvious.
AnodicElegy··on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.2
This update really gives OpenAI a boost. Not saying there's anything inaccurate or untoward about that, but the timing is unfortunate. It would have looked better had it been done prior to the Fable 5.1 and GPT 6 releases. I guess AA would say that there's no perfect time to do these updates, given the rapid fire pace of releases!
AnodicElegy··on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.2
It's very different than it was earlier today, so pretty sure it's v4.2.
AnodicElegy··on Scientists Find Worms in Almost Every Fish in a Tuna Haul – 96% Were Infected
Everything in moderation! With the big predators you get mercury, with the bottom-feeders you get persistent lipophilic compounds like PCBs and PFAS.

I could just fish for perch, but what's the fun in that?

(I'm mostly kidding, I love fishing for perch too.)

AnodicElegy··on Scientists Find Worms in Almost Every Fish in a Tuna Haul – 96% Were Infected
Any angler will know that, in some lakes, it seems like every fish is full of worms. I've always dealt with that by frying the crap out of them -- no medium-rare bass for me, sorry. Alternatively, I'm sure they're fine after a few weeks in the freezer.

Rivers seem to be better, with worm presence (or at least, obvious worm presence) being less common. Additionally, I've never seen worms in bottom-feeding fish like catfish and carp.

AnodicElegy··on GPT-6 Astra
If you scroll down in the Artificial Analysis page you linked, you'll see all the individual benchmarks.
AnodicElegy··on Dextroproporphan: An Analogue for a Better Dextromethorphan?
Confirmed: the compound proposed by the author has been made and studied since at least 1992 (https://pubs.acs.org/jmcmar/article-abstract/35/22/4135/7112...). It had activity interesting enough to be published, but like almost all active molecules, it wasn't interesting enough to push into the clinic.

Some other inaccuracies I noticed in the post:

"DXO is more lipophilic, meaning it’s attracted to fats and lipids."

Dextrorphan is more polar, and therefore less, not more, lipophilic than dextromethorphan. It is still able to cross the blood-brain barrier because it is still a fairly lipophilic molecule.

"My first thought was replacing the methoxy group with 3-fluoromethoxy. On paper, this seemed like it could be an effective way to interfere with CYP2D6-mediated demethylation, but synthesizing a fluorinated DXM analogue would be difficult and costly."

There is no such thing as a "3-fluoromethoxy" group. What I think the author meant was "trifluoromethoxy" ("3-" and "tri" have very different meanings in chemical nomenclature). The trifluoromethoxylated derivative of dextrorphan has, in fact, been synthesized and patented (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/24997117).

"The structure of DPO is (+)-3-(isopropoxy)-N-methylmorphinan, with the 3-methoxy group of DXM replaced by a 3-isopropoxy group."

The "+" indicates the direction that a chiral nonracemic compound rotates plane-polarized light in solution. While there are computational methods to predict it, it can't be assumed that the derivative of a "+" compound will also be "+". Better to use "R" and "S" (CIP nomenclature), since they are determined entirely by the 3D structure of the chiral compound and don't require a physical measurement to determine.

AnodicElegy··on Dextroproporphan: An Analogue for a Better Dextromethorphan?
This is pure speculation, and he really doesn't know what he's talking about:

"The main problem is that DXO also contains an amine, and that amine can react during the process. So the first step would be to temporarily protect the amine so that it doesn’t interfere."

Anyone who's taken introductory org chem knows better than this. That's a tertiary amine, so you're not going to be protecting it. Not that the compound can't be made -- it probably has been already. I'd check on Reaxys but I don't really want a morphinan in my search history...

AnodicElegy··on OpenAI begins rolling out GPT-6 Astra
It was in the link in the parent of the thread to which I replied. But you can find it on Artificial Analysis's website now.
Page 1 of 3Next →