Hacker News Reader

InsideOutSantaon Analyzing Frontier Model Progress with My Favourite Game: Prince of Persia

PCs were incredibly expensive at the time, though, and barely useful. Most people didn't buy a new one every two years, despite the fast progress in hardware development. So many people, especially kids, were stuck with "ancient" hardware. I had friends who had an 8088 PC or an Apple II in the late 90s.

InsideOutSantaon Analyzing Frontier Model Progress with My Favourite Game: Prince of Persia

It's so confusing how the actual article is in English, but the prompts are just gibberish. But LLMs are pretty good at deciphering gibberish; I often put our CEO's absolutely atrocious E-Mails into ChatGPT and tell it to explain wtf he wants from me.

Also, I feel like the LLMs would have done better if they had started from scratch each time, rather than being burdened by the output from the previous attempt.

InsideOutSantaon Toyota is taking the Corolla electric

Perfect.

InsideOutSantaon DoorDash Spent $1.4M Trying to Stop Mamdani from Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why

"Simply put, we screwed up. We should have given Cuomo two million so we can keep underpaying Dashers."

InsideOutSantaon Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

This is a bit like saying that shoes are more important than shoe factories. Yes, sure, I can't wear a shoe factory, but we'll all run out of shoes if all the factories are gone.

InsideOutSantaon What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals

Studies show that the severity of the expected punishment has a relatively small impact on crime (and in some cases, more severe punishments can lead to more severe crimes). The probability of getting caught has a much bigger impact.

InsideOutSantaon Claude Opus 5.5

People claiming they don't understand or are confused by relatively simple English is a surprisingly common genre of comments on HN. I wonder what causes the people here to have these feelings towards English; my guess is indeed that many people here judge English as if it were a programming language.

InsideOutSantaon GPT-6 Sol and Luna

> Also, I don't think either of them are horrible. That's honestly a ridiculous take considering how much people in here love their models

That's a non-sequitur.

"Nestle is a great company, considering how much people love their chocolate."

InsideOutSantaon GPT-6 Sol and Luna

They want to lock people into using the Claude Code ecosystem to make switching to other providers more difficult.

InsideOutSantaon GPT-6 Sol and Luna

> Also, OpenAI is just a company I'd rather support than Anthropic.

They're both pretty horrible, but I find it difficult to find arguments for why Anthropic is worse than OpenAI, other than their doomtrolling. Which, in the grand scheme of things, doesn't even register.

Edit: forgot about the SpaceX thing.

InsideOutSantaon GPT-6 Sol and Luna

I think the problem with Anthropic's plan is that Fable just destroys it. If you stick to Opus and below, the $200 plan goes from "using 50% of the weekly quota on the first day" to something much more reasonable.

InsideOutSantaon GPT-6 Sol and Luna

> I dont know how they make money here

By raising it from investors.

InsideOutSantaon MiMo v2.6

It's funny, I have the exact opposite reaction. This is probably misguided on my part, but Xiaomi is one of the very few major tech companies that I don't have an immediate strong negative reaction to. Everything I've bought from them, from robot vacuum to mobile phone, has been reasonably well designed, didn't break, and was priced fairly. I also think their car looks badass.

I'm sure they're doing all kinds of terrible things, like all major companies. I just can't help but like them. Also, this model looks great, and I'll give their subscription a shot next month.

InsideOutSantaon Far-left party wins Berlin election, pledging to nationalise housing

I mean, that's how taxes work. I don't have children, and yet I pay for schools. I barely ever drive anywhere, and yet I pay for roads.

As a society, we decide what we value, and then we pay for it. If you don't like what the group decides, it's your choice to move elsewhere.

InsideOutSantaon Grim Fandango Puzzle Document (1996) [pdf]

I first played it in my 40s when the remaster came out, and it's one of the best games I've played. It holds up incredibly well, particularly with the modernized controls.

So if anyone is wondering if this is just nostalgia, or if the game actually holds up, it's the latter. Just play it.

InsideOutSantaon I am often wrong

> Heavens. Is it possible you're reading into it a bit? He's miserable to work with? From this one blog post?

Everything about this blog post makes me think that I don't want to work with him, not just the "act with urgency" claim. The whole idea that he thought this was a blog post he should write and publish makes me not want to work with him.

I think there is a worthwhile idea in this blog post, which is that you should generally not strongly commit to any specific solution to a problem because you will learn new information while working on the solution, and that it is fine to say, "I was wrong; let's take a step back and rethink this."

But if you were to write a useful post about this, you'd focus on how to decide when to change your approach and when to stick to it, because always rethinking your approach can lead to infinite churn without any releases.

InsideOutSantaon I am often wrong

I think if people are always told that they are geniuses, they stop being able to discern good ideas from bad ones. Then they end up writing things like this, thinking they're incredibly gracious for publicly admitting they can be wrong, and missing how the whole message comes across.

InsideOutSantaon The Secret Life of Circuits

There's a difference between having an opinion and sharing it in a hurtful way.

> I think you know better than to accuse me of hurting people

No, I actually really don't. You saw something and posted something that was clearly meant to hurt the person who created it, with absolutely no upside for anyone involved.

InsideOutSantaon Step 5 Preview: Advancing the Pareto Frontier

GLM-5.3 and Kimi K3 are just below where I can use them to completely replace frontier models. Oddly,* SWE-2 is there for me.

If this performs similarly in the real world, we're approaching a level of capability where for most devs, it only makes sense to pay for Anthropic or OpenAI subscriptions if they are heavily subsidized and actually cheaper than these alternative options.

* Oddly, because I perceived Devin as being kind of a joke before trying SWE-2.

InsideOutSantaon The Secret Life of Circuits

Why in the world would you write something like that. Genuinely, what good does this do, other than hurt people?

InsideOutSantaon A graphical desktop for the ZX Spectrum

Yeah, I think this is interesting independently of how it was made, because it reveals a kind of "what could have been" alternative history. It's fun to imagine a past where the Speccy got a desktop, and it's fun to see what it could have looked like running on real hardware (or on an emulator).

InsideOutSantaon North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes

They'd know how big they are, obviously.

InsideOutSantaon One year of sponsored Servo development

They can obviously do whatever they want, but realistically, having five different engines that are all 70% complete is not helpful. That's not providing more options. Instead, having one that's 99% complete would be providing more options.

InsideOutSantaon A warning about 'model welfare'

In reality, courts interpret and make the law.

InsideOutSantaon Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude

PowerPoint Karaoke used to be a fun distraction; now it's literally people's job.

InsideOutSantaon A warning about 'model welfare'

I think the whole discussion about consciousness misses the simple point that LLMs might just work better if we treat them as if they were conscious.

Maybe it's a coincidence that the company doing this also tends to have the best models (and other factors certainly play a strong role). But I think it's plausible that focusing on "model welfare" actually makes models better at their tasks.

InsideOutSantaon A warning about 'model welfare'

LLMs, in a decade: "Those squishy things can't possibly be conscious; there's mounting evidence that they just lack the proper substrate."

InsideOutSantaon A warning about 'model welfare'

> Citizens United was 100% correct

It's interesting to me that one can look back at the effects that decision has had on the US and say it "was 100% correct."

It's a bit like sitting in the burning ruins of Rome and contemplating that Nero was 100% correct to focus on his music. I mean, I'm glad he got to do what he loves, but maybe 100% is just a tiny bit of an overstatement.

InsideOutSantaon Show HN: How Stale Is Your AI? Release age and training cutoff for 20 models

Came here to say the same thing. Models used to rely heavily on world knowledge from their training data. They are now much better at tool use and deciding when to research a topic, rather than just answering from memory.

I wonder how much that extends to using LLMs for programming. I assume most knowledge of programming language syntax still comes from training data.

InsideOutSantaon EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

> It is odious to start a company in the EU.

This is false.

> There are many accounts of this on HN itself.

Yes, I saw one just recently where the poster made obviously false statements about starting a company in Germany.

(Before you downvote this comment, please note that I have started multiple companies in the EU. I'm speaking from personal experience, not from something I've read on Hacker News.)