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Ratelman

67 karma · joined July 8, 2015

pw@deusvult.consulting / paulwillemjvr@gmail.com
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Ratelman··on Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers
What do you mean when you say sexual evolution?
Ratelman··on The mean means nothing: data visualization to debug a latency problem
"The “after” curve is higher than the “before” curve to the right of 140ms which means more requests are finishing slower than before."

Think they made a typo - "before" curve is higher than the "after" curve to the right of 140ms, which means more requests take longer than before to finish.

Or am I the one misunderstanding?

Ratelman··on AI companies are shredding rare books
Yeah - it does feel a bit overly dramatic, books mentioned from a potentially related article are from like 2018 (https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi...). Let's not pump the drama more than we need to, Sam Altman made another mention of the singularity over the weekend so enough of that going around.
Ratelman··on Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries
So this isn't groundbreaking results and the article itself is of questionable quality without sufficient detail as to why this is a newsworthy result. How is this the top rated article on hacker news? A more meaningful example would have been the paper that sets out a scalable and cost-effective route for closing the loop on LFP materials, while demonstrating that high-yield lithium recovery and environmental responsibility are not mutually exclusive: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092134492...
Ratelman··on Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
I actually like this idea - makes sense at face value - as long as they design the test in such a way that it aptly applies the knowledge instead of just learning for the sake of passing test like questions...
Ratelman··on AI Doesn't Have ROI
I get where you're coming from, was shocked when I left a relatively well organised corporate and did work at a relatively older company with a ton of legacy systems - when I asked what the strategy was they explained the structure to me - at the year end results they highlighted that they hit targets of cost cutting and saw this as an achievement, the whole narrative was around how its a tough economic environment (the presentation was literally all about things happening in the world - nothing about things they did/projects they delivered/value they added...) - they also had more project managers than engineers and wondered why projects kept missing deadlines- they hoped AI would solve their problems - but you can't get ROI in a space like that where your engineers are using AI to patch the ship to keep it afloat while the project managers think they're in an airplane and are trying to get it off the ground...
Ratelman··on AI Doesn't Have ROI
A financial services company in Africa
Ratelman··on AI Doesn't Have ROI
I've seen legitimately good outcomes with AI - a backlog has been cleared, features that were left on the cutting room floor have been pulled back in AND delivered all thanks to the use of AI coding tools. AI workflows have brought down processes from weeks of human processing to a couple of minutes with human oversight - and the revenue that it unlocks more than covers the AI bill. This is within a large corporate company - the "No such story exists for AI" feels overplayed. Sure, the wave of (quoting the article) "braindead executives, imbeciles and middle management hall monitors that don’t do any real work" might be bigger than with previous hype cycles because AI as a tool does enable pseudo-intellectualism, but the article overstates its case. I know, 1 counterpoint doesn't make a strong argument - but there's no reason the way we're applying this as a tool can't provide the same gains within other organisations - am I missing something/being delusional/huffing copium?
Ratelman··on Launch HN: Kita (YC W26) – Automate credit review in emerging markets
If you are eyeing the South African market - I can promise you granting credit here is waaaaayyy ahead of the US. There is a very solid credit bureau and a few of the banks are already on the "use AI to process docs" train. For rest of Africa - they're bigger on using cellphone data (see Optasia). If you want some insight into the market - happy to have a chat (email on profile)
Ratelman··on Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
Reflecting on my own experience - frequency of contact (if I see them once a year, can't really count them as close friends) How involved they are in my life - are they people I turn to when I'm facing a problem, do they turn to me when facing their own problems? Do we have frequent deep conversations - not just surface level discuss the weather, sports etc. but stuff that matter. Quantifying this - length of friendship (# of years), frequency of contact (annually, monthly, weekly etc.), level of trust (low, medium, high - can I trust my kids with them kind of trust), level of involvement (low, medium, high - what things do I feel comfortable sharing with them - suppose this is also level of trust?)
Ratelman··on Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
What makes you consider them close (aside from length of friendship)?
Ratelman··on Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization
Boils down to the basics of proper science - how does one measure/quantify close friends?
Ratelman··on Self-supervised learning, JEPA, world models, and the future of AI [video]
Yeah, he was quite vocal in his opinion that they would plateau earlier than they did and that little value would be derived from them because they're just stochastic parrots. Agree with him that they're probably not sufficient for AGI, but, at least in my experience, they're adding a lot of value and they're continuously performing better in a range of tasks that he wasn't expecting them to.
Ratelman··on Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference
Was my thinking exactly - but also semantically equivalent is also only relevant when it needs to be factual, not necessarily for ALL outputs (if we're aiming for LLM's to present as "human" - or for interactions with LLMs to be natural conversational...). This excludes the world where LLMs act as agents - where you would of course always like the LLM to be factual and thus deterministic.
Ratelman··on OpenAI Progress
In a few years we've gone from gibberish (less poetic maybe, less polished and surprising, but none the less gibberish) - to legit conversational, and in my own opinion, well rounded answers. This is a great example of hard-core engineering - no matter what your opinion of the organisation and saltman is, they have built something amazing. I do hope they continue with their improvements, it's honestly the most useful tool in my arsenal since stackoverflow.
Ratelman··on Stanford to continue legacy admissions and withdraw from Cal Grants
Which statistics in which study? Given the current system any sampling from college/university would be cherry picking vs general populous (unless you also sample general population with similar constraints to ensure a like for like comparison) so can't really be trusted.
Ratelman··on OpenAI's new GPT-5 models announced early by GitHub
Interesting/unfortunate/expected that GPT-5 isn't touted as AGI or some other outlandish claim. It's just improved reasoning etc. I know it's not the actual announcement and it's just a single page accidentally released, but it at least seems more grounded...? Have to wait and see what the actual announcement entails.
Ratelman··on O3 and Grok 4 Accidentally Vindicated Neurosymbolic AI
Extensive post on how neurosymbolic AI, the marriage between connectionist and neuro-symbolic approach to AI is potentially finally vindicated - opinion-piece by Gary Marcus
Ratelman··on At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
In America maybe, in south africa it's quite the opposite considering the government provides a lot more support for poor non-white folks than for white folks (specifically based om race)
Ratelman··on Offline vs. online ML pipelines
Might be missing something but how is this on the front page of hackernews? It feels more like an ad than anything else.
Ratelman··on [dead]
The closest article I could find to "Smith, J. et al. (2023). "Advances in Probabilistic Forecasting." Journal of Forecasting" was from the April issue of Journal of Forecasting, but the article was titled: Advances in forecasting: An introduction in light of the debate on inflation forecasting and there was no Smith, J. that was involved in writing that article. Where do these numbers for improvements in the various industries come from? Somethings feels off with this readme.
Ratelman··on Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time
So Minimax just "open-sourced" (I add it in "" because they have a custom license for its use and I've not read through that) but they have context length of 4-million tokens and it scored 100% on the needle in a haystack problem. It uses lightning attention - so still attention, just a variation? So this is potentially not as groundbreaking as the publishers of the paper hoped or am I missing something fundamental here? Can this scale better? Does it train more efficiently? The test-time inference is amazing - is that what sets this apart and not necessarily the long context capability? Will it hallucinate a lot less because it stores long-term memory more efficiently and thus won't make up facts but rather use what it has remembered in context?
Ratelman··on Dog Aging Project
FYI limited to to US only - they refer you to their sister project: https://darwinsark.org/ if you'd still like to contribute in a similar fashion but reside outside of USA.
Ratelman··on Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws
I'd say human rights violation is a bit of a stretch - the negative impact of social media use on an adolescent's psychological well-being is well documented - so possibly even the exact opposite.
Ratelman··on Australia: Kids under 16 to be banned from social media after Senate passes laws
What do you mean with MAPs? Sorry, haven't seen the acronym before.
Ratelman··on Show HN: Feels Like Paper
There is quite a variation in its wing position while flying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odvYot6Rldw&ab_channel=Earth... So at least some butterflies do actually move their forewings significantly forward of their head while in flight (as stated by edamstra on June 2nd, 2017 - comment on the OP link)
Ratelman··on OpenAI hits pause on video model Sora after artists leak access in protest
Link to the post: https://huggingface.co/spaces/PR-Puppets/PR-Puppet-Sora If you read through it, they clearly state: "We are not against the use of AI technology as a tool for the arts (if we were, we probably wouldn't have been invited to this program). What we don't agree with is how this artist program has been rolled out and how the tool is shaping up ahead of a possible public release. We are sharing this to the world in the hopes that OpenAI becomes more open, more artist friendly and supports the arts beyond PR stunts."
Ratelman··on OpenAI hits pause on video model Sora after artists leak access in protest
Meh, not entirely sure what would work better. Having read through the huggingface post a few times now, suppose it's less of an emotional reaction, more actual protest to abusive practices.
Ratelman··on OpenAI hits pause on video model Sora after artists leak access in protest
True, true - didn't think that one through
Ratelman··on OpenAI hits pause on video model Sora after artists leak access in protest
Fair point - and I suppose we are on HACKERnews - and they are OPENAI, so helping them be more open is an effective form of protest.
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