Hacker News Reader

ViktorRayon Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too

Garry Tan and Sam Altman recently did this interview together. They seemed pretty friendly with each other during it. Wonder what Sam Altman would say about Tan advocating for OpenAI’s models to be distilled.

Then again this is the same OpenAI that has gotten into legal trouble recently regarding Apple’s IP so who knows

ViktorRayon A wandering black hole caught feeding on the run

But it’s not an approximation right? In our reference frame it is the truth.

ViktorRayon A wandering black hole caught feeding on the run

Ah yes that’s indeed true.

But from the Earth’s reference frame wasn’t the Pluto activity I mentioned earlier simultaneous with what happened 5 hours ago on Earth?

So couldn’t you say from Earth’s reference frame this black hole’s activity happened simultaneously with events 20 million years ago?

ViktorRayon A wandering black hole caught feeding on the run

Wait then what about events that happen on Pluto?

Pluto is around five light hours away from us.

If an astronaut goes to Pluto and films herself doing activity A and then broadcasts that back to Earth, it would take around five hours for the broadcast to reach us.

So you’re saying that it is not correct to say her recorded activity happened five hours ago?

ViktorRayon A succession crisis that tore England apart (2023)

Is is true that they believed women couldn’t rule? England was not the first European country to have a female monarch. By the time all this was going on there had been a female monarch elsewhere in Europe a few decades earlier.

Would be interesting if there were any texts at the time discussing this.

I’m asking out of genuine curiosity not to start an argument.

ViktorRayon Tech's New Rich Are Suffering from 'Sudden Wealth Syndrome'

Wonder if it is similar to the frustrations some people feel when they retire. Some people have these very driven personalities and this can cause quite a bit of angst for them when they get a lot of free time.

I remember when I was a teenager I used to volunteer at a hospital. There was this one old lady there who had that kind of personality. I think she had been some kind of executive earlier in life but now she was retired and volunteering. I remember she was really harsh and strict and kind of dictatorial towards the other volunteers.

It was kind of strange to see. Here we are volunteering at a hospital. Shouldn’t we not have those kinds of interactions? But I guess that was just the kind of person she was. And she was volunteering because she couldn’t act like her old business executive self at home so she did it during volunteering.

ViktorRayon GPT-6 built this earth exploration site in 5 prompts

Wonder if someone might use an LLM to specifically vibe code a program that takes LLM code and makes it appear like non-LLM code.

ViktorRayon GPT-6 built this earth exploration site in 5 prompts

I thought this was super cool…

And then I clicked the “Explore” button on the top right and there are even more things that you can see! Pretty neat.

ViktorRayon Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract

But the moderator wasn’t just wringing their hands. The moderator banned the account. He even said so at the end of that comment.

ViktorRayon Why Bullshit Jobs Are (Finally) Dying [video]

You could argue that a bullshit job is a form of rent seeking. The bullshit job worker is increasing his or her share of the wealth without actually creating any wealth through labor. Rent seeking overall is not a good thing for the economy.

ViktorRayon Why Bullshit Jobs Are (Finally) Dying [video]

Unfortunately the video game industry is still filled with bullshit jobs with people who do nothing important.

https://youtu.be/s5qKN2Yxaok

This was a good video from Laura Fryer talking about this. She compared how there were barely any “producers” on the Halo game from 25 years ago. And then you look at the recent remake of the same game and there are so many people working in it. Again this remake of the same game from 25 years ago. So much bloat. So many managerial and producer positions? Why? It’s the same game!

Actually it’s not even the same game. It’s less than the same game! The original Halo 1 had single player and multiplayer. The remake only has single player. So you have tons of more managers to do less than the stuff just in some better graphics…

ViktorRayon Stockfish 19

I think an interesting problem would be for a LLM from OpenAI or Anthropic to try to learn chess from first principles and then use that knowledge to try and beat Stockfish.

I wonder if anyone at those companies is trying to tackle this problem.

ViktorRayon Show HN: The same nine streaming subscriptions cost $702/year more than in 2021

Why have the streaming costs increased so much?

Surely the cost of storage has not gone up. And the cost of sending the 0’s and 1’s hasn’t gone up either.

Are movie studios demanding vastly more money from the streaming services for the movie and TV content? Maybe the costs to make new movies and tv shows have gone up substantially but has licensing costs for the old movies and shows gone up too?

Are these extra costs just going to the streamers to run up profit? Genuinely curious about the economics here. I know the streaming business is highly competitive so I don’t think it’s just rent seeking so wonder what else is going on.

ViktorRayon Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract

There were times on this site where I saw some pretty bad comments that hadn’t been moderated. I emailed the mods at

hn@ycombinator.com

to let them know about those bad comments and the moderators were always super nice and helpful in response to me.

ViktorRayon Blizzard Workers Win Historic Union Contract

I guess we will find out when GTA 6 comes out as Rockstar has become unionized.

Although actually…Rockstar didn’t become unionized until most of GTA 6 had already been completed. So I guess we’ll find out when their next game comes out.

ViktorRayon I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus

Maybe my original comment wasn’t clear. If so I apologize. I was actually criticizing Noah Smith. I agree with what the author of the posted article said.

EDIT: actually it isn’t even that. I personally don’t know enough about this topic to really have an opinion or criticize anyone. Still it’s indeed a phenomena I’ve noticed.

ViktorRayon Muse, the band, lost its social media handles to Muse, Meta's new AI agent

Don’t worry dang! This response wasn’t irritating at all!

It’s actually very interesting to me to see how you all moderate this website! Thank you sincerely for taking the time to type all that up for me. Appreciate all the hard work you do!

ViktorRayon I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus

I wonder if there is a name to this phenomena. Where being knowledgeable in one thing (such as computer science) means you incorrectly believe you are an expert in another domain (such as virology)

ViktorRayon Muse, the band, lost its social media handles to Muse, Meta's new AI agent

I wonder if it is possible to transfer some upvotes too. This new thread was on the front page before the dupe tag and the comment transfer and the other thread has much fewer upvotes which inadvertently leads to less visibility.

ViktorRayon What will our economic future look like?

The person stated “ Many data centers are being built by companies that won't exist in a few years, as the winner will take all.” The person stated this as a negative.

If those built data-centers are sold to other companies what is the negative? The gains you mention would happen even if those other companies stay in business.

ViktorRayon What will our economic future look like?

Wait but then in your scenario wouldn’t the companies going out of business simply sell their data centers to the winning companies?

ViktorRayon Coyote v. Acme (1990)

For me I actually like seeing trailers before the movies. Personally I feel like the trailers are part of the experience and I can’t help but feel some disappointment when a movie starts with no trailers in front of it.

ViktorRayon Y Combinator Early Access Network

He was replying to a tweet by Paul Graham where Paul Graham says the following:

“Startups: Instead of appearing on Shark Tank, spend that energy fixing whatever makes your product so unappealing you think you need to.“

https://www.inc.com/business-insider/mark-cuban-chris-sacca-...

ViktorRayon Y Combinator Early Access Network

Wonder if people going to this will have the same infamous sense of arrogance and entitlement that is common to Y combinator folks?

Source:

https://x.com/mcuban/status/692595120969875456

ViktorRayon Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)

It’s interesting how monopolistic corporations can fall prey to the same dynamics as authoritarian countries with centralized economies.

ViktorRayon Unified Arabic

But doesn’t Taiwan use the traditional script? And over in Taiwan they don’t seem to have issues with literacy or using smaller screens?

ViktorRayon Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

Glad they were able to get legal help and are back. It’s frustrating to me how it’s so hard to access so many websites nowadays without being logged in. Ridiculous that so much of the web nowadays is just a handful of websites almost all of which seem to have so many restrictions.

ViktorRayon Making the Internet Boring

Some more good advice:

Turn off your YouTube watch history. This disables video suggestions when you open the website or the app.

ViktorRayon Apple reveals 'shocking evidence' from ex-employee's MacBook in OpenAI suit

One could make the argument that

"just do it and ask for forgiveness later"

is what the entire LLM industry is based on. They swallowed up all of society’s copyrighted texts without really asking for permission from anyone. This is just par for the course for them it seems unfortunately.