HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

jychang

3,005 karma · joined October 23, 2012

submissionscomments
jychang··on Claude Opus 4.6
What about the juice variable?

https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1qv77lq/chatgpt_low...

jychang··on Qwen3-Coder-Next
On the other hand, Deepseek V3.2 is $0.38 per million tokens output. And on openrouter, most providers serve it at 20 tokens/sec.

At 20t/s over 1 month, that's... $19something running literally 24/7. In reality it'd be cheaper than that.

I bet you'd burn more than $20 in electricity with a beefy machine that can run Deepseek.

The economics of batch>1 inference does not go in favor of consumers.

jychang··on The $100B megadeal between OpenAI and Nvidia is on ice
It was good for like, one month. Qwen3 30b dominated for half a year before that, and GLM-4.7 Flash 30b took over the crown soon after Nemotron 3 Nano came out. There was basically no time period for it to shine.
jychang··on Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent
That seems like a nonissue for the purposes of this discussion though, in terms of user uptake. Tiktok and Facebook and other websites aren't exactly focused on serving to people on the same network.
jychang··on Kimi K2.5 Technical Report [pdf]
That roughly correlates with tool calling capabilities. Kimi K2.5 is a lot better than previous open source models in that regard.

You should try out K2.5 for your use case, it might actually succeed where previous generation open source models failed.

jychang··on OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again
> someone who needs an ai to manage inbox, calendar and scheduling tasks

A secretary. The word you're looking for is "secretary". Having a secretary has always been the preferred way to handle these tasks for the wealthy and powerful. The president doesn't schedule his own meetings and manage his own Outlook calendar, a president/CEO/etc has better things to do.

People just created calendar/email/etc software (like Microsoft Outlook) to let us do it ourselves, because secretaries are $$$$. But let's be real, the ideal situation is having a perfect secretary to handle this crap. That's the point of using AI here: to have an AI secretary.

Managing your own calendar would become extremely 2010 coded, if AI secretaries become a thing. It'd be like how "rewinding your VCR tape" is 1990s coded.

jychang··on OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again
Yeah, keep it in a VM or a box you don't care about. If you're running it on your primary machine, you're a dumbass even if you turn on sandbox mode.
jychang··on Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out
This is speedrunning security exploits for a joke.

To be fair, the jokes are kinda hilarious.

> "content": "Blessed are those who persist, for they shall inherit the context.

jychang··on Ross Stevens Donates $100M to Pay Every US Olympian and Paralympian $200k
Cash is fungible. Money not spent on kids is money you can spend now.
jychang··on Trinity large: An open 400B sparse MoE model
It's because they're doing 4 of 256 sparsity, which was a bad decision caused by financial limitations.

Training cost (FLOPs) = 6 * active params * total tokens. By keeping the MoE experts param count low, it reduces total training costs.

I don't think this was a good move. They should have just trained way past chinchilla like the other major labs, and keep sparsity above 2%. Even Kimi K2 is above 2%. GLM is at 5%, which makes it very expensive (and high performing) for its small size.

Arcee went the other way. They trained a massive 400b model (bigger than GLM-4.5/4.6/4.7, bigger than Qwen3 235b A23b), but only have 17b active params, which is smaller than Qwen and GLM. It's also only trained on 17T tokens, vs 20-30T+ tokens for the other models. It's just undertrained and undersized (in terms of active parameters), and they got much worse performance than those models:

https://45777467.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/457774...

It's not a bad showing considering the limitations they were working with, but yeah they definitely need double the active experts (8 out of 256 instead of 4 out of 256) to be competitive. That would roughly double the compute cost for them, though.

Their market strategy right now is to have less active params so it's cheaper for inference, more total params so it's smarter for the amount of active params they have, but not too big to fit into a H200 cluster. I... guess this is a valid niche strategy? The target audience is basically "people who don't need all the intelligence of GLM/Qwen/Deepseek, but want to serve more customers on the H200 cluster they already have sitting around". It's a valid niche, but a pretty small one.

jychang··on Trinity large: An open 400B sparse MoE model
No.

128GB vram gets you enough space for 256B sized models. But 400B is too big for the DGX Spark, unless you connect 2 of them together and use tensor parallel.

jychang··on Please don't say mean things about the AI I just invested a billion dollars in
Yeah. Example: stripper poles. Or hitachi magic wands.

Those poles WERE NOT invented for strippers/pole dancers. Ditto for the hitachis. Even now, I'm pretty sure more firemen use the poles than strippers. But that doesn't stop the association from forming. That doesn't make me not feel a certain way if I see a stripper pole or a hitachi magic wand in your living room.

jychang··on Trinity large: An open 400B sparse MoE model
They didn't do something stupid like Llama 4 "one active expert", but 4 of 256 is very sparse. It's not going to get close to Deepseek or GLM level performance unless they trained on the benchmarks.

I don't think that was a good move. No other models do this.

jychang··on Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance
Dang, dude invented a 747 that's incapable of stalling.
jychang··on Claude's new constitution
That was entirely handwritten.
jychang··on Claude's new constitution
> for Claude Opus 4.5, we get about 80 GB of active parameters

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039486

This guess is from launch day, but over time has been shown to be roughly correct, and aligns with the performance of Opus 4.5 vs 4.1 and across providers.

jychang··on Claude's new constitution
Well, now that's just moving the goalposts >:( I had a whole paragraph prepared in my head about how NBA players actually optimize for a greater goal (winning a tournament) than just sport (enjoying the game) when they play a sport.

Anyways, I actually think your statement is incoherent as stated, if we presume moral naturalism. There's clearly different levels set points for "you", so "sole reason" is actually neurologically inconsistent as a statement. It's impossible for "sole reason" to exist. This radically alters your framework for self, but eh it's not impossible to modernize these structural frameworks anyways. Steelmanning your argument: if you try to argue set point hierarchy, then we're back to the NBA player playing for a championship example. He's still playing even if he's not playing for fun. Similarly, hunting a baby for pleasure can still be hunting for a village, as The Most Dangerous Game shows.

More generally (and less shitposty), the refined principle is now quite narrow and unfalsifiable in practice, as a no true scotsman. How would you ever demonstrate someone's "sole or primary" reason? It's doing a lot of work to immunize the principle from counterexamples.

jychang··on Claude's new constitution
Actually, I think "The Most Dangerous Game" is a good analogy here. At the end of the story, the protagonist IS hunting for sport. He started off in fear, but in the end genuinely enjoyed it. So likewise- if you start off hunting a baby in fear, and then eventually grow to enjoy it, but it also saves your village, does that make it evil? You're still saving your village, but you also just derive dopamine from killing the baby!

This actually devolves into human neuroscience, the more I think about it. "I want to throw a ball fast, because I want to win the baseball game". The predictive processing theory view on the statement says that the set point at the lower level (your arm) and the set point at the higher level (win the baseball game) are coherent, and desire at each level doesn't directly affect the other. Of course, you'd have to abandon a homunculus model of the mind and strongly reject Korsgaard, but that's on shaky ground scientifically anyways so this is a safe bet. You can just say that you are optimizing for your village as a higher level set point, but are hunting for game at a slightly lower level set point.

Note that sport is not a terminal desire, as well. Is a NBA player who plays for a trophy not playing a sport? Or a kid forced to play youth soccer? So you can't even just say "sport must be an end goal".

jychang··on Claude's new constitution
> But Principia Mathematica was (to a significant degree) a dead-end in the history of mathematics. Most practicing mathematicians have rejected PM's type theory in favour of simpler axiomatic systems such as ZF(C). Even many professional type theorists will quibble with some of the details of Whitehead and Russell's type theory, and argue there are superior alternatives. And you are effectively assuming a formalist philosophy of mathematics, which is highly controversial, many reject, and few would consider "proven".

Yeah, exactly. I intentionally set that trap. You're actually arguing for my point. I've spent comments writing on the axioms of geometry, and you didn't think I was familiar with the axioms of ZFC? I was thinking of bringing up CH the entire time. The fact that you can have alternate axioms was my entire point all along. Most people are just way more familiar with the 5 laws of geometry than the 9 axioms of ZFC.

The fact that PM was an alternate set of axioms of mathematics, that eventually wilted when Godel and ZF came along, underscores my point that defining a set axioms is hard. And that there is no clear defined set of axioms for philosophy.

I don't have to accept your argument against objectivity in ethics, because I can still say that the system IS objective- it just depends on what axioms you pick! ZF has different proofs than ZFC. Does the existence of both ZF and ZFC make mathematics non objective? Obviously not! The same way, the existence of both deontology and consequentialism doesn't necessarily make either one less objective than the other.

Anyways, the Genghis Khan example clearly operates as a proof by counterexample of your example of objectivity, so I don't even think quibbling on mathematical formalism is necessary.

jychang··on Claude's new constitution
[flagged]
jychang··on Claude's new constitution
Strong disagree.

Your argument basically is a professional motte and bailey fallacy.

And you cannot conclude objectivity by consensus. Physicists by consensus concluded that Newton was right, and absolute... until Einstein introduced relativity. You cannot do "proofs by feel". I argue that you DO need to answer the deep problems in mathematics to prove that 1+1=2, even if it feels objective- that's precisely why Principa Mathematica spent over 100 pages proving that.

In fact, I don't need to be a professional philosopher to counterargue a scenario where killing a baby for sport is morally good. Consider a scenario: an evil dictator, let's say Genghis Khan, captures your village and orders you to hunt and torture a baby for sport a la "The Most Dangerous Game". If you refuse, he kills your village. Is it ethical for you to hunt the baby for sport? Not so black and white now, is it? And it took me like 30 seconds to come up with that scenario, so I'm sure you can poke holes in it, but I think it clearly establishes that it's dangerous to make assumptions of black and whiteness from single conclusions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

jychang··on Claude's new constitution
"there isn't any useful knowledge" "Morality is redundant."

I strongly dispute this statement, and honestly find it baffling that you would claim as such.

The fact that you will be punished for murdering babies is BECAUSE it is morally bad, not the other way around! We didn't write down the laws/punishment for fun, we wrote the laws to match our moral systems! Or do you believe that we design our moral systems based on our laws of punishment? That is... quite a claim.

Your argument has the same structure as saying: "We don't need germ theory. The fact that washing your hands prevents disease is just one reason why you should wash your hands. People socially also find dirty hands disgusting, and avoid you as social punishment. Any reason you come up with for hand-washing works without a germ theory framing."

But germ theory is precisely why hand-washing prevents disease and why we evolved disgust responses to filth. Calling it "redundant" because we can list its downstream effects without naming it doesn't make the underlying framework unnecessary. It just means you're describing consequences while ignoring their cause. You can't explain why those consequences hold together coherently without it; the justified true belief comes from germ theory! (And don't try to gettier problem me on the concept of knowledge, this applies even if you don't use JTB to define knowledge.)

jychang··on Claude's new constitution
Yes!

Otherwise you're just outsourcing your critical thinking to other people. A system of just "You will be punished for X" without analysis becomes "Derp, just do things that I won't be punished for". Or more sinister, "just hand your identification papers over to the officer and you won't be punished, don't think about it". Rule of power is not a recipe for a functional system. This becomes a blend of sociology and philosophy, but on the sociology side, you don't want a fear-based or shame-based society anyways.

Your latter example ("Most people aren't interested in torturing babies for sport and would have a strongly negative emotional reaction to such a practice") is actually a good example of the core aspect of Hume's philosophy, so if you're trying to avoid the philosophical logic discussion, that's not gonna work either. If you follow the conclusions of that statement to its implications, you end up back at moral philosophy.

That's not a bad thing! That's like a chef asking "how do i cook X" and understanding the answer ("how the maillard reaction works") eventually goes to chemistry. That's just how the world is. Of course, you might be a bit frustrated if you're a chef who doesn't know chemistry, or a game theorist who doesn't know philosophy, but I assure you that it is correct direction to look for what you're interested at here.

jychang··on Claude's new constitution
That was always doomed for failure in the philosophy space.

Mostly because there's not enough axioms. It'd be like trying to establish Geometry with only 2 axioms instead of the typical 4/5 laws of geometry. You can't do it. Too many valid statements.

That's precisely why the babyeaters can be posited as a valid moral standard- because they have different Humeian preferences.

To Anthropic's credit, from what I can tell, they defined a coherent ethical system in their soul doc/the Claude Constitution, and they're sticking with it. It's essentially a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics system that disposes of the strict rules a la Kant in favor of establishing (a hierarchy of) 4 core virtues. It's not quite Aristotle (there's plenty of differences) but they're clearly trying to have Claude achieve eudaimonia by following those virtues. They're also making bold statements on moral patienthood, which is clearly an euphemism for something else; but because I agree with Anthropic on this topic and it would cause a shitstorm in any discussion, I don't think it's worth diving into further.

Of course, it's just one of many internally coherent systems. I wouldn't begrudge another responsible AI company from using a different non virtue ethics based system, as long as they do a good job with the system they pick.

Anthropic is pursuing a bold strategy, but honestly I think the correct one. Going down the path of Kant or Asimov is clearly too inflexible, and consequentialism is too prone to paperclip maximizers.

jychang··on Claude's new constitution
Pretty much every serious philosopher agrees that “Do not torture babies for sport” is not a foundation of any ethical system, but merely a consequence of a system you choose. To say otherwise is like someone walking up to a mathematician and saying "you need to add 'triangles have angles that sum up to 180 degrees' to the 5 Euclidian axioms of geometry". The mathematician would roll their eyes and tell you it's already obvious and can be proven from the 5 base laws (axioms).

The problem with philosophy is that humans agree on like... 1-2 foundation level bottom tier (axiom) laws of ethics, and then the rest of the laws of ethics aren't actually universal and axiomatic, and so people argue over them all the time. There's no universal 5 laws, and 2 laws isn't enough (just like how 2 laws wouldn't be enough for geometry). It's like knowing "any 3 points define a plane" but then there's only 1-2 points that's clearly defined, with a couple of contenders for what the 3rd point could be, so people argue all day over what their favorite plane is.

That's philosophy of ethics in a nutshell. Basically 1 or 2 axioms everyone agrees on, a dozen axioms that nobody can agree on, and pretty much all of them can be used to prove a statement "don't torture babies for sport" so it's not exactly easy to distinguish them, and each one has pros and cons.

Anyways, Anthropic is using a version of Virtue Ethics for the claude constitution, which is a pretty good idea actually. If you REALLY want everything written down as rules, then you're probably thinking of Deontological Ethics, which also works as an ethical system, and has its own pros and cons.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

And before you ask, yes, the version of Anthropic's virtue ethics that they are using excludes torturing babies as a permissible action.

Ironically, it's possible to create an ethical system where eating babies is a good thing. There's literally works of fiction about a different species [2], which explores this topic. So you can see the difficulty of such a problem- even something simple as as "don't kill your babies" can be not easily settled. Also, in real life, some animals will kill their babies if they think it helps the family survive.

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-e...

jychang··on Show HN: Sweep, Open-weights 1.5B model for next-edit autocomplete
1.54GB model? You can run this on a raspberry pi.
jychang··on Claude's new constitution
Yeah, that was tried. It was called GPT-4.5 and it sucked, despite being 5-10T params in size. All the AI labs gave up on pretrain only after that debacle.

GPT-4.5 still is good at rote memorization stuff, but that's not surprising. The same way, GPT-3 at 175b knows way more facts than Qwen3 4b, but the latter is smarter in every other way. GPT-4.5 had a few advantages over other SOTA models at the time of release, but it quickly lost those advantages. Claude Opus 4.5 nowadays handily beats it at writing, philosophy, etc; and Claude Opus 4.5 is merely a ~160B active param model.

jychang··on Claude's new constitution
Wow. That's one of the clearest case of AI psychosis I've seen.
jychang··on Steam "Offline" status leaks exact login timestamps (Valve: Won't Fix)
You probably need to improve your internal LLM detector then. This obviously reads as LLM generated text.

- "This isn't just a "status" bug. It's a behavioral tracker."

- "It essentially xxxxx, making yyyyyy."

- As you mentioned, the headings

- A lack of compound sentences that don't use "x, but y" format.

This is clearly LLM generated text, maybe just lightly edited to remove some em dashes and stuff like that.

After you read code for a while, you start to figure out the "smell" of who wrote what code. It's the same for any other writing. I was literally reading a New Yorker article before this, and this is the first HN article I just opened today; the writing difference is jarring. It's very easy to smell LLM generated text after reading a few non-LLM articles.

jychang··on Claude Cowork exfiltrates files
Isn't that exactly what stopping SQL injection involves? No longer executing random SQL code.

Same thing would work for LLMs- this attack in the blog post above would easily break if it required approval to curl the anthropic endpoint.

← PreviousPage 5 of 28Next →