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mentalgear

4,342 karma · joined October 11, 2023

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mentalgear··on Show HN: Real-time Solar System with 526k asteroids and all tracked satellites
A good showcase how easy it is now for LLMs to build these visualizations when the data is structured and available publicly - with the structured and publicly available parts being the main gatekeepers.
mentalgear··on It's Time to Investigate the AI Labs
“We need to stop letting a small number of private companies, acting and talking in increasingly erratic ways, dictate how we’re supposed to feel about..."

The original quote follows with "AI", but it should be clear by now that you could put any topic here and the main issue is: private conglomerate money trying to control people.

And the remedies are well known: breaking corporate power and power concentrations through 1950s style regulation, as it was deployed against the robber barrons from back then and which resulted in a golden age for America and the world.

mentalgear··on DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec)
I like it, represents science's general 'standing on the shoulders of our precedents' far more realistic then the 'genius solo' PR mythos.
mentalgear··on Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
Irresponsibile agents shaped by an irresponsible corporate culture driven by an irresponsible and utterly shady CEO - these agents are a product of this setup, what else do you expect to ever come out of it ?

it should be clear by now: the alt-man and people like him are a utter liability to humanity. (even though openAI's influencer army is trying their best to vote me down here)

mentalgear··on Once Claude can measure something, it can make it faster
So... this could optimize software so it runs again on older hardware, right ?
mentalgear··on OpenAI is enlisting an influencer army to make it look 'good for the world'
yeah, I have contemplated that as well and thought it would be an interesting project (since hacker news provides open data) to analyze it for signals of influence/manipulation and around which entities and topics they cluster.
mentalgear··on OpenAI is enlisting an influencer army to make it look 'good for the world'
Scam Altman and the company culture he shaped - that’s what you get when you put a shady marketing hype-guy in a position where an actual scientist (or at least benevolent human) is urgently needed.

No wonder he relies on hype and manipulating social media mainly, as all actual scientists have left openAI years ago when they found out who Altman really is and unfortunately unsuccessfully tried to remove him.

What oAi nowadays attracts is unfortunately not the prime talent like in the beginning that were in it for a better world, but semi-talented virtue-signaling people who are attracted by the compensation and name recognition and, as we have seen it quite a few of their recent "innovation" claims, don’t mind misinterpreting, mislabeling and outright copy/steal other people’s innovations and putting big IPO-associated oAi stickers on it without deserving any of it.

mentalgear··on Netherlands bracing for potentially devastating US sanctions against the ICC
Thank you for speaking up, the political leadership indeed is a shame and it's important for citizens to speak out and let the world know that these blood-hungry bastards do not represent their citizens.
mentalgear··on Netherlands bracing for potentially devastating US sanctions against the ICC
Because both T & N that have utter disrespect for law & order when it affects themselves. For example: both have to remain in political power as this immunity from law shields them from running trials that would probably end them in prison.
mentalgear··on Netherlands bracing for potentially devastating US sanctions against the ICC
It's really sad seeing the international order, erected primarily by the US as a driving force after WW2, now being torn down by the current US administration to the detriment not only of global safety but also the US itself.

Giving up the best soft-power levers they had in an attempt to replace them with coarse, obvious and ineffective hard-power beat-sticks is not only foolish but history shows never works well or long term.

mentalgear··on 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees
The main issue is that market evolution will always surfaces the most cost-efficient entities within the ecosystem pressures.

That means designing the ecosystem pressures is crucial: things more meaningful than just pure capitalist private-profit logic must by enforced by thoughtful regulation or otherwise the ecosystem converges for private-profit of a small sliver of individuals (billionaires) to the detriment of all other ecosystem members (99% of the world population).

This holds for anything broader than pure private gain, may it be security, social fairness or ecological topics. Sole monetary-value optimization for private gain must be properly constrained or else it results in pure predatory capitalism that implodes society from within, may it be through leaky security, poisoned environments or social unrest.

mentalgear··on The current balance of power in open models
Everybody including companies need their own models, especially considering that llm providers like openAi have no problem siphoning off your data and intelligence by inspecting metadata. and claiming any resulting value as their own.
mentalgear··on Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy
Exactly, the enshitificaton of Apple proves that Greed can never be satisfied: even a trillion dollar company, with a fanatic consumer base (that is ironically paying premium $ for the best USER experience) and THE tightest ecosystem grip that yields huge App-Store tax revenues, even such a company is not 'satisfied' and still can't escape capitalist logic and the stock-market's "perpetual share value growth" force and has to cannibalize user experience until at some point it will either implode or somehow manages to balance the 'just shitty/good enough' tightrope over their walled-garden (hello Microsoft).

In any case, user experience and the original ethos the company was build around has been lost for a long time, and enshitification by greed seems the ultimate outcome for every company that is traded publicly or equity funded.

mentalgear··on Can gzip be a language model?
Interesting approach, I wonder how this could be used as a classifier. :)
mentalgear··on AX – Google’s Open Agentic Orchestrator
I don't see a meaningful difference to the 100s of other 'agentic frameworks' that promise to be the one to all solution for all your troubles.

Would be about time we get benchmarks for these ... so these can also be gamified just like with the LLMs.

mentalgear··on Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices
Most importantly to fight it as Private Equity is creeping like a cancer into good health systems globally, even in Europe, to slowly but surely siphon away all that is good.

It's important to fight it now before it is too late and other places also fall apart into a degraded, predatory, dystopian US system !

mentalgear··on Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to
I feel like the main issue with projects switching between a permissive and less permissive license and back is that starting out as fully permissive in the first place was the main error.

If everybody would just agree to start their open source code as something like source-available or OpenRAIL -requiring companies with more than $5M in annual revenue to pay for the work - we wouldn't be in this situation.

https://fair.io/

mentalgear··on Trying the software factory pattern
and do you ever look at the code afterwards? The 'software factory' gets exponentially nastier the longer it is kept running without someone with actual experience 'shoving it' back in shape ever so often ... and even then.
mentalgear··on Show HN: Cactus Needle 3: 8-29MB automation models can match DeepSeek V4 Flash
Maybe with fine tuning?
mentalgear··on Show HN: Cactus Needle 3: 8-29MB automation models can match DeepSeek V4 Flash
Feels like Jev, no?
mentalgear··on Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap
> The author of Bend has completely missed that this is the current standard in the field of formal verification, if they even know that this field exists at all. They have instead come up with this whole system requiring verbose specifications and even more verbose proofs. A little research before vibe-coding an entire language and compiler could have substantially improved the result because the author would have known what to ask for.

> This example matters beyond Bend, vibe-coding makes it makes it far too easy to implement a design that’s horribly broken or decades behind the current state of the art because you can immediately get a result without ever having to do any research. If you ask a LLM for a language where it’s possible to prove that a function is formally correct by building up a proof from basic principles then it will happily do so, it will never stop to suggest to you that computers can already build complex proofs without the need for a LLM and eliminate 99% of the work. It will never tell you that what you’re building already mostly exists as work that you can build on.

---

That's why all your LLM requests to build something substantial should start with "run prior work research first". Of course, at some point everything converges (if we share our outputs open-source) and then we may have solid standard patterns and libraries and do not need to waste trillions of tokens globally to rebuild the same minor, fundamental things, each one in their silent little silo.

IF we share, it will be of course to the monetary detriment of LLM providers who will have less income overall, and of course now they can't repackage anymore all our collective input, thoughts, human 'thinking traces' that they collect in their meta-data, as their new 'innovations' any more to inflate IPOs / stock prices.

mentalgear··on A heap overflow and SSO misconfiguration to compromise OpenAI internal repos
> Until two months ago, any user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI’s own help forum (community.openai.com) could have had their ChatGPT and Codex accounts taken over. Since people can connect various services to Codex and ChatGPT, the scope of what we could theoretically access was huge, including GitHub, Slack and emails.

> The entire timeline from initial discovery to access to OpenAI repo access took place in less than 72 hours.

Great, and openAI's the company working with the 'department of war' to power autonomous killer AI.

mentalgear··on Introducing System One Models and Jev
Overall this seems like a classifier that gives weighted scores per custom labels. It's certainly useful, but whether it brings higher quality than an LLM in structured output mode has to be seen in objective benchmarks.
mentalgear··on Steam Frame starts at $1059
Rather bring back the glass hole creeps
mentalgear··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
true, and universal convergence
mentalgear··on Playing whack-a-mole is losing
Lmao. Of course I'm not assuming infinite computation, just computation > human computation.

Asymmetric it is indeed, but against cyber defense, especially the bigger the org/company the more inert it is.

And one thing we can agree on is, that there's a tiny fraction of entities that have best practices put in place, airtight, as you would need them.

Again, I really which it wasn't like that, but the trajectory of cyber penetrations is telling a different story.

mentalgear··on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash Uncensored
... like all LLMs? maybe not the swiss one fully trained on open-data.
mentalgear··on Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin
I have the impression that for hiring this is fundamentally the most important aspect: Finding a prospect that is just skilled enough for the position without being a risk to the person who is hiring them.
mentalgear··on Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]
Maybe you haven't noticed that the "Bitter Lesson" had itself a "Bitter Lesson" - that scaling pure data and compute did not lead to AGI: diminishing training returns, GPT-5 disappointment, even openAI stating it was the last 'pure scale' model.

The path forward all big llm providers ("ai" labs) have gone is neuro-symbolic (even though they publicly would never labeled it as such to not admit critics like Gary Marcus were right - even though all their actions actually point in that direction).

mentalgear··on Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)
also the new war-profiteers are profiting from a war a certain family member started.

> NEW YORK (AP) — Among dozens of companies competing for Pentagon contracts to supply attack drones, one stands out.

> Powerus is flush with cash and ballooning in size as it buys up rivals and has one other advantage: It is partly owned by President Donald Trump’s two oldest sons.

> The latest Trump venture is hoping to win some of the $1.1 billion set aside by the Pentagon to build up a U.S. manufacturing base for armed drones now that the Trump administration put a ban on importing them from China.

https://apnews.com/article/drones-eric-donald-trump-powerus-...

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