mediaman

Joined 17 years ago

Karma
6,516
Submissions
1,037
Member since
Apr 21
View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 5 hours ago
It does if LLMs are generally poor writers, which they currently are, because it is extremely difficult to RLVR essay quality.
Comment · 4 days ago
This comment doesn't make any sense. The products are mostly different categories. One is a VPN replacement and the other is encrypted shell access. Most people use ssh over tailscale. Tailscale does have a "Tailscale SSH" product but it's not that widely used compared to regular ssh over Tailscale.
Comment · 5 days ago
You are showing a selection from some third-party interface that mixes together models from six different suppliers: Mistral, Kimi, OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic and Google, with a bunch of old obsolete models.

Are you presenting this as evidence that OpenAI's naming scheme is bad?

If you don't want to spend the time to know the difference between all these different suppliers and their models, then why are you using whatever this program is that gives you so many choices, most of which are bad? Why is this OpenAI's fault?

Comment · 5 days ago
But what's the ask? This is the cleanest way I see of them doing it.

I see a ton of criticism and not a single person coming up with anything better, unless it's to take away options, like removing effort level.

What about buying Intel CPUs? A car? Electrical components?

If you're not just using this at a consumer level to ask about cooking recipes (and if that's your use case, you really don't care about API pricing, or any of this, and can just use the default), and are using it professionally, then this seems like a low bar of effort to understand what you're buying.

I do grant you the relationship between model and effort level has an unclear relationship, but there are also tradeoffs in most complex technical products that are not always clear; this is exacerbated by the fact that this product is stochastic.

Why are engineers using this as a professional tool expecting this to be bought like a consumer gadget and then blaming the maker?

Comment · 5 days ago
I don't understand what's so confusing about this.

The lineup of models is still the same.

There are four models: luna, terra, sol, and astra.

Pricing increases for each level. This new 6.1 Terra is 50% cheaper than Sol 6.1.

They are lowering prices for newer releases, so yes if you compare Sol 6.1 to 5.6 Terra it won't look right, but why are you doing that? Look at the same release version for comparable numbers.

Each model improves in successive releases but they maintain pricing and capability coherency within a release version.

Yes, Sol 6.1 is supposed to rival Astra for some work, which is what you'd expect from a later versioned release model against a prior release bigger model.

Assuming they release Astra 6.1 at some point, I expect it'll be better than Sol 6.1, at a higher price.

I don't understand what people are asking for here? No reductions in pricing? Different model names on every version release? Not releasing any models for a version number until they're all ready?

Comment · 9 days ago
This is a great way to destroy public transit!

The plan is to let anyone on the subway, with no fares. It turns out that the violent, unstable people who make public spaces unwelcoming are disproportionately represented among those who cannot pay $2.50 for a fare. So they scare off regular transit riders who mode shift to something else. It's vastly more expensive and difficult to react to violence on the subway than to keep violent people out with a small fare, so it's financially and logistically impossible to actually keep it safe. Then your transit ridership tanks and people who hate funding transit can declare the whole thing a giant waste of money and any new funding dies politically because now there's no public ridership constituency left.

Nobody cares about the revenue gained from $2.50 fares. What matters is the tiny amount of resistance that offers to the small number of people who are largely responsible for making public transit unwelcoming.

Comment · 10 days ago
GAAP does not permit booking contracted future revenue onto the balance sheet or income statement, because the spend is not actually an unconditional debt until the service has been rendered.

It doesn't matter if it's committed or not, it still won't be recognized on the formal financial statements.

Comment · 15 days ago
I'm glad it was asked too and enjoyed the answer.

The OP's question was clearly skeptical though:

---

napkins, and envelopes at least kind of make sense.

Who was ever writing on the back of cigarette packs?

---

Implication being that writing on the back of cig packs does not make sense. I'd agree with your reading if not for the "at least kind of make sense" bit.

Comment · 16 days ago
I think you would be less annoyed if you worked with these systems and used them in production.

Jev's pricing is 4.2 cents per million input tokens, less than half of Gemma 4. Qwen, gemma etc all have terrible non-uniform probabilities; in my testing, Jev's probability scores perform much, much better.

I'm usually seeing round trip classifications from Jev at <200ms for a completed query even with 10k+ input tokens. Gemma 4, depending on the provider, is about 200 ms time to first token - not time to completion. You can likely get better response running it locally, but then you're arguing why you're renting a low utilization 5090 when you could be paying $42 per billion tokens.

Jev can also run dozens of dimensions of classification in one call, without autoregressively generating a sequence of tokens. (i.e., it is much faster and has less order dependency.)

I've been running jev in some specific use cases and see much better speed and better accuracy than just using structured output from gemma/qwen.

I don't understand how the "just use gemma" crowd has this belief if they've actually built and tested the systems against each other.

Comment · 18 days ago
Liability issues will exist regardless of whether compute is on-device or central.

However, if the robot is in a contained environment like a home, there is less third party liability than for something like vehicles. Not none, of course, but less. And when you can get your arms around third party liability, first party liability can be better controlled by contractual agreements.

In general I expect on-device motor execution will allow it to safely come to a stop or enter a safe position if it loses the link to the execution planning cloud model.

Comment · 18 days ago
There are a lot of guys with garages that have a $40k CNC mill in it. If you've got the money -- and in America, a LOT of people have the money -- $30k to be able to experiment with a fairly open platform that may play, as a category, a pivotable role in humanity for the next 15+ years is not very crazy.

New trucks optioned out cost $80k+ and plenty of people pay for that without having much justification of any kind for it.

Comment · 21 days ago
They’re not just trained on human prose. They’re sent to RLHF, and also their language changes as a result of RL on verifiable rewards.

Getting it to write well is really hard because there’s no real way to verify whether it’s good prose or not. You and I can tell, but we can’t write a verifier that codifies our judgment.

Maybe they’ll find a way to improve this, but for now it’s certainly one of the harder problems to solve for LLMs.

Part of it is that I think they also have poor theory of mind, which I imagine is also a hard thing to train it to do.

Comment · 22 days ago
And no-one pays $2k/mo for marketing consulting, which they could do in-house.

No-one pays $2k/mo for a fractional CFO.

No-one pays $2k/mo for a fractional sales head.

No-one pays $2k/mo for environmental paperwork consulting for a manufacturer.

They can do it all in house. Why would they?

Right?

Except all of these actually do happen, of course, and each is a big industry.

As soon as this industry lost the inscrutability of the syntax of the work product, it began catastrophizing about the total end of any commercial demand at all.

Yet by this logic there should be almost no service providers at all for any industry that lacks legal certification barriers.

Comment · 24 days ago
Do those huge pools of money wanted restrictions on immigration and high tariffs?

Why is populism doing so well on the right? Is that what the pools of money want?

Comment · 25 days ago
Why would I run it myself? It's $0.10 per million tokens. Dirt cheap. (Jev is even cheaper.)

You could ask the same question about why anyone would rent a VPS. I can just run my own hardware, it's just a computer!

Buy vs rent is not just about what's possible, it's about what's economic.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton