Where the AI market is talking

Our position on open-weights models

> I don't understand how Anthropic or OpenAI can have overpriced models, yet losing money like there is no tomorrow. The marginal cost of inference (which is roughly what you're going to pay to a provider that's running an open weight model) doesn't include the cost of training that model.

Our position on open-weights models

He almost admits as much if you replace "America" with "Anthropic and openai" at certain places.

Our position on open-weights models

Bombing that building was an accident due to it being on what was part of a military target and I'm not sure if it was ever made clear whether the building was technically dual use despite also being used as a school. Either way, bombing a bunch of school girls wasn't intentional and nobody reasonable would assume it was. There was a time we bombed a bus or van with kids in it, but we admitted it and apologized for the mistake. Nobody wants to be bombing kids, first because they're innocent, but second because there is no military advantage to it since it's bad PR. Many of these targets were identified before Anthropic or OpenAI even existed.

Our position on open-weights models

> compared to his own closed and overpriced ones I don't understand how Anthropic or OpenAI can have overpriced models, yet losing money like there is no tomorrow. Taking their own numbers at face value, they claim a revenue of 24 billion (ARR, a dubious tool), spending 21 billion in operating losses and another 11 billion as "R&D" funneled straight to Microsoft pockets. That before all investments they are committing to in new data centers, equivalent to 20x their current revenue. To be profitable (including capex), the cheapest subscription should at least $200/month for what is currently $20/month, that some already consider overpriced. Unless a miraculous collapse in inference costs happen in the next couple of years, or every single human being become a paying customer o…

OpenAI called the Hugging Face attack unprecedented. But we've been here before

OpenAI called the Hugging Face attack unprecedented. But we've been here before

Our position on open-weights models

> If some other competing company had a similar or better product at a cheaper price and had reasonable safety measures that would also hurt them. Yet he's not arguing against that. Your argument is weak. Wouldn't it be interesting if the satisfactory "reasonable safety measures" turn out to be expensive + time-consuming + a twisty maze of compliance paperwork as a way to discourage "some other competing company" from even trying? Regulatory capture 101. Anthropic and OpenAI's largest vulnerability is that it's much harder to prove something is possible than to replicate it once it's proven. Especially given the effectiveness of "distillation" (highly schadenfreude-y given the utter and complete lack of effort to pay licensing fees for almost any of the content they initially scraped, …

Our position on open-weights models

> If some other competing company had a similar or better product at a cheaper price and had reasonable safety measures that would also hurt them. Yet he's not arguing against that. Your argument is weak. Wouldn't it be interesting if the satisfactory "reasonable safety measures" turn out to be expensive + time-consuming + a twisty maze of compliance paperwork as a way to discourage "some other competing company" from even trying? Regulatory capture 101. Anthropic and OpenAI's largest vulnerability is that it's much harder to prove something is possible than to replicate it once it's proven. Especially given the effectiveness of "distillation" (highly schadenfreude-y given the utter and complete lack of effort to pay licensing fees for almost any of the content they initially scraped, …

Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32/35 students cheating with AI

AI has made it 10x worse. My wife is a professor. Tons of students cheat. Often badly. It is a complete phase shift from pre-chatgpt. Detection methods keep having to adapt. Usually she catches people because a writing assignment will say something like "using material from the readings..." and the students don't care enough to provide the readings to the AI so the AI writes something coherent but which brings in a bunch of material that wasn't covered and that the student doesn't know anything about. Five years ago you cheated on a writing assignment by paying somebody else to do it. Today you type a few words. She's getting 10-20% of the class admitting to cheating when initially confronted. There doesn't seem to be a pattern in who cheats. The bad students who don't come to class cheat…

Ask HN: Any New Computer Ideas?

Metamine had a amazing demo[1], which is only still with us on the Internet Archive. I've fawned over it before[2], but suffice it to say it was a normal programming language plus a magical equals which kept the left side of an assignment updated after the fact, for the life of the program. (Along with the normal non-magical one) The amazing part is that the author, Ymte Jan Broekhuizen, had coherent rules figured out for mixing declarative and imperative programming. Figuring those out is a minor miracle in my mind. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20201014024057/https://www.youtub... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Exercise works for depression. So why isn't it treated like real medicine?

Sorry, wasn't trying to offend. I skimmed the links, and the majority of what I saw was observations that nausea, constipation, and diarrhea remained fairly common side effects even after having been on the medication for a while. That seems pretty mild [0]. I saw a couple mentions of pancreatitis, which is something that seems mostly debunked by now. The really interesting one out of those was the first one, which showed an actual physical side effect. In rats, not humans, with disclaimers about how hard it is to replicate in humans. I will keep an eye out for more mentions of that effect, for certain. [0] Okay, I wanted to say more about the nausea thing, because I suppose this might be a controversial hot take ;-). I think the physical punishment dished out by the medication is the onl…

README, not

Hand made machines were difficult to replicate/repair/reproduce. Mass production (machines building machines) addresses the issue. The same thing is happening to software. The same resistance is also occurring.

Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

I don't want to replicate email. I want to fix it. Sending email should not be free. It should be really, really cheap to send an email to one person (like a fraction of a fraction of a cent), but get exponentially more expensive the more you send. People shouldn't be able to send emails to you without your prior approval (which you can revoke at an instant). The recipient should be able to charge a tack-on fee for having email sent to him. I should be able to charge annoying people a lot to send to me, and charge my friends almost nothing. People who send annoying stuff to me should pay more to get my attention. All of a sudden, forwarding that stupid article without thinking about the content (or even reading the article they're sending) will be second guessed. Save the money (and time)…

Microsoft is using TPM chips to crack down on pirated Windows activations

>What is windows actually good at? It's gotta be Active Dir, right? That's what keeps the businesses around + using Windows OS, which keeps users at home using Windows because it's familiar. It becomes the 'foot in the door' (or trojan horse, YMMV) for the O365 suite, for Exchange... Plus, because it seems like almost everyone is using AD, you know you can send files in formats they can open and receive via the Office Suite. I've never once hesistated sending a .docx or a .xlsx .... I fully expect any vendor we work with to have the ability to open Microsoft's formats. Sure, Numbers and Sheets built it in, but I assume that's as a business requirement from their partners who needed the ability to open files in their own respective suites. They've now just about replicated all of the on…

Show HN: Descript wanted $24/mo, I built an open-source alternative in a weekend

Have you tried using this to actually edit anything? The local transcription is trash (slow, tons of repeated words, no speaker diarization, no option to upload a transcript or use ElevenLabs). I made a few edits to a sample episode I have, clicked on the upper left for a menu, it went to the front page and...I guess it lost the transcription and the edits with no way to get it back. Cool idea but it seems unusable at the moment, I'd say you have a lot more weekends of work to have something suitable for either Show HN or Product Hunt.

Kimi-K3 Technical Report [pdf]

being able to replicate it in the open means that there's nothing special about frontier models. Frontier models would have to do something extraordinary or unique, or unreplicatable, because clearly there is no moat, and US companies are sitting on huge nvidia valuations and get surprised when competitors beat them.

AI companies spend record sums on Washington lobbying

Oh so you're aligned with AI lobbying then? j/k, but then again, it's not like we have other means to "help make good governance decisions" that we haven't already tried before. Maybe except the failed cybernetics experiments that came a little before their time and in the wrong political regime, but then those are effectively replicated by any large multinational internally to some extent.

Magnolias are so old that they're pollinated by beetles, not bees (2025)

Whatever brings the most flies to the yard. The farm next door occasionally grows cauliflower. Like 15 acres of it. When that happens and they do the harvest in the end of August the whole area stinks like rotting brassicas and there's flies everywhere. If I could just replicate that experience in mid-May...

Chinese chipmaker shares surge 470%

Just replicate dogs brain. It is the ultimate state of art (far smarter than people). But you need a few kb of memory to replicate resoning skills. Dogs are very smart!

The Strongest El Niño Ever

Carbon capture is physically unable to be as effective as we need it to be. To an approximation, growing a tree is able to capture as much carbon as burning the wood from that tree. If most of our released carbon came from burning wood, we would just need to re-grow that amount of wood (unfortunately it's not even that simple, as the soil stores carbon long term in a way that just growing the tree doesn't capture, and is also released over time when old growth forests are cut down). Instead, the carbon we're burning comes from processes which efficiently concentrated the carbon from plants and microorganisms over millions of years to create coal, oil, and gas. Carbon capture technology would have to artificially replicate these millions-of-years-long processes, and do it on a scale of yea…