rytill

7 ms·

1.
by rytill 1mo ago
What required expenditures does a company like yours have on lab equipment / software, if any, to validate material properties?
2.
by rytill 1mo ago
What about the other thing that’s the actually important part of my reply, modifiability/extensibility? You just chose the weaker of the two factors I provided. And didn’t even provide a convincing argument related to it. You also didn
3.
by rytill 1mo ago
Why would this be the case when the text that produces binaries (code) is usually both more token efficient and vastly more effectively organized for modification/extension? Unless by bits you just mean text in general, or any data sin
4.
by rytill 1mo ago
The term "conflict" implies "there is a problem here". I would say it's very lightly disparaging, because it implies the author didn't even do basic research on other things that are also named the thing they d
5.
by rytill 1mo ago
Almost every possible name that is not a portmanteau, made-up word, or combination of N words has a naming "conflict". This is not an interesting thing to say and I wish that people would stop saying this on everything anyone ever
6.
by rytill 2mo ago
At least for me, I often have a hard time believing people’s stated reasons for whatever they’re doing. The substance <> narrative relationship is backwards a lot of the time. Someone does something for a nebulous multitude of reasons
7.
by rytill 2mo ago
Someone from Y Combinator made some software. Must there be narrativization of everything?
8.
by rytill 2mo ago
Well, it’s up to the user or post-trainer of the LLM what they believe to be above average. Then they can design around that. In the case of real world LLMs and post-training, what is above average is defined roughly as: labeled good by exp
9.
by rytill 2mo ago
LLMs learn a distribution during pre-training, not only an average. Then, by giving them context or by post-training, you can make them sample non-average parts of the distribution they learned.
10.
by rytill 3mo ago
I checked out your agent and it looks pretty well designed. Congrats on starting to share it with others! One thing I noticed: "Your Tools: Aether agents get tools exclusively via MCP servers." "...Aether ships with 1st-party
11.
by rytill 4mo ago
Why does its architecture or you knowing how AI is architected cause thoughts of it being conscious to go out the window? It seems like the biggest factor has nothing to do with AI, but instead that you went from being someone who admits th
12.
by rytill 5mo ago
That’s the most common time control on chess.com according to this article: https://www.chess.com/article/view/time-controls-and-game-re... It sounds like a good idea to me!
13.
by rytill 5mo ago
Hey! I played against a bot and it was pretty fun. Small suggestion: too many queues can make it very difficult to build up a network of players at first. I'd suggest, for now, lowering the amount of available time control queues so th
14.
by rytill 5mo ago
AI comments are against Hacker News rules.
15.
by rytill 6mo ago
The sheer em dash density of this post really struck me, so I asked Claude to write a script which ranked text post Show HNs over the last week in order of em dash density. Script here: https://github.com/mturnshek/hn-e
16.
by rytill 7mo ago
Are you trying to imply that humans don’t need generalized knowledge, or that we’re not “rewarded” for having highly generalized knowledge? If so, good luck walking to your kitchen this morning, knowing how to breathe, etc.
17.
by rytill 7mo ago
> that corporate profits would rise while consumer spend dropped are literally incompatible realities These are not incompatible realities. I would be willing to accept the statement that corporate revenues increasing and consumer spendi
18.
by rytill 7mo ago
When I hear "coding agent", I think of both the harness and the LLM as a pair. Like, Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Code is a coding agent, or Gemini 3 Pro and Pi is a coding agent. "Harness" is a way to reference the coding
19.
by rytill 8mo ago
LLMs are not "average text generation machines" once they have context. LLMs learn a distribution. The moment you start the prompt with "You are an interactive CLI tool that helps users with software engineering at the level
20.
by rytill 10mo ago
It is not a "narrative", "philosophical paradigm", or him "getting high on his own supply". It is simply him sharing his thoughts about something.
21.
by rytill 10mo ago
It really doesn’t, at all. Every sentence has a clear, non-equivocative meaning and it doesn’t use any LLM tropes. Your LLM sensor is seriously faulty.
22.
by rytill 10mo ago
What is the goal of doing that vs using L2 loss?
23.
by rytill 1y ago
So, I have heard a number of people say this, and I feel like I'm the person in your conversations saying it's a coarse description and downplays the details. What I don't understand is, what specifically do we gain from th
24.
by rytill 1y ago
> Boglehead > 140% gain on your holdings this year Choose one.
25.
by rytill 1y ago
Why would one have motivation to not use activation functions? To my knowledge they’re a negligible portion of the total compute during training or inference and work well to provide non-linearity. Very open to learning more.
26.
by rytill 1y ago
Okay, that makes perfect sense. Thanks for the explanation!
27.
by rytill 1y ago
Can you please explain the insight about reduced workweeks you are deriving from what you've linked? It is not obvious to me.
28.
by rytill 1y ago
> we’d just have to do it Highly economically disincentivized collective actions like “pulling the plug on AI” are among the most non-trivial of problems. Using the word “just” here hand waves the crux.
29.
by rytill 1y ago
Can you list some long textbooks on a single subject that are amazing?
30.
by rytill 1y ago
Don’t forget the training data!

More ›