Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | nickandbro's commentslogin

I just prompted GPT-5.5 Pro "Solve Nuclear Fusion" and it one shotted it (kidding obviously)

A lot better than what Oracle offered their laid off employees which was `Severance includes 4 weeks' base salary plus 1 week per year of employment.`

Very impressive! Interesting how all other benchmarks it seems to surpass Opus 4.7 except SWE-Bench Pro (Public). You would think that doing so well at Cyber, it would naturally possess more abilities there. Wonder what makes up the actual difference there

I asked it to make me a xkcd comic:

https://chatgpt.com/s/m_69e8cc31dac48191a09bb9c00d5aa3fe

kinda funny, I guess


Lol this is pretty funny

I am curious what workloads Citadel Securities is running on these TPUs? Are you telling me they need the latest TPUs for market insights?

Not Citadel, but Jane Street is training LLMs for trading:

https://www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/machine-learning...

> We build on the latest papers in LLMs, computer vision, RL, training libraries, cuda kernels, or whatever else we need to train good models.

> We invent our own set of architectures and optimizations that work for trading.


Truly an epic company.

Training their own, closed, internal models on their own data sets? Probably a good way to squeeze out some market trading signals.

Reminds me of when hedge funds started laying increasingly shorter fiber-optic cable lines to achieve the lowest possible latency for high-frequency trading.

I thought these TPUs were primarily used for inference?

TPU8t is for training. But even still, once you’ve trained, you need to run the model too. And these kinds of models already have a huge latency hit so there’s not much hurting running it away from the trading switches.

As the article states, there's both training and inference dedicated chips.

A lot of people are saying it’s disconnected, but even if it was, if a string of your country’s top rocket experts started disappearing, you wouldn’t just sit idly by

Could be nothing, or could be a new Havana Syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havana_syndrome

What's sad is, 5-10 years ago, no adversary would think simply off-ing American scientists was effective strategy, America was a new scientist generation machine.

Now thanks to Research funding falling off a cliff and massive immigration restrictions, this is no longer true.


Amy Eskridge - who publicly stated she was not suicidal before "committing suicide" reported to her friends that she received burns to her arms and hands through her window in an attack that sounded similar to this microwave/havana syndrome stuff. She was very vocal about the fact that she was being harassed over her work before she died.

She is also not a scientists, but some weird grifter with her “Institute of Exotic Science” and “antigravity” paper.

Sounds like the exact person we should be concerned about getting hit with scifi weapons to be honest

I mean, sort of? Let's put aside whatever she claims to have been working on. Then, consider, if there is a group of people more likely to be attacked by odd advanced weapons? Probably people whose work puts them into contact with with or near research into odd and exotic things. If someone was murdered in their NYC apartment and a schizophrenic neighbor claimed it was a wild tiger then sure, you'd take that with some salt. If you then found out the deceased worked at the zoo? Well...

> Amy Eskridge - who publicly stated she was not suicidal before "committing suicide"

I really hate the discourse around this stuff. Like, yes, disguising murder as suicide is a thing and obviously three-letters agencies do it.

But someone saying publicly they're not suicidal gives you close to zero information. People with suicidal ideation almost never advertise it publicly because, one, there is a heavy amount of social stigma attached to it, and two, publicly declaring you're suicidal is a good way to get involuntarily committed to a mental health institution.

I see a ton of jokes on social media that go "remember, X is not suicidal". How the fuck would you know? This discourse is so disrespectful to people struggling with suicidal thoughts.


Subjectively, it seems like it's even prudent to consider that someone who is involved in a discussion about whether or not they're suicidal is probably likelier than average to commit suicide. Fair chance that "I'm not suicidal" should really even be understood to mean, "I'm not suicidal right now".

It's a little different when the person is saying "I've received threats, so if you hear something happens to me, I did NOT kill myself!"

Then, you know, bringing up suicide and it being a warning sign they're about to? The odds have shifted a bit.


They publicly said they were receiving threats. And that if something happened to them, don't believe it's suicide. That's a bit different than just, you know, saying it at random, or because someone asked you how you're doing.

It's respectful to trust someone who says they're not suicidal. Saying "they could've been suicidal anyway" is disrespectful to people who aren't suicidal and are telling the truth.

If someone is struggling with suicidal thoughts and is publicly lying about it, they shall not have my respect anyway: I'm ok with being disrespectful to them.


She was also very visibly delusional for years

Havana Syndrome seems to be a CIA psyop to soften the US public to warhawk policy. The proposed mechanism is... magic. Incredible stuff.

Speaking in layman's terms, it's fancy remote microwaving.

No, it's not. There was one hasty study that claimed that early on, riddled with issues, and unable to be replicated. The symptoms are not RF burns.

Source? It is known (and studied) that even at low power levels that do not significantly raise body temperature, short RF pulses can cause rapid, microscopic thermal expansion in the brain. This creates mechanical stress waves that can lead to TBIs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_auditory_effect


That's the cool thing! No one really knows, so any remotely scientific theory is indistinguishable from truth. Maybe even the more outlandish the better, so as to scare people more effectively.

Did you mean to reply to a different comment? Struggling to connect this reply with what was said before it

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-military-tested-device-that-...

Things have changed. The weapon was acquired by DOD.


"...the importance of the energy being pulsed in order to have biological effects on humans. When you produce pulses like this, you can actually stimulate electrically active tissue like brain tissue and the heart, for that matter, mimicking what the brain normally does, but now you're driving it with your pulses from the outside."

Ah, so a portable pulsed microwave device. Current phased array technology is certain to be able to produce a narrow and powerful beam. Current energy densities of batteries allow for a significant amount of portable power. Expecting to see "Show HN" on this soon...


It’s been going on since the Obama admin. Could be longer. Purportedly a unit was smuggled out of some former Soviet republic and we now have a copy of the actual device. When tested on animals, the device produced injuries in alignment with those experienced by US foreign service personnel.

It’s been a great source of fodder for conspiracy theorists though.


> simply off-ing

What if they're interrogated in an attempt to extract something very specific? The deaths could be kidnappings gone wrong.


So it could be nothing or it could be nothing?

Or it could be something

X-Files music plays


[flagged]


Awww your data drops off at 2023. You’re so smart.

What could have happened after 2023 ? It's a real mystery!

> CRS calculated that President Trump's budget proposal for FY2026 included approximately $181.4 billion for R&D, $10.7 billion (-6%) below the FY2025 estimated level of $192.2 billion. The requested $181.4 billion, which included advance and supplemental appropriations, was to support federal investments in the conduct of R&D as well as R&D-related physical assets (such as the construction of R&D facilities or equipment).

181 billion! How will we prosper as a nation if we go back to 2021 spending levels??


they probably torture them for secrets and kill them

Lets say an American scientist in a strategic area was offered a boatload of money (or some other piece of mice) from China or similar. Legally probably he can move, though export control probably applies to the brain content too. How sure the said scientist would be that he isn't going to have a car accident? Gerald Bull would have a word on it. So, "disappear" may start to look like an attractive alternative. A related example - Russia has put a bunch of top hypersonic missile related scientists into prison for supposedly working with China (and may be they worked, though official charges have so far been obviously fabricated - like for publishing in a journal of an research article on a non-secret project with that article making all the typical rounds for months through peer-review, etc) as well as making a law giving FSB full control over any scientific interaction between domestic and foreign scientists and institutions.

I suppose the top AI talent may become subjects of a similar game.


It doesn't have to be China or Russia. As others have mentioned, the current political climate in the US is... "weird". At least, as an outsider, I just don't know how else to describe it. It's like watching/listening to gibberish.

So I can imagine American allies recruiting scientists en-mass, to protect themselves from America. The US has currently demonstrated a desire to take over allies completely (Canada, Greenland), and I'm sure few know who may be next. Some scientists may have simply wished to move abroad, and also, have quite valuable skills which are restricted in some way, hence them "disappearing".


>to protect themselves from America.

not necessarily from America. The goal #1 of the US dominated NATO for example was to prevent Germany from getting nuclear weapons in exchange for protection by US. Now with US de-facto withdrawing, Germany would have to quickly get nukes (as well as missiles to carry them) - i don't see other option for Germany here giving the environment in Europe and MidEast. So they would also need such scientists. South Korea, Japan, Australia seem to be in the similar situation too. (and everybody understands that a nuclear weapons program can't be a long multi-year endeavor - somebody will try to stop you - and so it must be very fast once started, and thus you have to have ready-to-use skills and knowledge)


Keeping the FRG from getting nukes wasn't part of NATO strategy. The succinct reason for NATO was to keep the Soviets from marching to the Atlantic. The more pragmatic was expressed as "Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down."

You're overlooking the fact that Europe started 2 World Wars and keeping Europe at peace was a major NATO goal.

Hence the part about "...the Germans down."

The whole point of NATO was always to present a united front. Even the slightest HINT of doubt could embolden the enemy to test resolve.

And at this point NATO has pretty much collapsed. Trump turned his back on Ukraine and nobody wants to join operation Epstein Fury.


> Germany would have to quickly get nukes

No shit? Why would they have to? Is someone ready to nuke them if it turns out they’re no longer under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, or are they some special snowflakes who should have them while Iran (and most other countries) shouldn’t?


>Is someone ready to nuke them

No. The nukes prevent the aggression even by a conventionally armed aggressor. Nukes ins't to win a war, it is to prevent one. Lets say Germany has successfully repelled Russian tank-and-soldiers invasion - it would still be a devastating thing for Germany which the nukes would help prevent from starting at all.

>are they some special snowflakes who should have them while Iran (and most other countries) shouldn’t?

Yes, i listed those several special snowflakes who were kept safe by the US nukes, and would need their own umbrella with US no longer providing the one. Iran's situation is obviously very different.


> Iran's situation is obviously very different.

Yes, very different as in 'Our blessed homeland vs their barbarous wastes' meme.

We (and our allies) should have nukes because we want to prevent wars. But no one else should have them, since the situation is obviously very different (we wouldn’t want them to be able to prevent wars).

And I used to think that Little Rocketman was a crazy bastard, but it looks like I was wrong.


>Yes, very different as in 'Our blessed homeland vs their barbarous wastes' meme.

exactly. Iran's policy declaration of destroying whole countries (US and Israel in this case) and conducting of actual proxy-wars in order to achieve those goals make them barbarians from whom the civilization must be defended.

>we wouldn’t want them to be able to prevent wars

they don't even try. They want nukes to be able to conduct wars.

>And I used to think that Little Rocketman was a crazy bastard, but it looks like I was wrong.

absolutely. For all their tremendous faults, NK uses their nukes for deterrence as they want to genocide their own people in the comfort of personal safety. Whereis ayatollahs are hellbent on waging wars and destruction in order to spread their Islamic Revolution.


I’ve heard that lower and middle education aren’t exactly the US’s strong suits, but still? The US organized a coup in Iran over 70 years ago and has never really stopped meddling in Iran’s internal affairs. The US runs proxy wars around the world on a daily basis, and when we’re talking about barbarians, they’re certainly near the top - almost a GOAT.

Or the scientists and engineers themselves are wanting out of the US and were offered secret offers to "dissapear" and live elsewhere under a new identity

We’ve just looped back to the first idea this brain dump came up with.

"Let's stop with the accusations. It was an old cat. He just happen to fall down while we were shooting." -- Adams aebler

True. Whether or not it's coincidental they have to look into it.

Unfortunately the people 'looking into it' have currently demonstrated that they are incapable of looking into anything in good faith.

You think the FBI won't investigate in good faith?

Remember, sarcasm on the internet is difficult. Do you think Kash "forgot his safety blanket" Patel will direct FBI in good faith?

Noem was the one who forgot the safety blanket, not Patel. Patel is one of the non-functioning alcoholics.

Ah Patel was the jacket.

Yes, I do, unless the whole thing is made up. Which I doubt.

No, I do not.

it does not pass the smell test, because what's the purpose of communicating about this FBI ongoing investigation ? at best it won't harm the investigation. it's probably propaganda

I'm not sure what you could do, you didn't even notice there was only one rocket scientist in the list.

The problem is that a lot of people not idly sitting by are UFO enthusiasts. They've done their own research.

It’s a list of scientists, admin workers, janitors, assistants, and one person is a pseudoscientific grifter.

And retirees

> if a string of your country’s top rocket experts started disappearing, you wouldn’t just sit idly by

The "if" is doing the heavy lifting here. And universe has lot of "ifs". Here's one:

If this was a perfect distraction spun up to distract from Epstein files, it has succeeded and you have been had.


200+ points in Arena.ai , that's incredible. They are cleaning house with this model

point delta (from 2nd) not total


Love this, I will now use backface culling for my game:

https://slitherworld.com


Backface culling has been common since the late 1990s when we started using face normals to determine lighting rather than per-vertex lighting. Pretty much every 3D game engine since about 2004 has included and enabled it by default. How is it that you made a game that doesn't use it?

For the curious readers, backface culling (at least in the way fixed-function OpenGL does it, and probably newer APIs still do) is not based on face normals, it's based on winding order of triangles, so it works even if normals are not used.

Also face normals (flat shading) are generally considered older tech than per-vertex lighting (Gouraud shading). Newer stuff since 2008-ish is generally per-pixel using normal maps for detail.


If I remember my graphics accelerator history correctly per-vertex lighting using Gouraud shading was the method SGI made standard with OpenGL in 1992, before 3DFX and ATI came in and made per-pixel via Blinn-Phong just as computationally efficient in about 2000 or 2001. Used before Gouraud and then alongside per-vertex and per-pixel was per-face flat shading, which kept being used up until the Xbox 360/PlayStation 3/DirectX 10 era. Face normals for per-pixel started being used in 1999 by SEGA, but stopped being common around the same time as normals flat shading got abandoned.

If I'm wrong please feel free to correct any of this, it's been about eight years since I last learned all of the different methods.


Thanks for clarifying, so I guess I already have it on then.

I didn't use a game engine

Ahhh. So you used a wrapper or a library? Interesting then. I had assumed that almost every rendering method enables frustrum, occlusion, and backface culling by default if only to clear the number of objects needed to be tracked in memory. One thing I noticed in your game is that it's based on the absolute mouse position, which with a 16:9 window makes it difficult to turn in certain situations because your horizontal movement space is much larger than the vertical movement space and that adversely affects turning speed. Changing so that is based just on horizontal mouse movement or adding keyboard controls might be better.

Thanks for the feedback, I’ll try to get that sorted out.

Whenever I read your articles, I get distracted by the space invaders and just play that instead. Maybe this is a problem with me being a bit ADHD, but I feel like I am not the only one

I just played for a couple of minutes and didn't even finish the article. Also suffering from ADHD but in my defense space invaders is pretty good with mouse controls.

Also played the game, but I'm just easily entertained, prone to procrastination given the chance... and kind of lazy sometimes.

Play and read simultaneously. Its nice.

Are you guys 12

famously, once you age past 12, you are no longer allowed to find anything fun.

"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." - C.S. Lewis

"If we let ourselves, we will always be waiting for distractions to end before we can get down to work"

- C.S. Lewis


If the author had something important to say, that really undermines it.

The so didn't, that they delegated the entire thing to an AI. That and the horrible horrible font.

i was just scanning the comments and decided to not click through until i saw yours -- space invaders is now what i'm doing for the next hour.

> me being a bit ADHD

Wait, what article?


that was my experience too!

Wow, if the benchmarks checkout with the vibes, this could almost be like a Deepseek moment with Chinese AI now being neck and neck with SOTA US lab made models

[flagged]


> Its not anywhere close

Close to what, and how are you measuring?

> nobody in the USA would be spending 7 figures on infrastructure for it

Au contraire, if AI had a moat it would pay for itself. They're funneling capital into infrastructure because they know it can't.


You need the infrastructure to train and run it regardless though. Kimi is great but I'm not getting the same performance from it running it on my MacBook or a 3090 as it running on a H100 or a Grace Hopper supercomputer. Pretend you did have said moat. Why wouldn't you also books infrastructure to run it on?

> Why wouldn't you also books infrastructure to run it on?

No, you wouldn't be using venture capital to overprovision your AI a hundredfold if selling AI was the end goal.


What?

With the previous generation? Yes. With 10T mythos-level models? Not even close.

The psyop continues. Mythos until it’s released is vaporware. Notice how you can try kimi 2.6. Where is the same for mythos?

It's been released to "select partners".

Yeah, Crowdstrike among them. Clearly experts in this "security" thing, given what happened during the last incident...

Yeah, people who would look stupid if they said the king had no clothes.

At this point it seems more like the result of a psyop to presume that a new anthropic model should be considered vaporware until released.

I've got a 12T model on my machine, built it myself. It's called Mytho. Too dangerous to even release a fact sheet about it. It can hack into the mainframe, enhance ultra-compressed images, grow your hair back, and make people fall in love with you.

Mythos isn't the current generation, it's literally vaporware.

I doubt it's literal vaporware. It's likely just a variant of whatever model they just generally released with some fancy prompt and a highr quant.

T


According to the benchmarks, you are wrong. It is on track and slightly above some sota. Just the benchmarks speaking there, they can be/are gamed by all big model labs including domestic.

There's no public data about Mytho.

That's because it would be too dangerous to release.

My girlfriend goes to a different school, you wouldn't know her.

Same for teleport, time travel and warp drive.

So is my P=NP proof.

They could release data to back up that claim.

10T? Impossible! They told us the training run was under 10^26 flops.

Mythos doesnt exist

mythos is a mythos

mythos is vaporware right now, what are you talking about?

Well, the model that a lot of people have been given access to and are reporting about on twitter?

Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: