jonmc12 (u/jonmc12) - Readit News

jonmc12 commented on I’m joining OpenAI steipete.me/posts/2026/op... · Posted by u/mfiguiere

sauercrowd · 25 days ago

Really surprised by all the comments here, they didnt hire him because of the amazing security openclawd had, but because he's one of the first one's who made a truly personal assistant that's actually valueable to people.

It's about what he created, not what he didnt create.

They're not acquiring the product he built, they're acquiring the product vision.

jonmc12 · 25 days ago

Also surprised; building something people want and proving it is the unlock. HN first principle since the beginning.

jonmc12 commented on Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research dwarkesh.com/p/ilya-sutsk... · Posted by u/piotrgrabowski

JimmyBuckets · 4 months ago

I respect Ilya hugely as a researcher in ML and quite admire his overall humility, but I have to say I cringed quite a bit at the start of this interview when he talks about emotions, their relative complexity, and origin. Emotion is so complex, even taking all the systems in the body that it interacts with. And many mammals have very intricate socio-emotional lives - take Orcas or Elephants. There is an arrogance I have seen that is typical of ML (having worked in the field) that makes its members too comfortable trodding into adjacent intellectual fields they should have more respect and reverence for. Anyone else notice this? It's something physicists are often accused of also.

jonmc12 · 3 months ago

I don't think trans-disciplinary inquiry is arrogance - the intellectual fields are somewhat arbitrary relative to how human expertise relates to real world problems. But, effective trans-disciplinary inquiry requires awareness of philosophical commitments, and familiarity with existing literature/theory.

The bigger challenge might be that people with ML expertise need to solve problems of human-AI interaction and alignment because the training for the former is uni-disciplanary while the latter is trans-disciplinary.

jonmc12 commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine

pydry · 6 months ago

Not really. The quality of engineering has little to do with the quality of content.

Their problem is that the quality of engineering started off being critical (who cares how good the content is if you get endless streaming failures?) and is now not so important.

jonmc12 · 6 months ago

Maybe an investment in "A-players" for streaming stifled cultural diversity and kept engineers from being able to innovate on novel media formats where they are losing engagement of the younger demographic to TikTok and other social media video formats.

The same corporate strategy and culture that hired "A-player" engineers for streaming is hiring "A-player" studios for content.

Defining A-players as such means you've set the rules of the game instead of building a culture of adaptive success criteria to meet customer opportunities. The label itself is a function of organizational ossification. This is the likely legacy of our tech giants; innovative in only one direction and not able to change fast enough to avoid becoming a brittle, mediocre institution over time.

As consumers, we can all feel this ossified mediocrity every day.

jonmc12 commented on Claude Code is a slot machine rgoldfinger.com/blog/2025... · Posted by u/rgoldfinger

Wowfunhappy · 7 months ago

> I became a software engineer because I loved the process of it. I could sit for hours, figuring out how to wire something up just so and get an idea made into something real. And it didn’t feel like work. It was just fun. Joyful. Satisfying.

It's funny, because I do not like the process of software engineering at all! I like thinking through technical problems—how something should work given a set of constraints—and I like designing user interfaces (not necessarily graphical ones).

And I just love using Claude Code! I can tell it what to do and it does the annoying part.

It still takes work, by the way! Even for entirely "vibe coded" apps, I need to think through exactly what I want, and I need to test and iterate, and when the AI gets stuck I need to provide technical guidance to unblock it. But that's the fun part!

jonmc12 · 7 months ago

Agreed. The constraints of software engineering are mostly idiomatic. I used to use my "Scribe" mind to crawl through library dependencies for days to solve some artificial sub-problem.

No software engineer is good enough to time-efficiently write the whole stack from machine code up - it will always be an arbitrary and idiomatic set of problems and this is what LLMs are so good at parsing.

Using "Scribe" cycles to define the right problem and carefully review code outputs seems like the way.

jonmc12 commented on A Philosophical Introduction to Language Models arxiv.org/abs/2401.03910... · Posted by u/sebg

gumballindie · 2 years ago

The main philosophical question in my mind is when did we allow people redefine reality and when did the post truth society become the norm. There should be no debate over sentient software, yet here we are. This is the result of taking people seriously when we shouldn't.

jonmc12 · 2 years ago

The Enlightenment produced free speech and reasoning. Nietzsche said, "god is dead," but a lot of people said it before and after - because reasoning could not fill in the gap of a shared reality. Harari's Sapiens gives a good history; Hoffman's claim that "natural selection does not favor veridical perception" says you're pretty confused about what is actually going on wrt "truth"; Seth's "Being You" might help to understand what conscious beings are actually trying to do in relation "truth" and survival.

jonmc12 commented on Immanuel Kant – What can we know? ralphammer.com/immanuel-k... · Posted by u/momirlan

jonmc12 · 2 years ago

"Our mind shapes the world".. Kant's psychology was foundational to the thought lineage of predictive processing. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2016.0007...

jonmc12 commented on For chemists, the AI revolution has yet to happen nature.com/articles/d4158... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

jonmc12 · 3 years ago

Some of the lower-hanging fruit in chemistry data was addressed by earlier versions of deep learning, like AlphaFold. It seems the nature of the domain is such that the language is less ambiguous than most natural language. Does anyone have a perspective on the apparent advantages of mapping chemistry interactions to latent space models for LLM training?

jonmc12 commented on Show HN: PodText.ai – Search anything said on a podcast, highlight text to play podtext.ai... · Posted by u/anonbuilder

culi · 3 years ago

Surprised to see how many other small projects doing this same thing there are. Kinda seems like a solved problem with ListenNotes. Not affiliated, but I use the service a lot and they have a lot more features than just transcripts including publicly accessible APIs (some of which could probably be utilized by some of the projects posted here)

jonmc12 · 3 years ago

I'd echo this. ListenNotes API is great and I thought podcast search was already solved for devs.

I've always enjoyed this question on their FAQ that gives some tips for potential competitors - https://www.listennotes.com/api/faq/#faq2

> There are at least 3,035,027 podcasts and 156,316,374 episodes on the Internet...

jonmc12 commented on Study links omega-3s to improved brain structure, cognition at midlife news.uthscsa.edu/study-li... · Posted by u/kungfudoi

hervature · 3 years ago

Did not read the paper but did not find any reference to omega 6 nor the ratio of omega 6 to 3. There are studies showing that the ratio is more important than the amount of omega 3 [1]. Because humans typically eat 16:1 (6 to 3) increasing 3 is actually just making the ratio more even which is what matters. A good food for this is flaxseed which is 1:3.5 which is less than fish which can be 1:30 or higher but does not come with the problems of consuming fish. In this reference frame, one can think of avoiding bad ratio foods instead of eating fish. Turns out that basically the most common oils and red meat have ratios of 20:1 (the wrong way) and so just avoiding oil and red meat ends up accomplishing the same goal. As always, nutrition causality is hard to establish, but trying to cut way back on oils and red meat is going to pay much larger dividends than eating more fish.

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12442909/

jonmc12 · 3 years ago

Omega-3 index is better correlated with overall health than O3/O6 ratio. Also, flaxseed is a source of ALAs whereas early all O3 health benefits come from DHA/EPA. A great source of info is Dr Rhonda Patrick's interviews w/ Dr Bill Harris. Here is a short clip - https://share.descript.com/view/2w6WidsYZlT

jonmc12 commented on How to really know another person hiddenbrain.org/podcast/h... · Posted by u/gmays

jonmc12 · 3 years ago

I think no one has posted the main thesis of this discussion. It's not just about "asking them", it's about the NYU psychologist's research that has systematically found no evidence for all counterfactuals other than asking a person about their internal state.

Knowing how to ask someone what they are thinking/feeling is a key skillset of anyone building a product for someone else. Its nuanced enough that books like "The Mom Test" break this down for entrepreneurs to implement tactically. On the other hand, West's research also suggests that one can comfortably underweight their own instincts laden with ego-centric and culture-centric biases. Further, you can also comfortably underweight the observations of your colleagues who might assert empathic abilities.

Perhaps the most interesting segment of this podcast was the story of how the author and her tenured colleague were able to dismiss their own intuitions about a acrimonious rivalry with one another and evaluate their relationship scientifically through hundreds of questions from their own research. They went from disliking one another to getting married.