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nl

33,353 karmajoined il y a 18 ans
Formerly founder of an ML company in Adelaide and Sydney. Exited 2021.

Did some decentralized databases work and private ML work.

Formally CTO at a startup working on AI for strategy/policy work.

Always happy for emails or tweets at me.

http://twitter.com/nlothian

firstname.lastname at gmail.com

Submissions

AI Value Capture

newsletter.semianalysis.com
3 points·by nl·il y a 12 jours·0 comments

Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

desfontain.es
899 points·by nl·il y a 28 jours·604 comments

The household battery revolution that could change energy bills and the world

theguardian.com
8 points·by nl·le mois dernier·0 comments

Anthropic says it's about to have its first profitable quarter

techcrunch.com
3 points·by nl·il y a 2 mois·1 comments

OpenAI Stargate: where the US sites stand

epoch.ai
4 points·by nl·il y a 2 mois·0 comments

We Tested DeepSeek V4 Pro and Flash Against Claude Opus 4.7 and Kimi K2.6

blog.kilo.ai
1 points·by nl·il y a 2 mois·0 comments

US/China talks to make sure non-state actors don't get a hold of these AI models

cnbc.com
3 points·by nl·il y a 2 mois·1 comments

Show HN: An Interactive Text to SQL Agent Benchmark

sql-benchmark.nicklothian.com
1 points·by nl·il y a 3 mois·0 comments

The Pentagon's UFO Psyop

garberfiles.substack.com
3 points·by nl·il y a 5 mois·1 comments

Stress testing Claude's language skills

vivsha.ws
2 points·by nl·il y a 5 mois·0 comments

Chat with Llamma 8B at 16,000 TPS

chatjimmy.ai
3 points·by nl·il y a 5 mois·0 comments

Llamma 3.1 8B in hardware, 16,000 TPS

taalas.com
4 points·by nl·il y a 5 mois·0 comments

DeepMind Aletheia [pdf]

github.com
5 points·by nl·il y a 5 mois·0 comments

Accelerating Scientific Research with Gemini: Case Studies and Common Techniques

arxiv.org
4 points·by nl·il y a 5 mois·0 comments

Agentic coding is accelerating app releases

coatue.com
1 points·by nl·il y a 6 mois·0 comments

Four Ingredients for Successful Retrofitting

bmin.ai
2 points·by nl·il y a 6 mois·0 comments

In Defense of Data Centers

deeplearning.ai
1 points·by nl·il y a 6 mois·1 comments

Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro

twitter.com
308 points·by nl·il y a 6 mois·294 comments

Microsoft's spending on Anthropic AI on track to reach $500M

msn.com
4 points·by nl·il y a 6 mois·1 comments

Tim Dettmers: A Personal Guide to Automating Your Own Work

timdettmers.com
3 points·by nl·il y a 6 mois·0 comments

comments

nl
·il y a 4 heures·discuss
Undecidable isn't uncomputable.

"Computable" can mean probabilistic, and classical computers can function over probability distributions just fine.
nl
·il y a 4 jours·discuss
I wouldn't be too fixated on the specific numbers in that post.

Anthropic was extremely capacity constrained at that point. They still are but not to that extent.

I'd note that OpenAI offers 24 hour caching. I'd be surprised if Anthropic hasn't optimised their caching for Claude code too.

SemiAnalysis recently posted that their actual Opus usage works out at $0.99 because of caching.

The principles remain though.
nl
·il y a 4 jours·discuss
It's not one prompt, but here is a parametric rod connector:

  Use SCAD and design a connector for square rods.
 
  The rods are 18.2 mm square. I want to connect two end-to-end.
..

  make if the bolt holes are created optional for each side - I want to set them separately. Make them M3.5 countersunk
..

  it's the +X or -X sides I want to turn the screw holes on or off.
..

  on each of the 4 sides of the connector add additional connectors at 90 degrees. Make each optional

etc etc
nl
·il y a 5 jours·discuss
I think that applies to military involvement abroad generally.

If you are dropping bombs on someone I'm unconvinced the use of AI will make them like you more or less.
nl
·il y a 5 jours·discuss
I've been doing a lot of 3D design in Codex GPT 5.5 (I found Opus 4.7 wasn't as good - haven't experimented much with 4.8 or Fable).

OpenSCAD is a parametric CAD programming language, and the models know it well.

The biggest challenge is communicating words like "inside" and "above" to the model - inevitably it's idea of which direction is which is often different.

I can't say I've done anything very hard, but for things like ESP32 cases, or parametric rod connectors it is great.

You can do things like "add snap connectors" and it'll do a great job.
nl
·il y a 5 jours·discuss
It's been very successful at frontier math tasks - a bunch of the Erdos questions have been solved by it - more than any other model.

https://www.erdosproblems.com/
nl
·il y a 5 jours·discuss
Their methodology isn't published.

Its widely accepted[1] that it runs the same query through the model in parallel and then has a model that either selects the best answer or synthesizes an answer from the multiple ones generated.

I believe most people think it runs 6 sub-models, but I think that is based on the pricing.

It's a pity that OpenAI doesn't publish details like this.

[1]eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48799977
nl
·il y a 5 jours·discuss
The source is the GPT 5.5 System Card:

> We generally treat GPT-5.5’s safety results as strong proxies for GPT-5.5 Pro, which is the same underlying model using a setting that makes use of parallel test time compute. As noted below, we separately evaluate GPT-5.5 Pro in certain cases because we judge that the setting could materially impact the relevant risks or appropriate safeguards posture.

https://deploymentsafety.openai.com/gpt-5-5/model-data-and-t...

There have been multiple podcasts with people from OpenAI which have confirmed this.
nl
·il y a 7 jours·discuss
I like this format:

"I love Lean because <abc>. I found it failed in <xyz> case because <123>. I created a thing <blah> which handles that like this: <ahhh>.

I'd love feedback! It's open source here: "
nl
·il y a 8 jours·discuss
Another Australian here too.

Yes, contacting your MP and senators can be very useful, including for federal stuff.

It's harder to actually get meetings with Federal members (they spend a lot of time in Canberra) but still worth trying.

Also it is very effective to vote for independent senators. You need to pay careful attention to make sure they aren't secretly insane but senators like David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie are very effective (Lambie seems crazy sometimes but she is surprisingly willing to change her mind on issues).
nl
·il y a 8 jours·discuss
No?

We do GDPR-compliant reporting by using differential privacy to provably remove PII.
nl
·il y a 8 jours·discuss
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517377

It's too bad this has become political.

I do differential privacy work for GDPR compliance and it's an interesting technology.
nl
·il y a 8 jours·discuss
> variabilities to the chaotic circumstances of real world (“general”) problem solving. All forms of intelligence relate to the reduction of uncertainty.

Lossy compression is a form of generalization which handles this exact thing.
nl
·il y a 9 jours·discuss
You are going to need to explain yourself in more details.

> Compression is not intelligence

Just saying this doesn't make it so.

It's widely accepted that compression and intelligence have a close relationship. I think this summary of Marcus Hutter's work provides some background: https://www.antoinebuteau.com/lessons-from-marcus-hutter/
nl
·il y a 10 jours·discuss
> intelligence negotiates probability (allowing multiple divergent outcomes) while compression requires an idempotent symbolic translation.

What does this mean?

Lossy, non-deterministic compression is a thing. Does that meet the "allowing multiple divergent outcomes" criteria?
nl
·il y a 10 jours·discuss
Yeah, broadly agree. See my comment on the other story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48742711
nl
·il y a 10 jours·discuss
It isn't distillation that gave GLM 5.2 it's jump in performance.

To quote Pat Toulme:

There’s a big misconception about how GLM 5.2 was trained. Yes, they distilled Claude and GPT 5.5 — but distillation is not how they matched Opus quality. Distillation only fixed the cold start problem in RL.

RLing an agentic coding model isn’t rocket science. In simplified terms:

1. RL needs trajectories — rollouts where the model actually completed a task in some env

2. No successful trajectory on a task = zero gradient = you can’t RL it. This is the cold start problem

3. Distillation solves it. You seed your model with knowledge from a smarter one (Claude, GPT) on tasks it can’t do yet

4. Now it produces positive trajectories on those tasks

5. RL on those trajectories and hill climb agentic coding

6. At that point you no longer need to distill and can solely hill climb RL to better models

This is an interesting curve. I’d argue it’s harder to get to Opus 4.8 from scratch than to go from Opus 4.8 → Fable/Mythos tier.

GLM 5.2 is already producing positive trajectories, so they have plenty to RL on — they’ll keep climbing to Mythos quality without distilling any further. They no longer need American models.


https://x.com/PatrickToulme/status/2069211575437627743

Not exactly sure what the finish line in "the race to superintelligence" looks like and even moreso it's unclear why you think being there first is a critical benefit.
nl
·il y a 10 jours·discuss
Opus is still significantly better than open weight models.

GLM 5.2 comes close on agentic tasks, but doesn't code as well.

Kimi 2.6 and Deepseek v4 Pro write great code but lose track when doing agentic workflows. They were better than Sonnet 4.6 but not as good as Opus. I haven't compared them to Sonnet 5 yet.
nl
·il y a 10 jours·discuss
Opus isn't nothing!

I think the 5x subscription is here to stay - I'd bet they make money on that from lots of people not using it.

The 20x is already unavailable in Teams plans.
nl
·il y a 10 jours·discuss
This post has been marked as a dupe, but it provides a lot more details than the other announcements of Fable's re-enablement provide:

> The export control directive on June 12 came after the government became aware of a report in which Amazon researchers had found a method of bypassing Fable 5’s safeguards: prompting it so that it identified a number of software vulnerabilities. In one case, the model produced code demonstrating how the relevant vulnerability could be exploited. Over the past two weeks, we have worked closely with the government and other partners, including Amazon, to review the report and evidence.

> Our testing confirmed that many less capable models—including Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and Kimi K2.7—could identify the same vulnerabilities as Fable 5 did in the report. When it came to the demonstration of how to exploit the single vulnerability, every model we tested could produce the same demonstration as Fable 5 (including Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.5, and Kimi K2.7).

This indicates three things:

1) WTF was Amazon thinking? Didn't their researches try the same thing in other models too before telling the CEO to tell the government it was dangerous (!?)

2) Anthropic - in particular Dario - really needs to learn government relations better. Most of the problems Anthropic has had with the government seem to stem from Dario's attitude rather than actual facts. (Eg, the DoD debacle seems to have ended up with OpenAI signing almost the same contract Anthropic already had, just worded differently)

3) The administration decision making is just wacky. In a normal administration they'd have actual policy documents you could look at to understand under what circumstances they think models have a problem. With this they just seem to make it up as they go, and the tools they use make no sense at all. If it is dangerous for cyber security reasons why would export controls make sense to use?