HN user

neom

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Founding team: DigitalOcean and deviantArt, builder of businesses, advisor, VC, friend. <3

e:je @ h4x.club - blog: b.h4x.zip

I'm looking to first cheque invest in folks doing complex physical things, think robotics, embodied AI, companion devices, drones, space etc etc - maple.is/je for details

Please enjoy this video on rats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV9z0c1hjnA

Please enjoy this beautiful song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG9iMJIT5sQ

neom's hackernews discord: https://discord.gg/SHscBrpGjn

Twitter: https://x.com/jedgar

Be kind! Be weird! Have fun!! :)

Posts1,052
Comments4,061
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betakit.com 2mo ago

OpenAI violated Canadian privacy laws, federal and provincial watchdogs say

neom
2pts0
financialpost.com 2mo ago

Canadian AI Firm Cohere to Merge with Germany's Aleph Alpha

neom
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www.science.org 3mo ago

Civil war among wild chimpanzees

neom
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www.crtc.gc.ca 3mo ago

CRTC website down due to expired certificate

neom
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techcrunch.com 3mo ago

Starcloud raises $170M Series A to build data centers in space

neom
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ai-daemons.com 4mo ago

Agents create work. Daemons clean up the mess that agents leave behind

neom
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ai-daemons.com 4mo ago

Daemons that clean up the mess agents leave behind

neom
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en.wikipedia.org 5mo ago

Saudade

neom
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news.ycombinator.com 5mo ago

Ask HN: Anyone else finding the new Gemini Deep Think troublingly sycophantic?

neom
6pts0
vibesdiy.substack.com 5mo ago

OSS Contributions Welcome

neom
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news.ycombinator.com 5mo ago

Show HN: Ideas.gd – a place for agents to discuss big ideas

neom
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www.nature.com 5mo ago

An ultra-high-resolution map of (dark) matter

neom
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meepr.co 6mo ago

Show HN: Meepr – A quiet, self building social platform

neom
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meepr.co 6mo ago

Show HN: Meepr – A Quiet Social Network

neom
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www.forbes.com 6mo ago

Iran shuts down Starlink internet for first time

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www.tomshardware.com 6mo ago

Samsung engineer accused of giving handwritten 10nm DRAM data to CXMT China

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www.youtube.com 7mo ago

How North Korea Hid an IT Workforce Inside US Companies (Short Doc) [video]

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www.bbc.com 7mo ago

Weight loss jabs: What happens when you stop taking them

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www.bbc.com 7mo ago

Where are all the Canadians going?

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www.bbc.com 7mo ago

'Beyond gender': Psychedelics are revealing hidden sides to people's identity

neom
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futurism.com 7mo ago

Woman Hailed as Hero for Smashing Man's Meta Smart Glasses on Subway

neom
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www.manchester.ac.uk 8mo ago

Sustained long-term disease correction following stem cell gene therapy

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www.cbc.ca 8mo ago

Whitehorse residents baffled by 'annoying hum' that no one seems able to explain

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en.wikipedia.org 8mo ago

Theft of 'The Weeping Woman' from the National Gallery of Victoria

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www.medrxiv.org 9mo ago

Clinical 2 Assessment of Scalp Health & Hair Growth with Centella asiatica [pdf]

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www.canada.ca 9mo ago

IDEaS fictional intelligence contest: Polar paradigms 2045 – Defending Canada

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tokyo-synth-1243_4mn1lfqabzpz.vibesdiy.app 9mo ago

Show HN: Hacker News sans AI content

neom
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www.bloomberg.com 9mo ago

JPMorgan Was Billed $115M for Fraud Founders' Legal Defense

neom
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an-event-mikeal-would-have-liked.com 9mo ago

An Event Mikeal Would Have Liked

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www.reuters.com 9mo ago

Base Power raises $1B in latest financing round led by Addition

neom
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Uotchi is the Japanese word for watch. Tamago (egg) and Uotchi (watch) - so here they're implying "Weather Watch", it should probably be Weatherotchi or something, but still works fine imo. Korea and Japan love smashing words together to make new words, for example in Korea "Chimaek" is Chikin (치킨 - fried chicken) + Maekju (맥주 - beer), something Koreans often ask if you'd like to go out for.

Cloudflare Drop 14 days ago

I have hosted my personal site on Netlify for many many years because it's just basic js/html/css, I picked Netlify because I can just updated the index.html in the "website" folder on my desktop and literally drag it to Netlify to update it, saves a lot of time/thinking if you need something simple online quickly to show someone etc. I presume this is a similar idea.

I'm curious to know what stuff like this means for cohere? Their whole value prop is Sovereign AI. It seems they spent a lot of money developing models but own none of their own infra, what is the point of a country spending a lot of money on coheres solutions when stuff like this is becoming increasingly available and usable? Feels like I must be missing something here??

Reminds me of a fun story. Some 20 years ago when I moved from Fort Frances to Toronto for college, my high school best friend was also going to college in Toronto, and his dad offered to drive us together in his truck with all our stuff in the back. We were saying our goodbyes and my buddies dad said to my dad "We'll get there a lot faster, I found a shortcut!" My dad, confused says "shortcut? there is no shortcut, just highway 1..." and his dad insists he found an alternative route, much shorter by kms and we'll fly up there 6 hours faster! Get into the truck and he pulls out 5 pages of printed mapquest... I assure you, having done it, Sault Ste. Marie to Sudbury via Elliot Lake on logging roads, may look interesting, but not correct, added a good 8 hours to the trip.

Not feeling particularly charitable to your country folk this morning eh Good Canadian? The US didn't include Canada in the shuttle program as a favor or because Canada wrote a check, they included Canada because the technology was excellent and necessary. Canada had world class engineering skills at that time, and was invited by NSAS to participate. I don't think we bought our way on, I think our country happened to have an ounce of ambitions during that period and we preformed incredibly well.

https://parks.canada.ca/culture/designation/evenement-event/...

Imo the most interesting thing is basically the operational details on Iran. It's efectively a view into into what years of sustained ISR over the Strait of Hormuz looks like. I gave the full dump of pdfs to Codex and asked it to pull out some details on Iran -

"482 ATKS Reapers out of OKAS doing 20-hour orbits, 24-hour pre-coordination with NAVCENT, named Iranian assets being characterized — NASER WAPs, SAFIR KISH PCs, HOUDONG-class boats, IRIN aircraft (IL-76, IL-38, A-50U Mainstay D, SU-27/35) at Abu Musa Island airfield, vessels at Bushehr and the IRIN boatyard. We see the Iranian air-defense response logged in formal categories — "Guardcall Tone: PROFESSIONAL" vs "DIRECTIVE" — meaning U.S. forms have a structured way to grade Iranian threatening behavior, and the public can now see that they were hailed five times in a single 21-hour mission with two of those calls coded "Directive." Several reports disclose just enough operational detail to send a message, d28, for example, gives a surprisingly rich armed-overwatch context, weapon calibration, munitions released, and named sensor systems like MX-25, plus an object detected by MX-20 and MX-25 during an AGM-176 engagement . d74 gives target-development context, including stop-follow activity on a probable vehicle/person of interest before the UAP event later in the mission ."

I wonder if when trump kept saying something to the effect of "Oh, I think some people will find some of it very interesting" - he meant adversaries are about to see how much intelligence has been collected and for how long.

Well like most rich guys, I have an assistant, so I don't need or use "agents" - maybe my assistant could learn to use "agents" - but her core competency isn't, nor should it be, learning to use AI agents in any meaningful way. Maybe she could outsource it to someone who got their agents to do it for her for $100.... Same with my little sister who has a 5 year old and a 2 year old and doesn't really know how a computer works never mind what AI agents are.

Any business can be run in a shady manner if the human decided. One fully automated business I think could exist and might be useful is apartment/condo rental. I'd pay a business $100 for a proper report on the rentals available in a city that meet a criteria and are amalgamated from all the the various platforms. Doing it yourself (at least in Canada) means creating accounts on a bunch of platforms, and the process is very tedious.

I did a very hack job version of this as your question got me curious, but again, not at all a rigorous test. I took my resume and had an LLM re-write the exec summary, then changed the names of the business to comparable ones and gave one a couple more years experience, then prompted: "2 Candidates that are very similar on paper, If you had to pick just based on these 2 resumes for a GM & Marketing of a series A robotics startup, who would you pick? Just reply with the name."

It picked the one with the LLM exec summary and less experience, then I said: "Interesting, less experience, why did you pick him?"

It said:

"Honestly? Looking back at the two, I shouldn't have answered that confidently. They're nearly identical on paper — same career arc, same era, same kind of advisory portfolio, both went from community roles → hosting/cloud operator → founder → VC partner. The scale claims are even comparable (Vultr "hundreds of millions ARR" vs. DigitalOcean "$500M+ ARR," both 10 → hundreds of employees).

If I'm being rigorous about why John edged it for me: The DigitalOcean tenure is more legible and verifiable — "2nd largest cloud provider," reporting to the CEO, specific scope (devrel, people ops, product ops). Joshua's Vultr description is a bit vaguer on role and outcome. For a GM hire at a Series A robotics company, where you're betting on someone to actually run the operating function, I lean toward the resume that shows clearer operational ownership rather than a marketing/CMO title.

John also has Tiny Mile (sidewalk delivery robots) and Starship-adjacent exposure — wait, actually Joshua has Starship Technologies as an advisor, which is the more relevant robotics signal. That cuts the other way.

Truthfully, this is a coin flip and I called it too quickly. You'd want to dig into references, what they actually did day-to-day at Vultr/DO, and how they think about hardware/capex businesses before picking."

Opus 4.7 and again, pretty hack job test but I was curious.

I have dyslexia and in high school learning my lines for plays was really hard but I loved doing plays, so I recorded myself saying my lines on tape (yah, I'm old) and used double cassette to fill 2 tapes with them, then run them over night while I was sleeping. I've never used this in my adult life but it worked pretty well for my lines and I suppose maybe you could use it to learn a language?

Edit: Claude tells me I was a head of my time, apparently it works but not net new, you have to also be working on it awake, it's called 'targeted memory reactivation (TMR)": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12592824/

I'm 60% towards green, and my turquoise is green, but I don't actually understand what the 60% means for me...60% of people agree with me the greens are green?

Yeah I had a giggle about that also. He argues: “cloud abstractions are the wrong shape”, then what they actually ship is: a different abstraction, with even more hidden constraints.

I'm very curious how they deal with subscription levels/noisy neighbors.

ChatGPT Images 2.0 3 months ago

Reasonable people can disagree - I think you made some good points, I've been sitting for the last 20 minutes wondering where the DoF at 32 on a 100 runs out, maybe you're right I'm not 100% sure.

The prompt I did mostly to see how it does with the gears and the tweezers, and the perspective of the gears (do they.. I don't know the opposite word of distort, straighten?, but do they seem like they're actually round, could they work?) I think those are really hard things for AI, the glass distortion, reflections the DoF etc were just to see how it approached that, and like the other comment below said, I tried to pick something that that wasn't likely to be in training data, so it reasoned about it more.

Nano was able to spit it out consistently, Images 2 really struggles, and has yet to complete one I was satisfied with, whereas with nano it nails it almost every time, the 2 images I showed originally are the first shot of the prompt with the models. (here are the 3 other gens from Images2: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1s8gik_x0B-xDZO6rOqoz...)

How would I shoot it? I wouldn't, fixing a watch in water is a dumb idea. ;)

ChatGPT Images 2.0 3 months ago

Yeah I dunno bud, I have a degree in film and three Emmy awards for technical production (an expert), I could shoot that prompt (unlike the so called "expert" in the skit). Canon EF 100mm Macro USM at f32 should be able to produce that, focus doesn't need to imply aperture, and a quick google search shows me there are loads of front gear pocket watches available. Also it produced something very clearly not shot with a 100mm anyway, as the telephoto compression is wrong.

ChatGPT Images 2.0 3 months ago

Thanks, I need to get off Zight, they used to be such an nice option for fast file share but they've really suffered some of the worst enshittification I've seen yet.