sebmellen

Yes, I’d say any infra provider that can't afford to have their own hardware security module should probably not be storing sensitive customer data.

Another reason hyperscaler cloud providers will continue to grow (IMO)!

Seen differently, it’s fair for a founder who has relinquished most of their control over the system to retain 5% equity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

404 for me

This is a complete non-sequitur, but I checked out your web page. I love the Curious George image. My daughter has been deeply into the Curious George episodes for the past couple of months, and I don't think I've seen him show up in many other places besides kids' shows :D

> said shareholders holding a majority of the company’s voting power have approved amendments

…doesn’t this mean Zuckerberg himself?

My feeling is that this will be near apocalyptic for the devs who found their joy in the finer grained aspects of implementation, like crafting individual “perfect” blocks of CSS and component code. Many developers enjoy the practice of writing software, as something distanced from actually delivering a product.

Retooling thought to be delivery-oriented is very difficult.

Never thought of that angle but it doesn’t seem far off.

Wow, super cool. Are you the PG Rust guy? Very impressive what you're doing.

I’m not flagging anything!

Nick is a force of nature. Highly recommend following him on X if you don't already.

His launch post gives good context not found in the blog:

> interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had

> with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works

https://x.com/nickcammarata/status/2110757819427574056?s=46

> it runs up to 1.7× faster than comparable MoEs on-device, with 184 tokens/s on an Apple M5 Max and up to 21K output tokens/s on a single NVIDIA B300 GPU

Wow, those are seriously impressive numbers for how intelligent this model seems to be!

One thing that this article doesn't clarify, and that I guess I really should look into, is what exactly AutomationBench tests for as compared to other benchmarks. The standout performance on AutomationBench is interesting to see, but I don't know what it really means because the model seems to score relatively close to other local models on every other benchmark.

I mean, in this case it linked me to many sources, including the manual for the OCT machine used. One thing that even my ophthalmologist might not know, buried in the PDF manual, is that the sample size only includes 5 people under the age of 35 (skewing my "1st percentile" results more aggressively).

But you're right that you can't be 100% certain. Isn't that true for human-to-human explanations too?

I know a number of physicians who have.

I have no idea how I’d have even started on a project like this in 2020… certainly not by writing raw WebGL — ha!

Absolutely. As one of my physician friends told me: “half the time, the best plan is, ‘We'll have to wait and see.’”

But, as a patient, it's hard to find comfort in that. I think that might be what drives the craziness in “non-traditional” approaches to treating disease. Could it be that people using fruititarian diets and essential oils for cancer are doing so because they don’t understand enough to bear a “wait and see” situation?

Argon explained the problem to me in such depth that I could be content with my basic treatment plan. ChatGPT went way off the deep end, suggesting things like high-dose niacinamide treatment (which is admittedly being evaluated in clinical trials, but comes with a host of other side effects).

It’s wild how good it is at explaining nuanced and complex health topics.

As an example, I recently had an OCT scan of my retina because I'm a “glaucoma suspect.” I'm a glaucoma suspect because I have an unusually high cup-to-disc ratio, which is a pattern typically seen in glaucomatous patients.

As part of this OCT scan, you get a report back on your RNFL, which is basically a report on the health and thickness of your optic nerve(s) and retina(s). (Dramatically oversimplifying, of course.)

My ophthalmologist struggled to explain my OCT scan results to me and instead sort of shrugged and said, "It's probably because you're a high myope, but we'll keep you coming in once a year.”

But my scans look horrifically bright red — meaning I'm in less than the first percentile of retinal thickness for my age. Obviously concerning enough to do my own research…

ChatGPT 6 Pro and Opus 5.5 have struggled to make any sense of the clinical implications of these scans. In contrast, Argon was the first model to:

1. explain how the OCT machine works

2. detail the physiological mechanism that causes the cupping and thinner RNFL layers in my scenario

3. sum it up into a clinical recommendation (similar to what my ophthalmologist recommended, with the addition of basic supplementation and lifestyle modification changes)

4. provide an interactive visualization of the topography of my eye vs a glaucomatic eye: https://optic-nerve-3d.netlify.app/

I'm blown away.

Yes, Paris 1919 is amazing. Have you heard Barracuda? That's my favorite of his.

Fuck me! We’re going to have to start our migration as soon as possible. I knew we were in a precarious spot after the layoffs, but this is a truly sad outcome.

Hey Yakko, this is super cool, and congrats! I think I saw a post on X where you were talking about how you vibe-coded your website, but people don't seem to think it's vibe-coded. You did a really great job!

I think one thing I'm struggling to understand is the underlying compute model and how it works. If you compare yourself to a cloud like AWS or a Neocloud platform like, say, Railway or Fly.io, what are you doing differently?

This is such quaint, clear, and beautiful writing. It deeply struck me. Thank you for posting it.

It’s fascinating to read through the reasoning traces: https://github.com/openai/math/tree/main/reasoning_traces

Look at one of their examples of an initial prompt: https://github.com/openai/math/blob/main/reasoning_traces/re...

I think they added it because I threw out the comment :D

Thanks for the heads up!

This asteroid is missing FWIW https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=20031...

Oh man, it seems like my asteroid (Minor Planet 31689 - Sebmellen [0]) is missing.

[0]: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6711174

[1]: https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=20031...

Zeiss?

Took me a moment.. hilarious

> Two Democratic committee members work for Flock, but were allowed to vote regardless

The only appropriate response to this is "What the fuck?"