Hacker News Reader

Borribleon Another Company Caught Using AI to Create Fake Journalists and Journalism

The equivalent of the great oxygen event. On the other hand, without it, we wouldn't be here, would we?

Borribleon A market mystery: Why do capers come in such tiny jars?

Come on, there must be good caper tongs or caper spoons, after all, there's obviously a dire need for them, right?

Borribleon Mouth-based touchpad enables people living with paralysis to use computers

I read somewhere about a similar tech a long long time ago. It must have been this one:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224648269_Tongue_dr...

Borribleon Why No Roman Industrial Revolution? (2022)

I am more interested in whether the Roman Empire could have had an industrial revolution later on if it had not collpsed beforehand. And had spared us a few hundred years of the Dark and Middle Ages.

Borribleon The Collapse Is Coming. Will Humanity Adapt?

As long as there's a buck to be made.

Borribleon The hikikomori in Asia: A life within four walls

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

"Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk - that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs."

...

"Vashanti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? - say this day month."

Borribleon The Prophet Who Failed

"The Sounds of American Doomsday Cults Vol. 14" sounds like a great CIA PsyOp piece.

Borribleon Google AI recommends adding Elmer's glue to pizza cheese after scanning Reddit

I prefer transglutaminase over Elmers.

But that's a matter of taste.

I used Elmers just for finger prints and other simple one-off moulds for my hobby.

Borribleon Companies Say They're Using Microphone Audio to Target Ads [audio] (2023)

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.” Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Borribleon A review on protein language models

Interesting, a (u)racil mutation. We'll see how the repair system reacts. And if not, who knows what will come of it.

Borribleon AI content firm creates fake writers for ai articles

So, do fake readers like the articles?

Borribleon Automated Social Science: Language Models as Scientist and Subjects

This certainly opens up completely new perspectives on the replication crisis in the social sciences ...

Borribleon Does light have an infinite lifetime?

Infinite in both directions of time?

Borribleon Show HN: An app that takes your money if you don't reach your goals

Does that mean you can buy your way out of the nonsense that is constantly preached about goals in life?

I am tempted.

Borribleon Infected blood scandal: Children were used as 'guinea pigs' in clinical trials

You probably know that children, especially children from low socio-economic backgrounds, were considered expendable in a lot of societies for the longest times?

Admittedly, it took a few decades after the Nuremberg trials before the superficial realization that you can't do everything that pleases the researcher's heart took hold.

"The ancient Persian kings and the Egyptian pharaohs are said to have treated criminals as expendable experimental material, much as a modern laboratory researcher might order a supply of rats or rabbits. The practice was apparently still in vogue in eighteenth-century England, since Caroline, Princess of Wales, "begged the lives" of six condemned criminals for experimental smallpox vaccination before submitting her own children to the procedure. (She also procured, for further trial, "half a dozen of the charity children belonging to St. James' parish/')"

Louis Lasagna, Special Subjects in Human Experimentation, p.449, Daedalus Vol. 98, No. 2, Spring, 1969, Ethical Aspects of Experimentation with Human Subjects

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20023886?seq=1

Borribleon It's cutting calories–not intermittent fasting–that drops weight

Somebody should invent a drug to strengthen willpower.

That would certainly also have interesting social side effects.

Borribleon Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?

I just remembered that the first time I read about this, I rummaged around for source material. There is a book from 1840 in which the processing of human bones from battlefields is described as productive and profitable. Carl T. von Natorp, "Ueber den Gebrauch und Werth der Knochendüngung", 1840 "On the use and value of bone fertilization"

There is a bad scan by google books of parts of the text written in German Fraktur, but on page 410 he's clearly talking about the English that started to collect bones from the battlefields to use as fertilizer in 1822.

https://books.google.de/books?id=PyRAAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA410&lpg=P...

Borribleon Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?

Well, for good reasons nobody expects the Anglican Inquisition ...

Borribleon Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?

The deeper you plough this field, the more fruitful the findings. No dead end in sight. This may even take the cake. Dark and heavy Belgian cake. Cake of the dead, so to speak.

Borribleon Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?

And then I thought, we've known for some time that dead men make good fertilizer.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/200th-a...

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

Borribleon Science fiction and the death of the sun

Just in case you don't know 'Fading Suns'.

Role-playing gothic sci-fi in a galaxy where the stars are dying.

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

Borribleon The Color of Silence

Coincidentally, ...or not..., a Catholic priest used John Cage's 4'33 in a German radio devotional that piqued my interest on last Holy Saturday while driving to the hardware store, picking up on Johann Baptist Metz' idea that the shortest definition of religion is 'interruption'. You may understand my amused confusion when I discovered this thread on HN yesterday. To deepen the discussion, I'll add a quote from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow about some special kind of silence:

"A screaming comes across the sky…He won’t hear the thing come in. It travels faster than the speed of sound. The first news you get of it is the blast. Then, if you’re still around, you hear the sound of it coming in."

Borribleon Visiting Scarfolk, the most spectacular dystopia of the 1970s (2016)

Since the computer is a friend to all of us, citizen, I hope you are not accusing it of malicious intent against us. Just to be sure you are not a traitor, it is in your interest to have this checked by the relevant authorities.

Stay vigilant citizen, anyone can be a traitor. Including yourself.

Borribleon Visiting Scarfolk, the most spectacular dystopia of the 1970s (2016)

Skimming an Atlas Obscura article the day before yesterday and ordering the books 'Discovering Scarfolk' and 'The Scarfolk Annual' especially for the surveillance themed humor, I'm not surprised to find a post about Scarfolk on HN today ...

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/digging-through-the-ar...

I especially like the BBC 1 initiative, 'We watch you watching us.'

I really need to dig out my old copy of the Paranoia RPG and reactivate the old team.

Borribleon Lego's 3,745-piece D&D set comes with its own playable adventure

I'd be more interested in a W40K Lego.

Borribleon Deadly morel mushroom outbreak highlights big gaps in fungi knowledge

The Future is Wild, and The Morel is a Harsh Mistress.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Hothouse

Incidentially, ... or probably not ..., I'm reading The Fungus at the moment.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheFungus

Borribleon The mystery of the garage

Successful Garage People

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11496136/

Borribleon The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better

The winner takes it all, until nothings left for him.

Borribleon Does fermion doubling make the universe not a computer?

I'm more interested in what is simulated, why it is simulated and for what reasons the plug may be pulled. Simulation implies there is an operator of it with an intention for it. Even if it is only for his/her/its/whatever own pleasure or curiosity. The inspiration of the simulation thesis is obviously a thinly veiled idea of a creator God, no doubt. What will it do when it realizes that its Little Computer People are starting to use the resources of its simulation (information, computing capacity, matter, energy) to simulate their own little world? Does this thwart its plans, contaminates the experimental setup? Is it what it is researching?

Borribleon A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

At least in Western magic and mythology, doppelgangers have been harbingers of personal doom for centuries - so beware of your evil twin.

Just saying, so that no one is surprised when they start to doubt themselves...