Hacker News Reader

bediger4000on Andy Burnham: UK Could 'Go All the Way' by Rejoining EU

Wow willing to give up all the trade benefits, sovereignty, ana secure borders so quickly after gaining them? What's going on?

bediger4000on Elon Musk Film Hit with Censorship

I agree that they argued from principle ca 2022. But if they're not arguing at all now, those principles were falsely put forth as bad faith arguments. We don't see reports of Greenwald, Taibbi, even Elon Musk, who argued for absolute freedom of speech when he bought twitter, arguing for it now.

bediger4000on Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

Based on what happens everywhere, they're paying reddit for leniency. Pink contracts have been around since Uunet was offering them to Usenet spammers.

bediger4000on Elon Musk Film Hit with Censorship

Have we heard from all the non-traditional free speech defenders on this? It's certainly within Elon's purview (albeit hypocritically) to not allow advertising of a documentary on Twitter, but you'd think Greenwald and Taibbi, and those who took issue with Biden admin over countering disinformation would be all over this. Much more egregious than any "Twitter files" material.

bediger4000on Uncle's frozen Mac says it's infected after viewing a Google ad. Now what?

Once again reality reminds us that ad blocking is personal infosec.

bediger4000on McDonald's turns to AI for drive-thru, inventory management, order accuracy

Traditionally, White Castle has not been concerned with order accuracy. McDonald's has. I'm thinking that's the seam that will give way in McD's quest to eliminate employees.

bediger4000on The US stood alone in dismissing AI safety concerns at the UN

Headline, in accordance with the text of the article, should say that "Trump stood alone". It's not like he's articulating some carefully considered policy with inputs from all stakeholders, he's just saying what he wants, what's best for him.

bediger4000on The AI Build-Out Is Becoming the Biggest Economic Bet in U.S. History

Not to mention who's on the throne and his thumbless grip on reality.

bediger4000on Happy Oligarch Day as Trump-Aligned Billionaires Take over Hollywood

No. Unfortunately, it's oligarchs all the way down.

bediger4000on The United States of Walmart, According to WiFi Data

That might be interesting, but it's hard to tell. The (apparently vibe-coded) web page is over half title bar. The map of the US is definitely Midjourney-scented, look at the Pacific NW states - what happened to Washington state? I'm using Firefox on Linux, but that shouldn't mean that human factors and common sense layout go out the window.

bediger4000on FBI Anti-Corruption Squad Was Circling Susan Collins Until Trump Got in the Way

Is this the kind of material that Trump apparently leverages in critical votes?

What happens when not if we find out something similar happened to one or more Supreme Court Justices, and Trump has used the material to get votes?

bediger4000on How do you best protect against copycats?

I've had a little of that happen. Ignore it. The people who do that sort of thing don't care, have no talent, and know that they have no talent. They'll abandon the effort shortly and it will disappear.

bediger4000on Are LLMs still surprisingly bad at some simple tasks?

Roko's Basilisk is going to put Terence Eden up against the wall (or whatever) first.

bediger4000on Trump Addresses the UN General Assembly

Currently (2026-09-22T15:53:05Z) I see "Live: Trump tells UN General Assembly he could 'annihilate' Iran but expects deal after midterms" as the title of this article. I'd like to think Reuters stitched a couple of phrases together to make that paradox of a title, but maybe not.

bediger4000on How much of the "AI is going rogue" talks is just a publicity stunt?

Probably most of it. Have "AIs" invented new techniques, or are they just applying techniques humans invented? It's the latter.

Remember that first time you heard about speculative execution attacks (Spectre)? That was something new, something unheard of. If an "AI" is going rogue, something previously unheard of would show up. Otherwise, they're just doing what patterns are in their training data, and doing a lot of it. And, it's a human telling them to do so.

bediger4000on What Palantir Actually Does

Damn that's a lot of buzzwords, put together in ways that make sense only after you've thought for a second, and thus hard to read.

bediger4000on What happened to the Snowden archive

See that's the thing: bad faith requests for presence in the marketplace of ideas almost always more the discourse towards authoritarian views, reactionary and racist views. Smashing it metaphorically means that monarchists and authoritarians flood the marketplace with garbage.

We as a society still have the idea that we must protect ourselves from socialist and communist views, but we have no similar immune system for reactionary authoritarianism.

bediger4000on What happened to the Snowden archive

In the past, I would have agreed with you. But I've seen that argument used in bad faith so many times since 2000, I've come to see it as an excuse to introduce bad ideas and move the overton window. Every oligarch seems to be in favor of absolute freedom of speech until they control the media in question, then it's hard right for thee.

bediger4000on CNN, MS NOW and Politico denied access to White House after Trump 'ban'

Politico's publisher got his wife an advisory job in Melania Trump's office ca 2020. What happened to Politico to earn such a stern punishment (access withdrawal)?

bediger4000on Ctenophores: Wonders of Biology

I imagine Steven Hydra was taken.

bediger4000on Ctenophores: Wonders of Biology

Steven Haddock, a marine biologist who studies ctenophores

Interesting case of nominative determinism.

bediger4000on Where's My Alien Mind?

This is actually a good point.

Where are the weird discoveries? Something like "super regular expressions", some patterns that are just as simple but way more expressive. Where is a better axiomatization of arithmetic than Peano's? Can you make a Y combinator out of B and M primitives?

bediger4000on The Great Barrier Reef refuses to die on schedule - best years record

LA Times is own by an oligarch Patrick Soon-Shiong. Soon-Shiong directly prevented LA Times from endorsing Harris in 2024. Given that breach of trust why should we believe this article? Maybe Soon-Shiong has directed LA Times to write this so as to give him better standing with Russel Vought, or other members of the Trump admin..

This illustrates a problem with direct owner interference in news organizations.

bediger4000on Students are planning around a future employers don't expect

Besides not making sense, this title is editorialized.

bediger4000on Anthropic CEO says AI swarm could 'take over the Internet' in 6-12 months

I hereby Triple Dog Dare him to let that swarm loose. It would be a huge improvement over the wasteland of social media.

bediger4000on If we all didn't copy each other life would be awful

Extremely important points made in this post. The title even matches the thesis of the post.

In light of the title and thesis, how does "intellectual property" like patents and especially copyright fit in? Basically copyright is a state granted monopoly on particular aspects of culture. Someone makes money on culture. Should we allow this at all?

bediger4000on Ask HN: If AI writes the code, what matters?

Nothing is the hard part. AI has very large working memory, no 5+-2 issues, no cognitive boases. AI has ingested every word of text in the world, it has all the design patterns and syntaxes in its weights. It's the worst it will ever be.

bediger4000on Ask HN: Why are the tech companies tracking humans?

So they have the ability to track people who object to their dominance. The first category of work any surveillance technology is put to is surveilling those who publicly don't like that technology.

bediger4000on UK Police to crack down on face coverings at protests

Good thing this isn't done in the US - we'd be cracking down on the police themselves