Hacker News Reader

bigDinosauron Microsoft abandons personal AI chatbot race with Copilot reboot

It didn't 'learn' anything in any shape or form at all, it performed an echo <input>.

bigDinosauron Microsoft abandons personal AI chatbot race with Copilot reboot

Siri is highly useful for setting timers and is a solid 9/10 at doing so reliably.

bigDinosauron Back and shoulder surgery is often worse than useless

That's not what single payer actually means, since Australia has both a single payer public system and a separate private system. The part that allows these to both exist is that the public system has vast resources (i.e. an entire national/set of state governments) that can act as one for immense negotiating power. This does not preclude a private system from existing.

bigDinosauron US interest rates raised for first time in three years

Iran is the source for the Islamic justification for suicide bombing (suicide is forbidden in the Quran and thus 'innovation' was needed to justify it). That alone puts immense amounts of blood on their hands. They invented this justification for their own religious and geopolitical aims (getting the US out of the ME). They are interventionists who want to be the spiritual centre of Islam, they are the opposite of passive actors in their region.

The bigger question is whether the other Gulf states (that we ally with or support) are any better and whether or not they deserve sanctions too. The West is clearly not in a place within the ME to preach morals, but that doesn't mean countries like Iran don't deserve sanctions.

bigDinosauron LG says we're fake news [video]

If someone is supposedly concerned about being recorded, having their privacy invaded etc. but they're too lazy to change the wifi password and deal with the trivial inconvenience of changing it on other household devices then in this case the revealed preference really is that they don't really care.

bigDinosauron All grown-ups were once children, but only few of them remember it

As a parent you should absolutely think about what kind of expectations and behaviours you're setting up for the future if 'if they enjoy it then it's worth the money' is teaching kids. Sure it's not perfectly clear cut but not thinking about value at all does not end well.

bigDinosauron Switzerland's Federal Government Is Replacing Microsoft on 3k Computers

The US has been by far the largest funder of medical and other scientific research since WW2 which has benefited billions immensely.

bigDinosauron GPT-6 Astra

The marginal return on education spending decreases fairly quickly, but obviously becomes zero at the point by which there are not enough hours in the day/year/decade to cover every single topic that humans know about - no matter the talent or resources available to the student.

bigDinosauron How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

You can define any word to be whatever you want and thus have linguistically correct predictions that are functionally useless.

bigDinosauron Oceans hit highest temperature on record

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#History

"1954 – The first practical photovoltaic cell was publicly demonstrated at Bell Laboratories.[27] The inventors were Calvin Souther Fuller, Daryl Chapin and Gerald Pearson.[28]"

The references are on Wikipedia. Maybe do the most basic thing in Wikipedia and click on some links to the related pages before asking for sources. One can still quibble that 'first practical' is indeed different from 'first' but the practical part is the part that actually matters in this argument anyway (i.e. solar rollout).

(also, of course it was Bell Labs.)

bigDinosauron I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch

If there's a single unifying fault to the unsuccessful people I know (for any definition of unsuccesful, including my own failures) is that they're precisely bad at working out why they failed - if they even think to ask the question. The successful people are generally much clearer that it was studying hard or networking or natural talent that contributed to their success. The latter group may have people who don't realise luck played a part, but they massively increased their chances of good luck by the aforementioned behaviours.

bigDinosauron AI in drug discovery – what it is, where we stand and the path forward

It's a very confusing comment since Derek Lowe is a chemist working in pharma but is being referred to only as a science communicator which I suspect most people would consider to be an implicit insult.

bigDinosauron Going Dark, and the era of law enforcement hacking

This is untrue when private citizens are in conflict (legal or physical or whatever) and the dispute needs to be mediated or resolved. The 'root cause' may well be she said/he said and the legal system may well have need to resolve this by looking at private communications.

Strong emphasis on the legal system part, but you've completely dismissed that private communications frequently are required to address causes of issues and the word subpoena makes it rather clear that refusing to comply comes with penalty.

bigDinosauron The Water Footprint of AI

This is not even an argument. 100 years? So you're admitting that almonds in California are clearly a sustainable industry that can exist in the long term.

bigDinosauron The Water Footprint of AI

Two completely unrelated things can indeed share some similarities at a very superficial level.

bigDinosauron The Water Footprint of AI

That's because the Californian almond industry is exclusively located in California, unlike the global data centre industry.

bigDinosauron Taste Is All That's Left

I'm not really convinced Metro was better than anything Apple at the time, even though it was refreshing and interesting. Was it actually easier to use? I didn't really find that nor see it with others.

bigDinosauron Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak

I honestly fail to understand the relevance of "some people can't tell the difference or just don't care". Good (or not) for them?

bigDinosauron The most official water costs $120k a gallon

I can't express just how profoundly culturally biased this is. There is absolutely nothing about Fahrenheit that 'just makes sense' to someone who grew up with Celsius instead.

Your comment about granularity is also nonsensical. I can adjust my heating by more granularity than 1C. That has literally nothing to do with the units being used.

bigDinosauron US citizen charged after GrapheneOS phone wipes during airport search

The biggest economy in the world and the richest country to have ever existed is not a developing country, although it is quite unequal. What you've stated is political rhetoric that you want others to accept as fact.

bigDinosauron Elevated Errors for Opus 5

What you expect is irrelevant.

bigDinosauron Half a Second – a book about the XZ backdoor

In this case all it required was to follow the link to their blog on their HN profile just FYI. Although your question was reasonable either way.

bigDinosauron Weightlifting beats running for blood sugar control, researchers find (2025)

You expect people to start running at 5-6km/h which is about a fast walking pace? That seems unduly slow?

bigDinosauron Star Just Ate a Planet, and It's Not Done Yet

If having a 'good time' makes me a bad guy then I'm sorry to say but I'm okay with that. I, of course, don't actually agree that that's true.

bigDinosauron AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

There's plenty of evidence that it's tens of thousands, but it's absurd to even argue over those numbers when a government massacring any number of its own citizens is morally reprehensible (whether it's 5k or 50k). Iran has a long history of executing its own citizens en masse.

Iran has admitted outright to 6k deaths, by the way.

bigDinosauron Show HN: I built a small app for FSI German Course

I simply don't believe that it generally produces graduates who 'cannot order food in a restaurant'. The phrases required for that are almost always simple. Perhaps you mean that the graduates do not necessarily know certain vocabulary (in the sense of not knowing how to precisely specify a 'rack of lamb' whatever) or the correct register/politeness level for every possibility?

bigDinosauron Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it

Nothing with email can ever be an easy fix, although the idea is amusing. It is inherently the problem.

bigDinosauron Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

You dropped the second half of my sentence which pointed to a specific harm. You consequently argued against something which I didn't say. You are not arguing in good faith and this 'conversation' has clearly run its course as you are not capable of engaging the actual points someone is making.

Someone saying that someone shouldn't be able to promote specific harm x is not saying that the idea of 'promotion' of anything in general is necessarily bad, exactly in the same way that we restrict certain harmful things from being sold without being against the idea of selling things in general.

bigDinosauron Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

If you mean 'should network TV be allowed to use behavioural psychology to manipulate people into being couch potatoes' then the answer is yes, that should be regulated against.

Anyway, the way you talk about shorts reminds me of drug addicts who talk about how they can control their consumption. Some can. Many cannot but delude themselves. The way I see people interact with shorts/TikTok/reels is very much not restrained. They're optimised for addictive scrolling in the same way a slot machine is - the fact that some people can use a slot machine without becoming addicted is besides the point.

bigDinosauron Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial

I'm genuinely curious how one can look at someone using an app like TikTok and conclude that's not addictive. It's optimised in every way to engage people in behaviours that look like outright addiction.

Anyway, sometimes 'panic' is justified. Sports betting has been a total disaster, for example.