Hacker News Reader

dirtyhippiefreeon Addictions Are Being Engineered

The article Farmvillains in SF Weekly fifteen years ago said Zynga had a staff psychologist to guarantee that each iteration would be more addictive.

https://www.sfweekly.com/archives/farmvillains/article_eb8e2...

dirtyhippiefreeon The Death of the Middle-Class Musician

The main rehearsal space in San Francisco closed more than two decades ago.

I venture that live music has suffered because of it.

dirtyhippiefreeon Moonbase Alpha: That time NASA made a meme video game

Moonbase Alpha was the location where the TV show “Space: 1999” was set.

First episode saw the moon permanently leave Earth orbit.

dirtyhippiefreeon Endometriosis is an interesting disease

AI hallucinating an art project is one thing…but medicine…?!?

Heaven help us.

dirtyhippiefreeon The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

I totally agree, but I needed you to post the other half because of TL;DR…

dirtyhippiefreeon The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles

Here’s the spot where we see who’s TL;DR…

> Claude 4 will rat you out to the feds!

>If you expose it to evidence of malfeasance in your company, and you tell it it should act ethically, and you give it the ability to send email, it’ll rat you out.

dirtyhippiefreeon Engineer Fixes and Re-Installs Old Payphones, Provides Free Calls to the Public

Beat me to it.

Street Roots has had one for about a month on Burnside and Third.

dirtyhippiefreeon AGI is not multimodal

Agreed, but most people are likely to look at the long title and say TL;DR…

dirtyhippiefreeon Beware of Fast-Math

I’m stunned by the following admission: “If fast-math was to give always the correct results, it wouldn’t be fast-math”

If it’s not always correct, whoever chooses to use it chooses to allow error…

Sounds worse than worthless to me.

dirtyhippiefreeon Improving performance of rav1d video decoder

Having your last name be Ravid really is the icing on your cake.

Real is about the only other codec I see that could be a name, but nobody uses that anymore.

dirtyhippiefreeon Google's future depends on AI and Project Mariner

I’ve been watching as we expect computers to do more, the abilities of the general population are decreasing…

Not a flame, an observation.

If Google is googling for us, we don’t even have to come up with queries anymore. /s, but not…

dirtyhippiefreeon A Secret Trove of Rare Guitars Heads to the Met

The article also says that William Ziff Jr. sold the computer magazines when his son, Dirk, didn’t want to run them.

He’s worth $7 billion, now.

dirtyhippiefreeon Despite strict regulations, California still has the nation’s dirtiest air

Let’s face it.

That many people in one place will generate unholy amounts of pollution.

One wonders what conditions would be like without the regulations.

dirtyhippiefreeon AI in my plasma physics research didn’t go the way I expected

I’m with gthompson512

Sounds like a routine Bill Hicks might have come up with if he was still with us.

He hated obfuscation.

dirtyhippiefreeon You could just choose optimism

Absolutely, but continuing the thought will result in a long list…

dirtyhippiefreeon Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996

Billboard had to recalculate its charts because so many of us stopped paying for what is essentially extortion (Jammie Thomas, statutory damages of $1.92 million ($80,000 per song, within the allowed range of $750 to $150,000).

Streaming didn’t kill sales, and yes it was cheap…and not in dollars…

dirtyhippiefreeon Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996

https://www.theregister.com/2005/05/13/otto_rosen/

(Hillary Rosen) presented the notion of lawsuits against consumers that her successor Mitch Bainwol would turn into a course of action. Who among us hasn't wanted to slit the tendons of thieves and watch as they hemorrhage justice back to The Man?

Rosen, however, led a fruitless crusade that in the long-term was more of an attack against capitalism's progress than the defense of intellectual property rights.

dirtyhippiefreeon Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996

Weird Al wrote an open letter to this effect more than a decade ago, but he broke through again to be Spoticific… Fairly certain that letter is older than Spotify, but this is 2023…

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2023/11/30/weird-al-spotify...

dirtyhippiefreeon Getting Older Isn't What You Think

“But time makes you bolder/Even children get older/And I'm getting older too.” -Stevie Nicks, “Landslide”

dirtyhippiefreeon Telling Lies: Bowie and Online Music Distribution in 1996

Boy, but it sure took the RIAA •years• to figure out that suing fans (aka “customers”) wasn’t the greatest idea…

dirtyhippiefreeon Where do scientists think this is all going?

Philipov missed the last line, “The last human died five years ago.”

Correction: The Holocene Extinction has been happening for a couple of centuries and we can’t bear to look, even indirectly.

All hail Earth’s coming overlords…

dirtyhippiefreeon Zuckerberg: "The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15"

I humbly apologize.

I’m definitely not going to stop you from talking to your imaginary friends.

dirtyhippiefreeon Zuckerberg: "The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15"

Other discussion on same story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43860755

dirtyhippiefreeon Mark Zuckerberg Thinks You Don't Have Enough Friends and His AIs Are the Answer

Other discussion on same story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43861266

dirtyhippiefreeon You could just choose optimism

There’s an article recently posted about a violin built in a concentration camp.

Talk about optimism…

The point is that someone in bad circumstances can focus on the task and the horror of what they endure can subside.

It’s definitely possible to choose optimism and end up improving one’s situation.

dirtyhippiefreeon Zuckerberg: "The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15"

The man assumes that we want friends who don’t actually exist. Astounding.

dirtyhippiefreeon Two publishers and three authors fail to understand what "vibe coding" means

> When the person building the application doesn't know or care, the application will still be deployed.

Resistance is futile.

We will adapt.

dirtyhippiefreeon A Math Lesson From Hitler’s Germany (2017)

——> Worth mentioning that this is the result of Operation Paperclip. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip

The scientists came here or were kidnapped by the Soviet Union.