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flashman

4,035 karma · joined August 13, 2014

Data analyst.
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flashman··on Study links GLP-1 drugs to bigger jump in women's employment than a degree
> "If it's going to make me more money to paint my face, clown me up," she said.

Oh you're already a clown

flashman··on ReFrame – The EPaper Camera
When John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats started recording albums to cassette on his portable Panasonic stereo, he got a sound that was so much more lo-fi than what could be obtained in a studio, or even with a more expensive recorder and microphone.

His genius was to realise he'd made a sound that most professional musicians would never bother with, and thus it became his own and his signature. I think not worrying so much about fidelity probably gave him more time to concentrate on the lyrics and music.

Most people carry one of history's most technologically-advanced cameras. How many can say they actually use it for something interesting?

flashman··on So Reddit has decided that plain HTML is unsafe
> The "product" is now selling data to LLM companies

Incorrect; 94% of Reddit's 2025 revenue came from advertising, it's right here on page 81 https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001713445/42e4fe7...

This is why Reddit is supposedly ending its licensing agreement with Google: when the latter shows AI snippets in its search results, Reddit misses out on advertising revenue, and Reddit has judged the Google juice to not be worth the squeeze.

flashman··on Is The Economist Always Wrong?
You assert that, but can you prove it? Likewise I can say that the model is biased towards rating the Economist's claims as 'mainstream' and 'bang on' because as a high-profile publication those claims are repeated elsewhere and hence up-weighted.

I could be wrong - my point is, how would we know?

flashman··on FCC wants to kill burner phones by forcing telecoms to get all customers' IDs
The current ID verification requirements for phones were introduced to Australia in 1997
flashman··on The LLM warnings Google fired Timnit Gebru over have all come true
> Claude and ChatGPT are not indoctrinating into the manosphere users asking about discounted cash flow formulae.

You're defining an extremely narrow case and then saying bias is irrelevant within it. At the risk of Godwin's Law that's kind of like saying it's okay if my accountant is a Nazi as long as they only ever have conversations about accountancy.

flashman··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
In the same way that a photograph is not dissimilar to the thing it represents, that is, in the most important way.
flashman··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
vast oversimplification of the experience of brain damage
flashman··on Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
Maybe when the system can generate its own state, rather than that state existing as a deterministic output of its inputs, maybe then we can consider it to have the interiority and reflexiveness required to call something 'thought'.

A very convincing simulation of thought is not thought, especially without memory or any evidence of an independent will. LLMs have the same kind of consciousness as a nematode, albeit with less-complex behaviour.

flashman··on 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices
well we could [HN terms of service violation]
flashman··on 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices
I didn't say there wasn't bot-generated content in the past. I said we weren't excited about a future where it was de rigeur.
flashman··on 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices
I don't know what else you'd call the widespread and enthusiastic adoption of a technology that is designed to exploit people's trust in the veracity of images by mimicking reality as seamlessly as possible. I think it's both aberrant and abhorrent for the tech industry to be actively developing something that's permanently polluting our information environment.

Here's a local story published after I made my comment, about tour operators using AI images to misrepresent destinations in the area: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-01/ai-videos-spark-conce...

Increasing the availability of fake image generators directly enables more harms like these.

flashman··on 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices
Twenty years ago, I don't think any of us were excited about a future internet where we couldn't trust whether what we were seeing or reading was genuine. I hope one day we'll be able to look back on this era as an aberration, like that scene in Mad Men where the Drapers fling their picnic rubbish onto the grass and drive away.
flashman··on The Pack That Killed the Pack Mule
hey OP what's with all the carryology submissions in the past two days

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48279030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48266757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48279413

flashman··on AI is a technology not a product
Apple is smart to avoid betting the farm on generative AI based on large language models, which is really what we mean by 'AI' here. It costs a lot to create and to run, nobody is willing to pay enough to cover those costs, and when that financial reality hits, it's going to take the knees out from under some major corporations.

Maybe Apple will buy Nvidia. That would be a useful vertical integration.

flashman··on AI is a technology not a product
No, it's asking for my two-legged horse to have four legs
flashman··on Googlebook
But we all knew what they meant and here you are being tedious about it
flashman··on SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites
Misleading, because satellites are made of different materials to meteors. Satellites are the dominant injection source of 24 elements into the atmosphere, including Al, Cu, Ti, Nb, Co, Zn, Sn, Pb, Ag, Li, V, Hf, W, Ge, Mo, Zr, B, and Ba. This list includes many transition metals, whose catalytic effects on ozone and cloud nucleation are mostly unknown.

Copper in particular is a well-known catalyst for the destruction of ozone.

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027311772...

flashman··on Obsidian plugin was abused to deploy a remote access trojan
well there was this previous issue in the crypto community where it turned out someone was not a competent engineer and should have stuck to their online exchange for magic: the gathering
flashman··on Canvas is down as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data
What's in the files they've already released? Some of them are > 800GB.
flashman··on Goodbye to Sora
Not enough money though. Not hundreds of billions of dollars.
flashman··on United MAX Hit by Falling Object at 36,000 Feet
didn't help Shed Garvey lol
flashman··on New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria found in technician's garden
Jesus
flashman··on Self-Driving Teslas Are Fatally Rear-Ending Motorcyclists More Than Any Other
seems like vision quality might be a major source of robot accidents
flashman··on An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip
Let's reverse that. "Current generation AI models can think of things that are truly new."

How could you possibly know that? Could you prove that an image wasn't copying from images in its training data?

flashman··on An image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip
Redbubble was sued by the Pokemon Company two months prior to the launch of Pokemon Go, so you picked the exact wrong company and moment to try this with

https://www.smh.com.au/business/consumer-affairs/pokemon-hel...

flashman··on SheepShaver is an open source PowerPC Apple Macintosh emulator
macintosh.js is an alternative that runs as an Electron app https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js
flashman··on JFK Assassination Records – 2025 Documents Release
A bunch of these documents have been released in previous years so we'll need a filter on filenames to determine what's actually new, e.g.

2023 release: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2023/20...

2025 release: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2025/03...

flashman··on Apple says it will add 20k jobs, spend $500B, produce AI servers in US
> It is essential then that the hardware deployed in data centers has not been physically tampered with. Without that the whole thing falls apart.

am i wrong or does this just change the threat from Chinese to US government tampering

and if third-party auditing can detect hardware tampering then why does it matter where the hardware is manufactured

flashman··on Atari 2600+ vs. Atari 7800+ – Which Should You Get?
> Speaking of game loading, it is surprisingly slow. You plug in a cartridge and turn on the 7800+, which takes a moment, and then there is a “Loading game” screen that takes 15 to 20 seconds to actually load the game.

This would have been nearly instantaneous on the original console. You could hit reset and be back at the title screen basically before you'd leaned back from pushing the button.

It is very funny that as computers have become more powerful, we've lost the incentive (and probably the skills, outside of the demoscene) to make things run fast and close to the bone.

Also, I think "disappointing joypad" is faithful to the Atari experience, having used those spongy suckers for many hours in the early 90s.

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