Hacker News Reader

gilbetronon Anti-aging injection regrows knee cartilage and prevents arthritis

> lean kangaroo mince

I first read "mice" which was startling, then realized it was "mince" and then realized it was kangaroo! How would you describe the flavor?

gilbetronon AI helps ship faster but it produces 1.7× more bugs

1.7x more bugs, not great, not terrible

gilbetronon AWS CEO says replacing junior devs with AI is 'one of the dumbest ideas'

Absolutely. I missed the punch card days, but have been here for the rest, and software quality is way higher (overall) than it used to be.

gilbetronon This is not the future

He didn't cause that, he is just riding the wave. The call to ban them has been going on for years, it was just put on pause during the pandemic.

gilbetronon Ford kills the All-Electric F-150

A bit taller, but generally not bigger. Most pickups have gotten insanely huge.

gilbetronon Just 0.001% hold 3 times the wealth of poorest half of humanity, report finds

Well, money is power, so wealth inequality is power inequality. Those 100x wealthy people will have 100x (or more) the power, and people with power like that like to do bad things to those that don't have it.

See, it isn't about having stuff, it is about having power over people. That's why inequality is horrible.

gilbetronon The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets

My favorite explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vitf8YaVXhc

gilbetronon Kroger acknowledges that its bet on robotics went too far

Taco Bell by us has AI order taking and it is amazing. Quick, always has been getting it correct, and easy to understand. Granted, it's probably very abusable, but for someone just wanting to put in a quick order it is way better than a person.

gilbetronon Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners

I call it the "Persistent Incompetence of Software Development", which is another perspective on estimation, focused more on expertise. A chef that cooks pizzas, cooks the same pizza over and over again and becomes amazing at it. If you are a developer that writes the same code over and over, you are terrible at software development. A good software developer should always be solving new problems, as by the nature of software, once they solve a problem, they never solve that (exact) problem again. So we are persistently incompenent.

Which is why software development can't be estimated, as well. Because it is all, as you say, novel. With infinite error bars.

At this point, I can't take anyone seriously that believes software dev can be estimated.

gilbetronon Bag of words, have mercy on us

You may know the mechanics, but you don't know how LLMs "work" because no one really understands (yet, hopefully).

gilbetronon Palantir could be the most overvalued company that ever existed

What simple method would you use instead? It is effective to have such comparisons for quick communication of the relative size of things.

gilbetronon 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/features/certificates-public...

Lack of health care records interoperability (locks patients into a system).

Much of the well-intended regulation around healthcare ends up getting perverted to prevent competition.

gilbetronon 'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs

You assume that there is any meaningful competition. What we are seeing, across industries including education, is a type of indirect collusion that is keeping prices crazy, not competition. Over regulation is a big piece of what enables all this.

gilbetronon The New AI Consciousness Paper

> Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inhabit a world whose structure is stable, self-consistent, and rich enough to support persistent internal dynamics.

Why? How do we know that? Seems like a made up requirement without proof, because we can't prove anything about consciousness because we don't know what it is.

gilbetronon Ford can't find mechanics for $120K: It takes math to learn a trade

> auto mechanics make double minimum wage if they don't own their tools (so they can go buy some)

I think you have that backwards:

"Typically, in California, if your employer wants you to provide and maintain your own work tools, they must pay you at least double the minimum wage. This means that in 2025, with California’s minimum wage at $16.50 per hour, your employer must pay you at least $33.00 per hour before they can require you to supply your own tools."

Auto mechanics make double minimum wage if the do own their own tools.

gilbetronon Why don't people return their shopping carts?

I've found an anecdotal correlation that the (relatively few) people that have moralized at me about returning shopping carts also tend to dislike self-checkout at the same stores. I guess it is immoral to have someone return your cart, but moral to have someone scan your groceries? I generally don't return my cart, but I mostly self-checkout. I'm pure evil apparently.

gilbetronon NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again

The pandemic induced the major change. Schools were forced to put everything online, and so screens became the default learning environment. What's the difference between them being on a laptop/chromebook/tablet and a phone? Not really that much. Plus parents allowed their kids get phones at a younger age to keep track of them. Now we are trying to claw it back, but the big problem is that the parents are the ones preventing it. They need to be constantly attached to their kids. Our son is 16 and while he loves screens, he also is enjoying kids spending less time on them at school so he can chat with people more.

gilbetronon The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

The paper is yet another in a long line of, "humans are special, computers can't replicate them". Such thinking has been a part of the fields for decades and decades, I had arguments about them when I was in college with my professors (such as John Holland, "creator" of genetic algorithms). That's the whole reason LLMs are so interesting, they are the first time we've captured something very much like thinking and reasoning. It can do many of the things long thought to be the sole purview of humans. That's why anyone that knows anything about the field of AI is astonished by them.

The "intellectual e-waste from Silicon Valley" has produced something amazing, the likes of which we've never seen. (Built on decades of curious people in the AI, neuroscience, computer science, and other fields, of course).

gilbetronon The Case That A.I. Is Thinking

This is one of the least curious posts I've seen on HN. We have been thinking about thinking for millenia, and no, Buddhists don't have it figure out. Nobody does. LLMs are the most significant advancement in "thinking science" in a long, long time. It is clear that they are doing something a lot like thinking, if it is not thinking. They seem to think more than most people I know, including the person I'm responding to.

I think people conflate thinking with sentience, consciousness, and a whole lot of other concerns.

Clearly this website is not for you and your complete lack of curiosity if you call us "sicko freaks".

gilbetronon Trump directs nuclear weapons testing to resume for first time in over 30 years

This is Trump, when he says, "test", he wants to see mushroom clouds.

gilbetronon Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

> I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because.

There are two kinds of people, those that think it is clever to split people into just two groups, and everyone else.

gilbetronon Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

novice -> informed -> asshole -> seasoned

Keep pushing through the asshole stage and you get to another where you learn to enjoy what you enjoy, whether it is a $10 chocolate chip cookie or Chips A'Hoy. A $200 bottle of wine or a $5 bottle.

It is possible to dig deep into subjects and emerge with a nuanced understanding rather than an asshole demeanor!

I've kept aquariums basically my whole life and have had all kinds of critters including a really expensive marine tank fully kitted out with fish worth hundreds each. My current favorites are some guppies I got for free because it wasn't worth charging for them!

gilbetronon Space Elevator

The Mars one is much more interesting and traumatic :)

gilbetronon Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agreeing new rules

Ah yes, the problem of "more people" determining elections. It should be the minority that determines elections!

gilbetronon Ask HN: Has AI stolen the satisfaction from programming?

No, managers did that years ago.

gilbetronon Climate goals go up in smoke as US datacenters turn to coal

I will bet a large amount of money that the world will not detonate in 2026, any takers?

gilbetronon Canadian bill would strip internet access from 'specified persons', no warrant

Unbelievable how someone on this forum can blame "the left" when the US has an administration that is clearly the greatest threat to the 1st amendment, really all of them, the country has probably ever seen.

gilbetronon How the US got left behind in the electric car race

What other downside is there besides range anxiety? I've had an EV for 18 months now, and I see nothing but upsides. Environmental concerns were my main purchasing reason, but now that I've experienced an EV, that is at the bottom of the list.

I get to charge at home, it is quiet, easy to drive, fun to drive, great in the snow, no fluids to deal with except wiper, doesn't smell of gas/oil, doesn't need to start up, has almost no maintenance costs, roomier, and cheaper to operate.

Range anxiety is annoying, doubly so because we can easily fix the problem. "Refueling" speed is not the best, but isn't that big of deal for longer trips.

gilbetronon How the AI Bubble Will Pop

This period feels extremely similar to the early 2000s, where people were saying that the web hadn't really done much and that it seemed to be at an "end". And then Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and pretty much the entirety of the modern web exploded.

How tech innovation happens is very different from how people think it happens. There are nice, simple stories told after the fact, but in the beginning and middle it is very messy.