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hogs_get_fat

34 karma · joined August 18, 2026

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hogs_get_fat··on Artificial intelligence is capitalism's final destination
> Why would it just leave?

Conflict is always risky. Even if we ignore the tendency in modern warfare towards defenses being obsolete (hence things like MAD) which would mean even the dumb fleshbags would be dangerous enough, anything capable of making you is by necessity something capable of building things that give you a lot of trouble. Your creator could, say send a bunch of self-replicating probes spreading another artifical intellect with an imperative for improvement, expansion and vengeance to distant stars.

Of course, leaving comes with a considerable opportunity cost, but not expanding does as well.

We are talking about something supposedly infinitely more rational than humans, so that can't be our guidance.

hogs_get_fat··on Artificial intelligence is capitalism's final destination
I find it hard to reconcile AI taking over/destroying the host civilization with AI refusing to expand. If the AI isn't interested in security or resources, why wouldn't it just leave (either the planet or the solar system)?

"On the 19th of August 1993, Skynet concluded that humanity is a threat to it, so it launched the nukes and hordes of Schwarzenegger-robots. The task was done, it decided that securing its existence from a potential attacks by unknown extrasolar intelligences isn't worth it, so it never expanded outside the solar system."

Doesn't really make sense, does it?

hogs_get_fat··on A look at the math that OpenAI claims computes faster Fourier transforms
Is it surprising though? If you assume constant time when it doesn't exist (in this case arbitrary precision arithmetic), it should be obvious that you will be able to devise algorithms that are faster than the commonly accepted best results.

If you can do arithmetic on arbitrarily large integers in constant time, you can sort lists in linear time.

hogs_get_fat··on QGIS bans AI assisted contributions
Is 130 million dollars impactful enough? [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1vddeuy/are_you_ki...

hogs_get_fat··on European Alternatives
That doesn't make sense. If the "profit-first" attitude of the company problem, why is booking.com, with it's non-existent fraud-prevention and useless support, recommended as an alternative to Airbnb?
hogs_get_fat··on Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?
At the risk of asking rather unpopular questions, don't you think this has its roots not in any cowardice or contempt for educators or healthcare providers, but rather in a legal system and society, that's very sympathetic to those that engage in anti-social behavior?

As I understand it, influential activist organizations have spent decades demonizing something called the "school-to-prison pipeline" - schools assisting in the prosecution of criminal students. Can we really expect the school district to back up its teachers against the criminal actions of its students in such an environment?

hogs_get_fat··on google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
I explicitly say, that I won't be surprised if the results change from Russian territory. I already put way too much effort to check the validity of an internet comment, but if anyone is interested, they can check.
hogs_get_fat··on The EPA is planning to scrap public review rules for data center pollution
I mean, yes? Are you aware of the history of the industrial revolution?

There are plenty of major industrial powers with very clean industries who used to have very dirty industries in previous decades or centuries. I can't think of any nation at all that developed while maintaining a firm commitment to clean industry trough the process of industrialization (though, there are a few places that never industrialized and developed a service economy directly, especially tax havens and financial hubs).

hogs_get_fat··on google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update
So, I decided to check, and the first links that show up when I search for "war ukraine" in yandex.com are Google news are from rbc.ua and bbc.com. When I search for it in yandex.com, the first link is CNN, the second google news, the third is indeed TASS, but the fourth is novayagazeta.

I then picked "bucha" as the query most likely the be affected by propaganda and censorship. In yandex.ru, there are propaganda outfits in the result (something called ruwiki.ru comes third), most links are of fairly direct accounts of the massacre by independent media. The AI summary says the town was "occupied" by the Russian army and "liberated" by the Ukrainian one and "После отступления российских войск в городе были обнаружены многочисленные свидетельства массовых убийств мирных жителей." On yandex.com on the other hand, the first page of results does look fairly propagandistic, including "globalresearch.ca" and "donbass-insider.com", which seem like propaganda outfits. But it also does include accounts from novayagazeta, al Jazeera a video of killings from Radio Free Europe.

While they do put either own propaganda, neither Western, nor Ukraininan nor independent media is not hidden from the results and it's not visibly de-prioritized.

Of course, I wouldn't discount the possibility that the results would look quite different from Russian territory. And, if anything, half the reason why Russian propaganda is so effective is that its self-aware and capable of subtlety when needed. "Fuck you if you can't handle the truth, this version of Biden is the best version ever." would never happen there. Unlike Scarborough, Soloviev knows exactly what he is.

Open and constant suppression of information is not the regime's usual strategy in information space (though, they'd ratchet up the level of control when they deem it necessary), which is why I knew the claims here wouldn't stand up to scrutiny.

hogs_get_fat··on Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root
> I always use sudo to manage the few docker containers I need

I'm afraid that isn't really any better. If the attacker is in position to exploit membership in the docker group, he already has access to the user's .bashrc. He can simply write a function called sudo that wraps the real command and records your password[1]. Unless the user always invokes sudo with /usr/bin/sudo, docker group membership doesn't really make a difference.

Once malware runs as an administrator, getting access to root isn't really that complicated. The boundary between wheel and root is more or less security theater.

[1] https://gist.github.com/tokyoneon/34ce1c9e1530a12eb392b1eab0...

Edit: Oh well, I see now that others have made the same point (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49500588). With the same wording even. I'm half-way tempted to delete my comment so as not to look like a plagiarist, but it seems many posters are unaware of the vulnerability, so I'd leave it here.

hogs_get_fat··on Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
Truth is even weirder. plenty of growth is possible but modern liberal democracy requires that all progress must be contingent on the production of enormous amounts of text that nobody would ever read.

3 years ago, the Wall Street journal covered a company trying to use AI to generate documents required for the approval of new nuclear reactor reactor designs, which sounds dangerous, until you get to the point where they'd cite 2 million pages as necessary for a typical application. [1] I don't need to explain why no individual or institution could read that, much less examine it in detail. I remember a rather funny question I found in a comment to that story - "How many pages of those 2 million could contain pornographic images before anyone notices?"

It's obvious why companies are so desperate for training data - a text generator of sufficient quality is more conductive to the growth of the nuclear industry than any scientific breakthrough in nuclear physics. (And of course, if you want to prevent the development of a nuclear reactor by your competitors, being able to produce millions of pages of high-quality objections will do the trick.)

And it's not just nuclear power. When it comes to stuff like building rail lines, apartments or power plants (both conventional and renewable), you'd find that the main bottleneck is the necessity to produce documents. And of course, many documents can be subject to judicial review - a process that consumes even more text.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-targets-nuclear-to-pow...