HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

infoseek12

362 karma · joined August 2, 2019

submissionscomments
infoseek12··on ArtCraft Apps – open-source Adobe compatible suite written in Rust
Bugs are ever present. And beta software should be treated with charity. But Photoshop, let alone the entire suite, is a beast. An effort, like this says it is, aiming for parity fundamentally misunderstands the reality of both the software they’re trying to replicate and the capability of AI assistance now and in the foreseeable suitable future
infoseek12··on Ed Zitron is mad as hell
He’s flogging a paid newsletter.
infoseek12··on Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
What surprises me is that they had the mini subs door open and bright lights on inside. This seems like surprisingly poor light discipline.
infoseek12··on The current state of LLM-driven development
There are kind of a lot of errors in this piece. For instance, the problem the author had with Gemini CLI running out of tokens in ten minutes is what happens when you don’t set up (a free) API key in your environment.
infoseek12··on Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model
That’s a complex encoding. I wonder if current models could decode it even given your explanation.
infoseek12··on Cursor IDE support hallucinates lockout policy, causes user cancellations
There is a time and a place for everything. Software development is often about compromise and often it isn’t feasible to work out a solution from foundational principles and a comprehensive understanding of the domain.

Many developers use libraries effectively without knowing every time consideration of O(n) comes into play.

Competently implemented, in the right context, LLMs can be an effective form of abstraction.

infoseek12··on The next time Wikipedia asks for a donation, ignore it (2022)
With a few prominent exceptions, the Wikipedia Foundation has been wise enough to enjoy the perks parasitism and not get in the way. However, their stated fundraising goal is amassing a large enough endowment that they can exist perpetually on it’s interest.

I sometimes worry if they ever achieve their goal they might not be wise enough not to kill the golden goose.

infoseek12··on ChatGPT Pro
This new plan really highlights the need for open models.

Individual users will be priced out of frontier models if this becomes a trend.

infoseek12··on IronCalc – Open-Source Spreadsheet Engine
There are lots of cases in businesses where there are integrations with other software that are difficult to port.
infoseek12··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2024)
Can you talk about what book you’re trying to digitize?
infoseek12··on Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week
It’s extraordinary!

Perhaps how quickly we become jaded should be taken as evidence of how quickly the world is changing right now.

When I looked at the examples they seemed like the kind of one off scripts, of limited complexity, that we’ve seen many times in the last year or so.

infoseek12··on Copying is the way design works (2020)
An interesting article about Asian perspectives on copying (https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just...)
infoseek12··on OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records show
That’s a rather idiosyncratic interpretation that doesn’t align with current views or legal structures in the Western world (look up ‘publicity rights’)

‘Ownership’ isn’t a property of the universe. It’s a value imposed by human society and philosophy. The physical reality you describe is true but irrelevant

infoseek12··on OpenVoice: Instant Voice Cloning
Writing and being a voice actor are two quite different skills. My experience with author narrated audiobooks is that there isn’t very much overlap.
infoseek12··on Mental health in software engineering
I think software engineering is just as complex as medicine, both endeavors try to utilize human cognitive ability to the maximum extent possible.

I do entirely agree about software engineering being a lot less stressful though.

infoseek12··on New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco
A cemetery would be a bad place for them as cemeteries tend to attract looters.
infoseek12··on Mass Retraction of unethical Chinese Forensic Genetics Papers
It will be interesting if a lot of research gets published in Chinese journals and not the West. If this happens I wonder if Western researchers will get their information from Chinese journals or lag a bit behind Chinese researchers on the answers to these questions.
infoseek12··on A Nigerian professor who makes more money welding
That’s awesome! Though, I think the headline underplays what he’s doing and done

Having a part-time job as a welder for a private company would be awesome and no doubt useful in a variety of ways. However, he’s not only helping his countries technical industry as an individual contributor, he’s also running a small business and educating quite a few future welders

Many public-private partnerships between academia and industry, that were far better resourced, have a accomplished far less

infoseek12··on Why Germany Is Rich but Germans Are Poor and Angry
I was in Germany a couple months ago. My experiences are entirely anecdotal but I’ve never seen so much anger before. I kept seeing fights and hearing angry yelling everywhere I went in Berlin.
infoseek12··on The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf]
Turtles all the way down
infoseek12··on A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages
It may be just about as unethical as someone discussing something they overheard in a crowd.
infoseek12··on Hot Take on Google's Gemini and GPT-4
It’s a very fast moving space and if OpenAI doesn’t keep sailing forward they’ll be dead in the water but I don’t think GPT-4 or GPT-5 is the end of the story. The deployment of the vision API and other iterative improvements are somewhat substantive.

In the end more competition is a good thing. I think we have a lot of reason to be optimistic about the progress being made.

infoseek12··on Gemini AI
> "we've been doing this ai stuff since you (other AI companies) were little babies"

Well in fairness he has a point, they are starting to look like a legacy tech company.

infoseek12··on How Nations Are Losing a Global Race to Tackle A.I.'S Harms
Probably after a couple more years. ARPANET accelerated progress but the idea of large interconnected networks is an obviously useful one and the technology to build was coming to maturity at that point in time.

In an ideal world I agree with you with you about effective governance, in the one we live in I’m not so sure.

infoseek12··on How Nations Are Losing a Global Race to Tackle A.I.'S Harms
The pace of technological change and the complexity of this technology contrasted with the ability and rapidity of politicized bureaucracies and the sovereignty of 100+ nations almost guarantees government regulation will lose.

This is a fact I think we should be glad of, despite an increasingly reflexive authoritarianism from outlets like the New York Times, I think most people would agree that innovations like the Internet would be much worse with a fraction of their potential if they had been subjected to regulation and governance before their formative period had passed.

Adaptation to have the power and nuance necessary must come organically not from top down fiat.

infoseek12··on Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
> Crazy you think that the company who invests the most in AI won’t retain any value in the transition to the space.

They’ll obviously retain some value. Google can integrate more easily and seamlessly with things people are using but that’s a competitive advantage not a moat.

Google’s trajectory has been from innovative market maker, to dominant market leader, to megacorp that has a strong established position that keeps them competitive and relevant, to legacy provider, to kind of irrelevant.

Google’s still strong and significant but every day they are less so.

infoseek12··on Former GitHub CEO Friedman and Scale AI CEO Wang Declined OpenAI CEO Role
And given the present turmoil they aren’t likely to remain in the position very long. Unless there are significant financial inducements, that vest without any tenure requirements, it’s hard to see an upside.
infoseek12··on OpenAI investors try to get Sam Altman back as CEO after sudden firing
Even if he isn’t critical to OpenAI’s future there is the issue of how the board handled this. They surprised everyone from their most significant investors to their employees, which would be justified if they have a very good reason. Without an excellent reason, all of this looks capricious and incompetent.
infoseek12··on Lockheed is now tracking phones and walkie-talkies from space
The linked article shows they’re not wholly immune. Some publicly available technologies can be quite powerful as Bellingcat demonstrates.

It’s certainly an asymmetrical field but, especially moving forward, I doubt it will be an entirely one-way street.

infoseek12··on Death by AI – a free Jackbox style party game. AI judges your plans to survive
I hope AI will end up being a bit less murderous
Page 1 of 4Next →