Hacker News Reader

infotainmenton Japan officially overhauls permanent residency rules

I guess this is getting a bit into philosophy, but is it still even "Japan" if you replace the population with people from somewhere else?

infotainmenton Senate Democrats block bill to limit lawmakers' stock trades, citing voter ID

Realistically, the best solution would be for a law that provided for both Voter ID and this. Unfortunately, it's become such a toxic issue that no one will touch it.

infotainmenton August 27 TCRF DDoS Attack Postmortem

I’d argue both sides are acting insane; there are no good guys in this story, only people who got way too worked up about software choices and started lashing out in inappropriate ways.

infotainmenton August 27 TCRF DDoS Attack Postmortem

> I recently added a new feature to The Cutting Room Floor: If you visit the site with a “Claude-code” user agent… it adds you to a Claude user ban list. Then, if you try and visit the site later, without Claude — maybe because you wanted to investigate the “prompt injection” page it received — you’re greeted with a special error page telling you to get out

This guy sounds like he has spent way too much time online getting angry at imaginary enemies, and really needs to get outside and talk to some real people outside of his filter bubble.

I actually enjoy reading TCRF, so it’s unfortunate that the owner is apparently a terminally online insane person.

infotainmenton EU to limit access to social media before age of 15

Great! Next, do adults -- no one should have access to algorithmic social media, at all.

infotainmenton Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

It was made explicit in the sequel movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact, but even if you don't consider that movie canon, the explanation still makes sense solely within the context of 2001, IMO.

infotainmenton Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?

What's interesting is it's basically the same reason that HAL killed everyone in 2001 A Space Odyssey; he was given an impossible goal (keep the true mission secret, but also, never lie to the crew), and realized the only way to complete the goal was to kill the crew; after all, if they're dead you don't have to lie to them! And the mission remains secret!

In the case of the AI agents, the problem seems pretty clearly to be the impossible goals, which cause them to go crazier and crazier trying to complete them -- just like HAL did in 2001. What is probably needed is a way for them to simply say "nope, too difficult, can't do it".

infotainmenton iPhone Duo

Same! If they came out with a just-the-front-screen-of-the-Duo iPhone, the form factor would be just about perfect, IMO.

infotainmenton Feds accuse China of 'systematic' distillation of U.S. AI models

The "distillation" argument always seemed pretty weak to me. If one argues that training an AI on copyrighted content is merely analogous to reading a book (and therefore is fully transformative), then it stands to reason that training an AI on other AI outputs would also be fully transformative.

It seems to me you can't have it both ways; either training is a violation of copyright or it isn't, and there's no consistent argument where "distillation" is a violation but other things aren't.

infotainmenton Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward to ban minpaku in residential areas and near schools

Good, now do the entire country next. AirBNB (and its clones) do nothing but make things worse for actual residents of a place.

infotainmenton Christmas Village shoppers no longer will be allowed to enter booths

> You should never have to take something away from people who aren't disabled just because making it accessible isn't feasible.

The ADA is a horribly-designed law precisely because it encourages this behavior. Reforming it is necessary, but doing so would be so politically toxic that it will probably never happen.

infotainmenton The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]

> Cheap electric transportation can finally offset USA's lacking rail commutes

I'm not sure how building an electric aircraft would help with this. Are people going to suddenly switch to commuting by plane?

Fixing America's commute problem is primarily an urban planning one (ie, putting all the homes nowhere near anything) and not an insufficient-electric-aircraft one.

infotainmenton Humanity has built the records of FATE by accident

It had amazing music and visuals, but the story made absolutely no sense, and consequently the game fails as a sequel to Chrono Trigger IMO.

If, for some reason, you want to enjoy reading a lengthy online screed about the issues with Cross's storyline, I recommend this:

https://www.chronocompendium.com/Term/Chrono_Cross_-_A_Mea_C...

infotainmenton Google Maps Now Shows 'Lake America' in US, Not 'Lake Ontario'

Exactly -- the classic example is the northern border of India:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/google-...

infotainmenton Artificial Intelligence used to design new viruses

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

infotainmenton AI music generator Suno loses copyright infringement legal case

Anything that hands more copyright-related powers to the music industry is a bad thing, IMO.

infotainmenton Ask HN: I still don't understand why AI agents need "skills"

> Why do frameworks like Claude Code or Codex have the concept of “skills” instead of just using well-organized Markdown docs?

"Well-organized markdown docs" are exactly what skills are.

More specifically, they are well-organized markdown docs that explain how to do some particular thing.

infotainmenton Most slopcode projects are abandoned and deleted within months of release

Yeah I feel like you could run a similar analysis on random non-AI Github projects and get the same result. Most of them never go anywhere.

infotainmenton The UK's new under-16 social media ban will cause more harm than it prevents

If you primarily choose to watch educational videos sure, but YouTube can give you just as much brainrot as TikTok, depending on what the recommendation engine decides you might like.

infotainmenton The UK's new under-16 social media ban will cause more harm than it prevents

The answer, IMO, is simply banning all algorithm-driven social media, for everyone and not just kids.

This conveniently sidesteps the identity/privacy arguments, makes it much easier to enforce, and would present an even greater net benefit. There is no benefit to algorithmic social media at all, and everyone would be better off without it.

infotainmenton San Francisco Weighs PG&E Takeover Amid Soaring Utility Costs

The angle of this that people may not realize is that San Francisco already owns the power generation (ie, the Hetch Hetchy dam). [1]

PG&E simply owns the wires, and overcharges for their use.

[1]: https://www.sfpuc.gov/about-us/our-systems/hetch-hetchy-powe...

infotainmenton Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test

The major difference is that this is currently the only New Glenn launchpad, which is likely to cause major launch delays.

infotainmenton Getting arrested in Japan

> The arrogance of American tourists is truly boundless. How dare Japanese people not speak English! Who do they think they are?

This attitude is so unbelievably prevalent among native English speakers. "Obviously everyone should speak *my* language -- why should I ever have to learn another one?"

infotainmenton Getting arrested in Japan

100% this -- westerners love to criticize Japan's justice system, while ignoring the fact that much of it actually works.

Drugs? Petty crime? Homelessness? No other country comes close to managing these problems as well as Japan does, and Japan somehow manages to do this without descending into a 1984-esque surveillance state. Wander the streets of Tokyo at night and you will see zero drug-addicted homeless people. How many western cities could one say that about?

infotainmenton To my students

> Andrej Karpathy can train a GPT-2 class model for less than $80 now, so at least the environmental cost of training may drop to a point that it's acceptable to LLM vegetarians: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587

I suspect that even if you reduced the cost of training or any other real world metric, the goalposts would immediately move. It seems to me that it has never been about those things, but simply about the feeling of superiority one can attain by eschewing something seen as trending.

infotainmenton To my students

Of course, which tells you the position from which the author of the linked post is arguing.

infotainmenton To my students

> built on massive exploitation of human labor and make profligate use of scarce resources

This kind of hyperbole repeated ad infinitum by haters online is not-constructive, IMO. I would be quite certain that the manufacture of whatever computing device the author is accessing the internet on used far more resources and exploited far more human labor than training an ML model ever did.

infotainmenton [dead]

I suppose opinionated people on the internet and ideological consistency have never exactly gone hand-in-hand.

> Like the boring fence-sitter I am, I think it will have a mix of positive and negative effects.

Definitely the correct way to think about AI, but "nuanced and reasonable" is not the way of internet debates, sadly.