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io84

198 karma · joined February 4, 2015

https://lui.ie
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io84··on A warning about 'model welfare'
I’m sympathetic to OP but think this is a hopeless battle.

1 - The commercial demand for anthropomorphised models is already immense, pre AGI.

2 - There is an intellectual hunger to engage with robot minds on questions of sentience. This too will grow with AGI.

I expect that tension of godlike minds that seem to be biddable and ownable like slaves is going to leak back into human-to-human morality, regardless of where we land on how we treat AI.

There’s an interesting academic group in the UK already focused on the model welfare debate, they seem to lean in favour of AI rights. No affiliation: https://www.prism-global.com/

io84··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
Simple recommendation app that asks 10+ AI models for the top options for whatever you’re looking for, and it pools the results to give you the overall top three:

https://top3.best/

I mainly built it to explore which areas have model consensus and which have diversity of opinion.

io84··on Trezor's email provider has been breached
Their devices have never been [known to be] remotely breached, but still…

2022: Their Mailchimp account breached

2024: Their support ticket portal breached

2025: Support contact form sent phishing via official auto-replies

Aug 2026: Shipping partner ShipMonk breached

Sep 2026: Email provider breached

Anything Trezor knows about you should be considered thoroughly compromised.

io84··on Health benefits of Tai Chi
Yes, all of the links seem to go through to shopping funnels, even to get a PDF. I’m not seeing any freely downloadable resources. This is basically just an ad.
io84··on The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons
A new and growing fear I have is that AI cuts off some of the most well-trodden pathways to intellectual growth. Every time the AI solves a problem that I would not have been able to efficiently solve alone, it has replaced an interaction that previously would have happened with a mentor/supervisor/code reviewer. This is faster for the person seeking the micro-assistance, but there is a flipside: fewer human-to-human acts of mentorship and shared problem solving. We lose a lively ingredient of team formation, expert formation, and a source of joy for all involved. As this scales up it feels plausible that we end up with a wider deagradation of intellectual standards. I like the Cognitive Comons framing.
io84··on I moved my digital stack to Europe
The very same - he writes about that elsewhere on the site.
io84··on Complete silence is always hallucinated as "ترجمة نانسي قنقر" in Arabic
"In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes" _in a microniche techno-linguistic community, at a time and choosing of the swirling AI clouds_
io84··on Build Your Own Color Search Engine
How to create a semantic search engine for colors (or anything else) using Supabase and an embedding provider such as OpenAI or Mistral
io84··on Build and Host AI-Powered Apps with Claude – No Deployment Needed
"You need a Claude account to use this artifact"

This could be a phenomenal growth loop for Anthropic.

io84··on Models.dev
The Model Id column alone makes this a useful resource for me, thank you!

Every time I need to enter a model id into code I am amazed at how hard it is to find something so simple and important on the providers' websites.

io84··on Yes I Will Read Ulysses Yes
I had a few tries at Ulysses in my 20s and always abandoned it.

I tried it again aged 38 and I found it flowed much more easily. The protagonist Leopold Bloom, who I remembered as an old man from earlier attempts, was relatable. It turns out Bloom is exactly 38.

I find side notes too disruptive when reading so my crutch for the middle was to skim a short chapter summary before a starting each new chapter. This let me enjoy the dreamlike qualities of the text without needing to catch every reference.

io84··on The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over
I wonder if that’s a dictation artefact
io84··on Google aims to reinvent email with Wave (2009)
I have very fond memories of Wave. My non-tech friend group embraced it as our primary communication platform for a brief period and it hosted a frenzied chaotic fun that was only matched over a decade later by the tech exuberance of AI image gen and LLMs.
io84··on LinkedIn is the best social media site
Nice writeup. I've seen that if I take a post of mine that was successful on another platform and repost it to X it's met with crickets.

My theory is X is now more dominated by in-groups and LinkedIn is broader, more sprawling networks.

io84··on Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination
You're capturing nicely how the relationship with the farmer is an essential part of the "product" you buy when you buy high-end organic. I think that will continue to be true in culture/info markets.
io84··on Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination
Interesting...thinking this through: For text and ideas the information size is often small enough to fit in human memory, and thus containing this is already unsolvable! I can ask the LLM to compose the text of a pitch and then film myself writing it out. Nothing you can do will prove the provenance of those bits was not from the AI.

So I think the premium product becomes in-person interaction, where the buyer is present for the genesis of the content (e.g. in dialogue).

Image/video/music might have more scalable forms of organic "product". E.g. a high-trust chain of custody from recording device to screen.

io84··on Low-background Steel: content without AI contamination
Just like with food: there will be a market value in content that is entirely “organic” (or in some languages “biological”). I.e. written, drawn, composed, edited, and curated by humans.

Just like with food: defining the boundaries of what’s allowed will be a nightmare, it will be impossible to prove content is organic, certifying it will be based entirely on networks of trust, it will be utterly contaminated by the thing it professes to be clean of, and it may even be demonstrably worse while still commanding a higher price point.

io84··on Ask HN: What API or software are people using for transcription?
Cheap hack I use for transcribing in-person customer sessions:

1. record the audio on your phone audio recorder

2. send the mp3 to yourself in Slack

3. a few minutes later the transcription will appear on Slack

I then feed that to an LLM for summary and actions. Quality has been great for this workflow, all in English.

io84··on What are people doing? Live-ish estimates based on global population dynamics
Great execution. Interesting to think about the peaks and troughs of global activity.

The Sleep numbers make a big claim: Right after Europe and West Africa have woken up (i.e. now) it says only 350 million people (4.25%) are sleeping. It's 01:08 in Anchorage and 06:08 in Recife. Over 1 billion people live in the Americas between these two time zones. Seems implausible that only a third of them are sleeping?

io84··on Is-even-ai – Check if a number is even using the power of AI
Kudos to the open source contributors but honestly this is the kind of area where the big commercial players need to step up and help with the heavy lifting.
io84··on Burning Mao
I think the point is that Mao is in a very small club of individuals deemed responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Che is small fry in comparison.
io84··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)
Great name!
io84··on Show HN: I made a tool for finding memorable, available domains
Great, messaged. Looking forward to chatting!
io84··on Show HN: I made a tool for finding memorable, available domains
Thanks for the anon comments that came in via the feedback form! I'm guessing they came from here.

I've deployed two of the suggestions:

1. don’t show unavailable (now hidden behind a button at end of list)

2. be able to specify which tlds are included

These changes are now live. The other suggestions around advanced options will take a bit more time/consideration.

io84··on Show HN: I made a tool for finding memorable, available domains
Awesome I'd love that! Let's chat - I'm yablochko on both bluesky and twitter if you want to dm me on one of those.
io84··on Ask HN: How to track inputs from other people
If I have an active thread in Gmail and I'm waiting on a response I find it useful to snooze the thread so it reappears in my inbox either with a response or after the snooze time has elapsed.
io84··on Reports of widespread power cuts in Spain and Portugal
Source?
io84··on Icônes
Great resource.

Has anyone come across a semantic search to navigate these icon libraries? I want to be able to search for “Industry” and get icons returned that show factory, cogs etc. I’ve been using https://react-icons.github.io/react-icons but the same problem there, you search for a string and it just greps across the official icon name. If you don’t know the name you’re not going to find it.

io84··on Show HN: I built Libris.fm – 10000+ free, human-narrated audiobooks
Congrats on the launch.

I’ve long the thought “the LibriVox app” wasn’t living up to it’s potential and was then disappointed to learn that it’s not an official app at all, just a private company burying free content in ads.

io84··on Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic
Congrats on shipping and selling!

Countering some recurring feedback here: I find the design decisions you’ve made strike a good balance between simplicity and inviting the player in to find their way round. I’m viewing on mobile.

- I can’t easily parse a top-level clue structure but the lack of colours keeps it neat - Guess history would have been useful but omitting it keeps each guess low stakes for a first time user - The keyboard is fine, don’t let the unicode universe in for an ascii input field

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