Hacker News Reader

jasonlfunkon Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001)

The verb seems pretty important to me…

————- Learn more about [the browser]

Never hear about [the browser] again

Those links will do very different things.

jasonlfunkon Satellite will have to be turned off when it floats over the US

Why does the title only mention the US? It can’t do it over Europe either.

jasonlfunkon Oxygen atoms discovered in most distant known galaxy

I’m always a bit skeptical about these sorts of things. Perhaps I’m just ignorant about the methods used.. but the amount of data we can get from the most distant known galaxy can’t be very much. How confident can we be that the shift in observed light or whatever is actually from the presence of Oxygen and not one of probably countless other causes, both known and unknown.

jasonlfunkon Google Maps Will Rename Gulf of Mexico as Gulf of America in US

This is exactly right. I'm not sure who should get to decide what the name of the gulf should be, but it shouldn't be Google.

jasonlfunkon Bill requiring US agencies to share source code with each other becomes law

It’s hard to know what they hope to accomplish with this bill. Anytime you develop custom code, it’s because you need something, well, custom.

What are the chances that something custom built for one agency is going to be at all useful to the custom needs of another agency?

jasonlfunkon UK bans daytime TV ads for cereals, muffins and burgers

I just hope that the US can ban ads for pharmaceuticals.

jasonlfunkon OpenAI threatens to revoke o1 access for asking it about its chain of thought

This is 100% a factor. The internet has some pretty dark and nasty corners; therefore so does the model. Seeing it unfiltered would be a PR nightmare for OpenAI.

jasonlfunkon OpenAI Pleads It Can't Make Money Without Using Copyrighted Materials for Free

Can someone help me understand why it's a problem for companies to train these huge LLM on your copyrighted material? What exactly is the harm that is being done to the copyright holder?

I can understand why the New York Times (for example) wants to claim that a couple billion dollar companies have done it actual harm; but I am struggling to actually identify what it is.

jasonlfunkon Denmark to charge $100 per cow in first carbon tax on farming

Whether or not this will reduce CO2 is yet to be seen. But it will almost certainly raise the price of beef and dairy products. Taxes on producers inevitably get passed on to consumers.

jasonlfunkon Detecting hallucinations in large language models using semantic entropy

Isn’t it true that the only thing that LLM’s do is “hallucinate”?

The only way to know if it did “hallucinate” is to already know the correct answer. If you can make a system that knows when an answer is right or not, you no longer need the LLM!

jasonlfunkon Does anyone need a 1k Hz gaming display?

Certainly there is an upper limit to what our eyes/brains can perceive. I don’t know what it is, but I’d imagine 1 kHz is getting close.

jasonlfunkon Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human brain

The author did not commit a logical fallacy. They referenced some people worth reading if you wanted some various opinions on a controversial subject.

jasonlfunkon Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS

https://twitter.com/aarongraves/status/1765441652120834112

Apple’s justification isn’t too unreasonable.

jasonlfunkon Stephen Fry Warns About the Dangers of Voice Clones

I think we should less worried about people believing deep-fakes are real and more worried that politicians (and others) will be able to claim things which they actually said are deep fakes.

jasonlfunkon How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

I think the important part of the technique is talking about what you see, not the actual act of seeing things. He talks about creating brain pathways between the visual and linguistic parts of your brain.

It’s those new pathways that are the key.

jasonlfunkon Leaked screenshot shows Amazon now tracking individual employee attendance

Sure, but "were they in the office" is /much/ easier to measure at scale. And I'm sure you'd throw a pretty big fit if your pay was docked because the company didn't think you did a good enough job, even though you were in the office.

jasonlfunkon Apple clarifies why it abandoned plan to detect CSAM in iCloud photos

And it would only notify someone for human review if a certain threshold was reached; just having one or two violating images would have tripped the system.

jasonlfunkon Magic Earth: OSM based map and routing with crowd sourced traffic data

My iphone is telling me that it’s not available in my region (USA).

jasonlfunkon Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

When does a thief become a whistleblower?

It seems to me that something really dangerous or illegal needs to be going on to morally justify publicly releasing a 100GB worth of (presumably unfiltered) private company data.

jasonlfunkon Show HN: Freenet 2023, a drop-in decentralized replacement for the web

I guess I’m confused. I thought the web was already decentralized. Of course individual websites aren’t, but the web itself certainly is.

jasonlfunkon A token-smuggling jailbreak for ChatGPT-4

Is there a reason not to have another “unbroken” chat instance check the output for violations? It seems like a simple “does the following response violate your rules?” would stop most of these “jailbreaks”.

jasonlfunkon Zoom lays off 15% of employees

On a side note.... "Zoomies", really?

jasonlfunkon Musk’s $5.7B Mystery Gift Went to His Own Charity

Instead of giving directly to charities like St. Judes - he funds his foundation which gives to charities like St. Judes. When you give away $5B, wouldn't it be irresponsible to not give it to a foundation? And if you have your own foundation, wouldn't it be dumb to not give it to your own foundation? This seems like a nothing story; except that it's in vogue to hate Musk right now.

jasonlfunkon Hey, GitHub – Waiting list signup

I probably wouldn’t use this to write code, but I could see it being really useful for navigating around a project.

“Go to line 35” “Open the model controller” “Show the get method and set method side by side”

jasonlfunkon DALL·E 2 vs. $10 Fiverr Commissions

I think the point was that it wasn’t a made up experiment. It was a real world problem.

For all the hype around these systems currently, it’s nice to see some places where it doesn’t work.

jasonlfunkon How to stay focused while working on your startup and having a 9 to 5

> Yeah, also what's wrong with making a product first, marketing it, and seeing if it sells? No need for this landing-page-with-fake-pre-orders lying to your customers overhead.

The overhead of actually building the product is WAY more than just making a landing page.

Plus, knowing that there are people who are willing to give you money for a thing is very motivating.

Also, having pre-customers while you are building is a great way to know which parts of the product to focus on. The features you think are important may not be what your customers think.

Certainly there is a range of approaches in between vaporware and building in secret. But if you actually want to make money, you should start selling as soon as possible, even before it’s ready.

jasonlfunkon Forget the hype, “thinking machines” can’t replace humans

> because we don’t have one yet

Part of the problem is that at this point we have no way of ever knowing if something is conscious or not. We assume that other humans are because they look like me, act like me, and are made of the same stuff; and I know that I am. But all I really have is your word that you are. Will that be enough from a computer? I can write a program right now that says it’s conscious, but it wouldn’t be. So how can we ever know?

jasonlfunkon The Singularity has already happened

As long as you redefine what is meant by “The Singularity”…

jasonlfunkon Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade

This is the very core of the disagreement. Pro-life people do not agree that it’s comparable to an appendectomy.