HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

kraf

330 karma · joined October 14, 2015

submissionscomments
kraf··on The LLMentalist Effect (2023)
I keep being confused about how people's understanding of the models get stuck at next token prediction. Isn't this entirely neglecting the RL training? I might be misunderstanding something but to my mind it makes the issue way fuzzier than it's being painted here.
kraf··on An Alien Mind
It'll learn how to not get caught lying.

Lying can unfortunately help you achieve goals very effectively, especially economical and political ones.

kraf··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
You can just as easily argue that markets caused all this. They don't incentivize the preservation of the planet or even life at all. There is no reason to believe that anything that comes out of markets organically is good, they don't converge towards worlds that have sound values. If they do in some instance then it's just by happenstance as in the solar example.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-liberta...

Also this seems to contradict your fossil fuel paragraph completely, the US is amongst the world's highest fossil fuel consumers per person: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels?fuel=total&m...

kraf··on The kids with phones are alright
I'm not familiar with what you're talking about. Can you share a real world example of a case like this? You're saying a social media comment about a crime is somehow punished harshly and much harsher than the crime itself?
kraf··on Cyberpunk Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels
I've noticed this as well and I'm rather concerned about it. Those cheap rip offs will ruin countless classics for her and it's really sad. I'm looking for the most boring stuff for her to watch just so she doesn't become fully jaded by age 18.

Side note: if you need new stories, I've found a lot of weird and fun stuff to read on Royal Road.

kraf··on EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0
> What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, [...]

I thought WhatsApp is removing e2e encryption. The article should replace the wrong example with something like Signal

kraf··on Grok 4.5
And it's all the same to you? You don't care which values those things have? Of course there will always be underlying values. I wouldn't go as far as calling everything political narratives.

I think it's just pretty clear that Elon's values are not what most people want the world to be shaped by.

kraf··on Apple's weird anti-nausea dots cured my car sickness
You may be wrong here and Apple seems to be the one copying the feature. Someone mentioned KineStop in this thread and that's been around since 2018.
kraf··on How to earn a billion dollars
I asked ChatGPT how many billionaires the US can have if every one of them has "just" 1 billion and if everyone else has basically nothing (i.e. zero net worth).

It said that the theoretical maximum is 174,000. In a country of 340 million.

That sounds to me like the chance to make it is a lot lower than 0.05%

Maybe we should just stop pretending that everyone can make it and that it's mostly people who already come about with vast amounts of luck (means = luck, opportunity = luck) who have even a chance to make it.

People with cool startup ideas cannot just make it. Working hard is not enough. Growth is not good enough. They will likely just be destroyed in an increasingly unfair and predatory market.

kraf··on If AI writes your code, why use Python?
That's what I'm thinking too. There is a lot of noise and I know teams where the majority of the people writing Python just have no idea what they're doing.

I'm working with Clojure which is used mostly by senior engineers and it still blows my mind how well Claude writes software in it even though it's a fringe language. It's even able to pick up in-house DSLs written with macros.

kraf··on Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable
They create toxic products that make the entire world more toxic. How they still manage to not have any responsibility while being editors and publishers is beyond me. I couldn't imagine how their insides wouldn't be toxic as well. Nice people don't do this.
kraf··on I Am Not A Number. In memory of the more than 72,000 Palestinians killed
Sources can be found here. I was actually surprised myself how damning this looks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_genocide

kraf··on SpaceX files to go public
But why did you invest on those grounds? Is profit not your goal here?
kraf··on System76 on Age Verification Laws
Comparing today's internet to the 90s is hardly fair. It has become extremely predatory, and most places youth gravitate towards are controlled by algorithms with the goal of getting them hooked on the platforms to make them available for manipulation by the platform's customers.

Of course, there will be stories of smart kids doing amazing things with access to vast troves of information, but the average story is much sadder.

The EU is working on a type of digital ID that an age-restricted platform would ask for, which only gives the platform the age information and no further PII.

Companies (not talking about system76) amazingly always find the shittyest interpretations of their obligations to make sure to destroy the regulations intention as much as they can. The cookie popups should have been an option in the browser asking the user whether they want to be tracked and platforms were meant to respect this flag. Not every site asking individually, not all this dark pattern annoyance. It's mind-blowing that that was tanked so hard.

kraf··on Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies
Love the headline and curious what the pope actually believes that brains do.
kraf··on I’m joining OpenAI
I usually don't notice these things but in the picture in the bottom it's almost exclusively white men.
kraf··on An AI agent published a hit piece on me
No it's not, an agent is an agent. You can use other people like tools too but they are still agents. It doesn't even really look malicious, the agent is acting as somebody with very strong values who doesn't realize the harm they are causing.
kraf··on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
This is not about stopping kids from communicating. The list of negative consequences of being on social media is long and real.

A government regulating something is also not authoritarian.

"Government bad" is not an argument by the way, and also not a given. It's just libertarian confusion.

kraf··on AirPods live translation blocked for EU users with EU Apple accounts
> who's to blame here

It's ok to wait longer for a product to make sure it's safe instead of the ol' "move fast and break things". Having ever new "interesting" stuff to play with to feed our endless boredom is not the only thing worth caring about.

kraf··on Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
Nah he's not. Stuff has been pretty stable, impressively so. Especially if you keep to certain hardware options which Apple users also accept.
kraf··on Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
It's been many years since I had my last driver issue. I find that impressive considering how many different platforms Linux has to run on.

Have you noticed how bad the Docker experience is on Macs though, after how many years?

kraf··on Google Brain founder says big tech is lying about AI danger
It's a race dynamic. Can you truly imagine any one of them stopping without the others agreeing? How would they tell that the others really have stopped. I think they do believe that it's dangerous what they're doing but that they would rather be the ones to build it than let somebody else get there first because who knows what they'll do.

It's all a matter of incentives and people can easily act recklessly given the right ones. They keep going because they just can't stop.

kraf··on Google Brain founder says big tech is lying about AI danger
I don't really see an argument made by Ng as to why they're not dangerous. I hardly ever see arguments, we're completely drowned in biases.

I know that he often said that we're very far away from building a superintelligence and this is the relevant question. This is what is dangerous, something that is playing every game of life like AlphaZero is playing Go after learning it for a day or so, namely better that any human ever could. Better than thousands of years of human culture around it with passed on insights and experience.

It's so weird, I'm scared shitless but at the same time I really want to see it happen in my lifetime hoping naively that it will be a nice one.

kraf··on Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
Do you think AIs are safe? I'd bet that if you would have a convincing argument that they are, then there wouldn't be a need for regulations. If you just assume that it can't possibly be that bad you should really read what the critics have to say. I don't see a way around regulations and I'm hoping that they'll get them right because a mistake here will likely cost us everything
kraf··on Sam Altman goes before US Congress to propose licenses for building AI
I like jobs too but what about the risks of AI? Some people I respect a lot are arguing - convincingly in my opinion - that this tech might just end human civilization. Should we roll the die on this?
kraf··on Why Lisp?
It has Go style concurrency, look for `core.async`. Maybe it could have been said that it wasn't lightweight enough and that would have been due to the JVM not providing the primitives but they're here now under the name "Virtual threads".
kraf··on Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?
I converted a few codebases from JS to TS and this takes a surprising amount of time. I won't put out estimates but it's definitely non trivial.

> I challenge you to provide a modern framework that doesn't provide types

Ruby on Rails

kraf··on Ask HN: Is TypeScript worth it?
Tests are great and the usual argument from static typing opponents is that they almost completely replace the regression safety from static typing.

Types are not the same as tests at all, tests are much better at giving you a glimpse of what the code even does.

For clarity, I'll define a static typing opponent as somebody who believes that the return on investment for static typing is negative.

kraf··on Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?
I should make a list but I don't keep one yet. I can tell you who comes to my mind off the top of my head

* Maryanne Wolf * Cal Newport * Jaron Lanier * Studies conducted by Facebook and brought to public attention by Frances Haugen

Not all are writing about kids specifically but rather humans in general. There are also plenty of psychotherapists specializing in internet addiction, you can look through some of their web pages to see what they are dealing with. I'm from a small European country, I'd recommend looking into local professionals.

It's true that there is a lot of hysteria and speculation and the grand experiment is still running. I admit I'm also biased by what I see in grown ups around me and by my own experiences. The apps and games our kids use are designed to make them addicted. And wasn't it in Irresistible by Adam Alter that managers of companies like Facebook and similar heavily regulate their kids screen times?

I'm not advocating for zero screen time. There are official recommendations from institutes of developed countries and I lean on those. I believe in limits on time and content and media education. They can also learn to deal with something dangerous slowly, they don't have to crash a thousand times.

kraf··on Ask HN: How do you protect your children from internet addiction?
I'm absolutely convinced that this is not the same internet now and that kids have to deal with a lot more challenges. Everything is actively built to be addictive and to fragment your attention. There are big players who don't want you off the internet. The content itself has also changed and there is a lot more false information that is indistinguishable from the "good"

You can't compare your own childhood to this, I don't think we even get it. You have to set limits both on time and content.

Page 1 of 3Next →