HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

l33tbro

3,458 karma · joined July 27, 2011

Total badass l33t h@xx0r pwning the n3wbs
submissionscomments
l33tbro··on The End of Creativity
"End of creativity". Nice bait.

If you're going to try to argue such a gargantuan point, perhaps don't lead with such a paltry example. Of course an AI video slideshow is going to be fairly indistinguishable from a human. It doesn't exactly take Ken Burns or Errol Morris to put together a decent montage. 'Brad & Kelsey tie the knot!' is going to look fairly identical, whoever cut it, because there are very limited parameters for human expression.

Heck, even my very dated Iphone generates decent sappy video sideshows from the image archive.

l33tbro··on The revenge of the philosophy majors
I'm not sure I agree with this. A senior academic is usually very familiar with the canon. You don't think you will be vaporised if there is no underlying logic and saliency to the arguments in the work you present?
l33tbro··on The revenge of the philosophy majors
Interested to hear how you think one "bluffs" their way through a philosophy degree. Could you sketch that out?
l33tbro··on DaVinci Resolve 21
It makes things more convenient for you. I'm not arguing against that. And, yes, you may have a satisfied client. But the work will not be as interesting, because you have not comprehended all of the ingested material. That is my only point. I'm not sure why this is so upsetting?
l33tbro··on DaVinci Resolve 21
So you are satisfied with work where you have not watched all of the material? Fine if that works for you, but I would not think I'd have done a good job.

If something has compiled some great selects for me, I only have material based on what is said. But I don't know how it is said - which to me is everything. Yes, this goes for podcasts too. What I make just won't be as good as if I'd have taken the time to go through everything.

I even notice this with things like NBA highlights. It's clear the editor (or bot) never watched the game. There were moments in it that are interesting and significant. Even small incidents that are actually clutch to the outcome of the match. But it is clear they've quickly compiled all of the goals and bashed out something mediocre which does not tell the story.

l33tbro··on DaVinci Resolve 21
"Taste and skill" is my exact point. If you are not watching everything you have captured, then what you make will most likely not be as interesting than if you had.

I think your mistake is to assume editing is like painting, where you can just make something brilliant with a few colours and a canvas. But editing is much more analogous to writing a book. If you have read extensively on Ancient Rome and spent time comprehending the subject, you will create something far more interesting than essentially remixing a few primer books and articles that have suggested to you by an LLM.

People have indeed "been creating amazing things with nothing" in the expressive arts, but that approach falls short when the value comes from communicating depth from narrative information.

l33tbro··on DaVinci Resolve 21
> wasted hours editing

Editing is a craft. You have to watch everything, otherwise you don't know what you have.

A machine organising stringouts and selects can work for interviews, but not for action. But even then it is only parsing your media for semantic intent. It misses the way things are said, which often imparts a different meaning.

You can use AI features for editing. But it is unlikely you will be making anything very intetesting.

l33tbro··on DaVinci Resolve 21
Just get Resolve. It is similar to what FCP was before Apple turned it into glorified iMovie. Only it is far more powerful than FCP 7 was back then.

Industry-standard NLE's like Premiere or Avid are probably the closest to Resolve. But even those are legacy programs that rest on their moats, whereas Resolve takes far more chances and does far less dumb shit than Adobe and Avid.

The seamless integration with industry-standard grading software is also... um mindblowing. Premiere has Lumetri and FCP has it'd colour correction tab, both of which are like MS Paint compared to Resolve's colour capabilities.

It's also free. The paid version unlocks mostly things to do with grading.

l33tbro··on Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait
The advancement of the Greater Israel project. US taxpayers directly and indirectly funding the regional expansion of a foreign state led by a genocidal maniac, which has no clear benefit to themselves.

Talk of the chaos and stupidity of Trump just obfuscates this grim political reality. Ie, focusing the narrative on political and operational incompetency misdirects the citizenry from the fact that money from their labor that could go to healthcare, education, and building community is diverted to an aggressive foreign entity.

l33tbro··on Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait
He is surrounded by very sharp people. They just happen to have undeclared dual allegiances to Israel. Who this war is helping achieving their regional objectives.

The chaos and stupidity narrative only mask and sustain the far grimmer reality of this operation.

l33tbro··on The Rise of the Bullshittery
Downvote the bots and morons aggressively. Our only salve.
l33tbro··on How the Turner twins are mythbusting modern technical apparel
It's utter LLM shite. You can always tell, amongst other things, by the clunky headings. Eg, "The Catalyst: A Broken Neck".
l33tbro··on Film students who can no longer sit through films
What's the "information density" of a Matisse ot a Pollock?

There's an enormous thematic subtext of surveillance state and paranoia running in the background of The Conversation that is "informationally dense", but if you've grown up mainlining Coco Melon and Tiktok shorts, that "information" is not available to you because you have poorly developed critical faculties.

l33tbro··on How will the miracle happen today?
Yes but the large language STEM salad of "marginal utility of a stranger's story" and the "P2P protocol of kindness" is surely more authoritative than your real world experience.
l33tbro··on Ask HN: Is it time for HN to implement a form of captcha?
A preliminary discussion is more efficacious than polling uniformed users.
l33tbro··on Tell HN: X is opening any tweet link in a webview whether you press it or not
> but one day they could suddenly start ranting about their own political opinions or crazy beliefs.

Why is this a problem? I don't mean to be confrontational here, but by this I mean: is it about them being "crazy", or us not being able to hold complexity and ambiguity? Politics has to emerge somewhere, and it's not like we have third spaces for these rants in our modern world (save for a few die-hards at your local town-hall meeting).

Also, I think cartoon politics is something that tends to emerge out of somebody's experience. Often it is armor. I think if you learn to not take them at face value, then it can really give you a quick insight (not always accurate) about what makes somebody tick.

l33tbro··on You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say
Are you arguing that seeing and recording someone are the same act?
l33tbro··on Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube
Yes, I feel these type of conspiracies were structurally similar, but of a slighly different composition to political conspiracy. But I think what changed is that political conspiracy became activated by the atomisation of culture and the lack of social consensus. As a result, these former examples (ufo, moonlanding, etc) now almost feel quaint and cartoonish, because they are relatively inconsequential compared to the choices people make and socially harmful actions they'll undertake with political conspiracy.

For a few reasons I personally find that the best medicine is just to nod along with these people and watch them give away their ideological hand:

a) You know where they stand and who you are dealing with.

b) They can, however rarely, be forced to actually confront the irrational logic when sharing it.

c) I think it is the compassionate thing to do, as people just often want to spout these theories as a much needed release valve. After all, people believe this stuff often because of a confusion or frustration they have with their own lives.

l33tbro··on Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube
True. I was being hyperbolic, but I hoped it was clear that I meant that flat-earthers are nowhere near the threat-level of something like a qanon or antivax movement, who are far more politically-activated, willing to take matters into their own hands, and likely to incite actual physical harm through ideological-driven behavior.
l33tbro··on Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube
Yes but a flat-earther is a useful idiot for precisely zero dangerous social movements. They are irrationally angry at nature, not the establishment.
l33tbro··on Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube
Yes. It has become mainstream. As soon as Kirk died, people were spouting antisemitic BS conspiracies that 'it was all Israel', even though he was the biggest shill of Israel's policies!

As you say, the medical conspiracies have really evolved since covid. I'm just glad we had covid when we did, because I feel that 5 years later people are so much more ignorant and less willing to all go through something together for the greater good.

With that said, I think the lot of conspiracy that just doesn't really hurt anyone but the believer. Aliens, moon landings, illuminati, etc. Kind of the modern day opiate of the masses.

l33tbro··on Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube
I totally agree about literacy being huge, and would actually extend it to going beyond literacy.

The literacy crash is alarming, and is no doubt agitating this situation in a major way. However, I think what we are experiencing is something like a kind of siloing of private realities. Not the pearl-clutching 'echo chamber' discourse from 2019. But an increasing lack of social competency amongst younger people that is disallowing them to be present others in the world itself.

This is why I still think it is a power problem. Government, however incompetent, still has the monopoly on control and policy. They have experts yelling at them everyday about these problems. But their answer does seem to be more censorship and surveillance, rather than addressing the causes of these problems. As I mentioned, this only exacerbates the problem and makes it more socially dangerous.

l33tbro··on Conspiracy content drives anti-establishment sentiment on TikTok, YouTube
All 5g gay frogs aside, this a power problem and not really a people problem. How many establishment institutions are left that citizens would wish to enthusiastically uphold? We have come to almost expect corruption and these days.

This isn't a justification for irrational conspiracy theory (which are generally harmless, yet occasionally highly catastrophic). It's that the establishment whack-em-all approach is not working, and is probably exacerbating their problem.

l33tbro··on Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music
Yes my attempt at humor. Which is always a bit risky on this forum :D
l33tbro··on Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music
So you are saying this is more effective than foraged mushrooms in a dark dorm room - paired with a Winamp visualizer using real-time DirectX plugins and shader-based graphics? Forgive me for being a bit skeptical
l33tbro··on AI is different
People migrated from the farms to the city. They didn't stop working.
l33tbro··on AI is different
Work is central to identity. It may seem like it is merely toil. You may even have a meaningless corporate job or be indentured. But work is the primary social mechanism that distributes status amongst communities.

A world of 99 percent of jobs being done by AGI (which there remains no convincing grounds for how this tech would ever be achieved) feels ungrounded in the reality of human experience. Dignity, rank, purpose etc are irreducible properties of a functional society, which work currently enables.

It's far more likely that we'll hit some kind of machine intelligence threshold before we see a massive social pushback. This may even be sooner than we think.

l33tbro··on The untold impact of cancellation
What if the girl above is crying and appears hurt because she has been mollycoddled, and this is a strategy to get attention?

Perhaps the parents had clocked-on to this, and were just letting the girl self-soothe so she could learn resillience. Then, on-cue, in steps some member of the public with their own opinion on the child they're trying to raise. This would be kind of tiring for the fatigued parent of a toddler, and the frustration of the parent in the above scenario is justifiable, particularly as encounters like this could happen multiple times daily with a child like that.

Now they could also just be a shitty parent. There's plenty of them. But it's difficult for us to judge and make hard rules in cases like this.

l33tbro··on Ask HN: Will AI models over time converge into the same system?
I'd guess no. While they have similar training data, there is plenty of novelty and unique data entering each model due to how each user is using it. This is why ideas like model collapse are fun in theory, but don't really play out due to the irregular ways LLMs are used in the real world.

I could be wrong, but I have not heard a convincing argument for what you propose.

l33tbro··on Radium Music Editor
> Information to warez groups: Since the source is open, it should be simple to turn the demo into a fully featured version. Please let me know of any problems.

Makes sense as their name suggests that they are affiliated with one of the original warez crews, Radium, who were around in the late 90s. Or that the name is an homage to Radium, who did a lot of massive releases that these developers may have grown up on.

Page 1 of 26Next →