Hacker News Reader

peraon The Origins of Wokeness

You could argue that nationalism and traditionalist conservativism are predominantly performative within right-wing politics in the US - if this is not immediately evident then compare these ideas against the character and actions of those who get voted by the electorate.

peraon The Origins of Wokeness

Can you provide a few examples? I honestly don't remember anything this bad

peraon The Origins of Wokeness

Few things are as performative as venture capitalists aligning their politics with the upcoming government.

peraon Ask HN: Am I the only one here who can't stand HN's AI obsession?

The way I see it is that HN usually follows the VC money, and since there is a *lot* of money being invested on anything with the tag "AI" nowadays there is a lot of interest in the topic.

peraon AI Tools: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking

Papyrus had existed for at least a couple of thousands of years before Socrates so I'm not sure I understand your argument

peraon Scanning ultrasound removes amyloid-β, restores memory in Alzheimer mouse model (2015)

> Anti-amyloids are expensive, and insurance won’t always cover them

https://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/anti-amyloid-therapies-alzh...

> the key reason donanemab isn’t available through the NHS is its cost. The treatment is estimated to cost around £25,000 a year per patient

https://theconversation.com/alzheimers-drug-approved-in-the-...

peraon Zuckerberg Approved AI Training on Pirated Books, Filings Say

It depends who you are:

- if you are an individual then it's called "pirating copyrighted work"

- if you are a multi-billion dollar corporation then it's called "use of uncleared material for training"

peraon DuPont and “DuPont” connectors, and how to crimp them properly

Yeah crimping tools can be quite expensive... There is a long running, and still active, thread on the eevblog forum about affordable ones (mostly from AliExpress) you might find interesting:

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/affordable-crimp-tools...

peraon I was wrong about the ethics crisis

You'd be surprised: Next time a recruiter from some big tech corp sends you an e-mail try explaining why you don't want to join them.

peraon I was wrong about the ethics crisis

I agree. This is what I have been doing:

- Respond with a template explaining why I don't want to work for Google|Amazon|Meta|Microsoft|Apple

- Include information of some tech unions the recruiter could join and give reasons to do so

- Talk to colleagues about concerns and what can we do to mitigate current power imbalances

- Talk to family and friends about the industry, its impact on society, and provide help if they would like to try alternative technologies

peraon The number pi has an evil twin

What's more likely: (i) famous mathematician expressing his frustration regarding how his previous internet community is now full of Nazis, or (ii) famous mathematician casually saying Nazis suck so to be perceived as morally superior by some random readers?

To me the second option is an extremely bizarre take and I cannot imagine why anyone would even consider it.

peraon GPT-5 is behind schedule

It's scary to think that we are moving into this direction: I can see how in the next few years politicians and judges will use LLMs as neutral experts.

And all in the hand of a few big tech corporations...

peraon OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB

It's not clear to me whether AGI is necessary for solving most of the issues in the current generation of LLMs. It is possible you can get there by hacking together CoTs with automated theorem provers and bruteforcing your way to the solution or something like that.

But if it's not enough then maybe it might come as a second-order effect (e.g. reasoning machines having to bootstrap an AGI so then you can have a Waymo taxi driver who is also a Fields medalist)

peraon OpenAI O3 breakthrough high score on ARC-AGI-PUB

Maybe AGI as a goal is overvalued: If you have a machine that can, on average, perform symbolic reasoning better than humans, and at a lower cost, that's basically the end game, isn't it? You won capitalism.

peraon Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

It's alright that you like LLMs but you don't need to name-call ("luddites", "snowflakes") those who don't find them as useful as you do.

peraon Most iPhone owners see little to no value in Apple Intelligence so far

The data is in the linked survey: https://www.sellcell.com/blog/iphone-vs-samsung-ai-survey/

- 11.1% of iPhone's users felt the AI features were "very valuable"

- 5.9% of Samsung Galaxy's users felt the AI features were "very valuable"

peraon The case against Google's claims of "quantum supremacy"

> If I take the Willow announcement at face value (in particular, the QEC claims) [...]

Considering that Google's 2019 claim of quantum supremacy was, at the very least, severely overestimated (https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1910.09534) I would wait a little bit before making any decisions based on the Willow announcement.

peraon Itch.io Taken Down by Funko

Sorry you are right, somehow I'd missed that part

peraon Itch.io Taken Down by Funko

According to this no one has ever been prosecuted just for sending false DMCA takedown notices:

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-bee...

They do mention a case where the defendant acted in bad faith and was found liable for damages though.

peraon ExxonMobil's Alleged Hack-for-Hire Campaign Targeting Climate Activists

This is a more up-to-date article:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-lobbyist-inves...

peraon ChatGPT Pro

> A con like that wouldn't last very long.

The NFT market lasted for many years and was enormous.

Never underestimate the power of hype.

peraon How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

I agree and I think it's good that you pointed that out. Unfortunately the quality of nature.com articles is often quite bad.

peraon How close is AI to human-level intelligence?

You are probably thinking of Nature Communications. This article was posted on their more pop-science publishing site.

You aren't the first one mislead by the Nature brand btw - if you look into past submissions you will find similar comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nature.com

peraon UK: Proposed amendment to legal presumption about the reliability of computers

Software engineering culture is still in a very primitive phase: just take a look at the comments of the category theory submission currently in the front-page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42291141

Try suggesting to use a tool like TLA+ to validate some complex design and the most likely scenario is that people will laugh at you, even if it's a critical component for the business.

Most decisions in the industry are based on weak anecdotes and unfounded opinions of underserved "authorities".

peraon Core copyright violation moves ahead in The Intercept's lawsuit against OpenAI

A product from a company is not a person. An LLM is not a brain.

If you transcode a CD to mp3 and build a business around selling these files without the author's permission you'd be in big legal problems.

Tech products that "accidentally" reproduce materials without the owners' permission (e.g. someone uploading La La Land into YouTube) have processes to remove them by simply filling a form. Can you do that with ChatGPT?

peraon Core copyright violation moves ahead in The Intercept's lawsuit against OpenAI

> It's hard to see how they can argue with a straight face that it is accidental

It's another instance of "move fast, break things" (i.e. "keep your eyes shut while breaking the law at scale")

peraon Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers

I had a similar situation with Santander many years ago: it was a small amount and happened when I was closing my account, bank manager couldn't explain it and escalating the problem was a pain - especially because I was about to move to another country and had more urgent things to do.

I wonder how common issues like these are...

peraon OK, I can partly explain the LLM chess weirdness now

A chat conversation where every single move is written down and accessible at any time is not the same as blindfold chess.