HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

phasefactor

45 karma · joined July 18, 2025

submissionscomments
phasefactor··on Blindsight (Watts Novel)
And the authors blog/website is: https://www.rifters.com/crawl/
phasefactor··on The Claude Delusion
Professional tech Cassandra discovers ELIZA and Searle; coins a term for it. More at 10...

Seriously though, why did I just need to read that many words to get no really new content? We have known for decades that humans are predisposed to anthropomorphize chatbots, and questioning whether coherent linguistic output implies understanding (or intent) is equally old hat.

phasefactor··on I'm teaching an introductory 12 week course on Quantum Oracle Engineering
Very cool, will there be any recordings? Assuming it is being presented.
phasefactor··on MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
It can be both full of fluff and have actionable take aways.

This is dozens of pages long and reading it thoroughly will net you maybe a dozen useful sentences. That ratio is the problem people are complaining about.

phasefactor··on MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
I was not claiming they are not correct punctuation/syntax. My claim is just no one uses them that frequently... When you see dozens of them in the first few pages of a document it raises suspicion.
phasefactor··on MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
It is more about the document containing more than sixty of them. They are a completely legitimate piece of punctuation, but even prolific pre-LLM users did not tend to go that wild with them.
phasefactor··on MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
I guess prolific em-dashes is not considered a sign of LLM writing anymore.
phasefactor··on MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
"Be bold" by saying nothing of any interest. I have to agree that this is basically just fluff.

Anyone put it into pangram yet?

phasefactor··on AI companies are shredding rare books
Sometimes? But for scanning I can use a cheap worn copy as long as the pages are clean.

Most books I would rather have a digital copy. I had four or five book cases full of stuff and it makes moving difficult.

I originally started scanning 20 years ago when it was more difficult to find PDFs of basically whatever you want. Now it is only random old books I find at the used shop or online for cheap and somehow cannot get from archive.org or elsewhere.

phasefactor··on AI companies are shredding rare books
Correct, it was switching to unlimited lending instead of one lend per physical book that got them in trouble.
phasefactor··on AI companies are shredding rare books
Easier to send them through a duplex scanner (or put them in a flatbed one if they are fragile). Cheaper than buying the automated ones with the page turning robot arm.

I have done it at home for my books since the mid-00s.

phasefactor··on Recovering Eric Graham's 1987 Amiga Juggler raytracer source code
Creating the python extractor at all was sort of bizarre. The argument given was that it is too difficult for a developer to spin up a whole dev environment just to compile a tool, but the C extractor is a single C file that only depends on the C standard library and zlib.

This feels more like your mom likes to wash dishes by hand and you have a known good dishwasher that needs to be plugged in, but instead of plugging it in you build a new one that you tested a couple times and it seems to work but who knows? At least you saved yourself all the work of plugging in that other dishwasher?

Still a cool project to publish the source code, but the python port side quest seems pointless.

phasefactor··on Objective metrics that change the most as we age
The training kicks in and my knee-jerk reaction to not one of the graphs starting at zero is to discount the trustworthiness of the entire article, whether that is well deserved or not...
phasefactor··on IBM Quantum Computing Summer School Registration Open
Registration is now open for Qiskit Global Summer School 2026: A decade on the cloud—the latest entry in an annual, global program designed to help students, researchers, and developers build practical skills in quantum computing. The two-week event will run from 13–24 July 2026.
phasefactor··on LinkedIn profile visitor lists belong to the people, says Noyb
Love it, the article referring to a statement by a LinkedIn spokesperson: "The first part of that statement is false, as you can see from the screenshot above. Given the obvious untrustworthiness of that half of the statement, we didn't bother wasting any time trying to evaluate the second part."