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skwirl

2,401 karma · joined March 28, 2013

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skwirl··on DraftKings Is Using AI to Behaviorally Target Chronic Gamblers
This is out of date. They didn’t like to be referred to as gambling companies when it was just daily fantasy sports. There was legitimate debate as to how much of daily fantasy sports was skill and that mattered to its legality in many states. There’s no debate over whether sportsbook betting is gambling.
skwirl··on FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses
This was something I fully realized when I got married. Where is the official record that we are married? It’s a piece of paper in a filing cabinet in a small town two states away. Unless I provide a copy of my license, there is no way for anyone to see for sure if I’m married except to go to every jurisdiction nationally and see if they have a marriage license that matches my info. You could try to infer it from something like tax returns, but the IRS has never actually validated that I’m married. They just take my word for it unless they have a reason to be suspicious.

If one or both of the two who just got married wants to change their name? The process is downright bizarre. There is no central name database you go update. You just send off forms to a bunch of places saying “this is my name now,” some with a copy of your marriage license.

Very strange system IMO.

skwirl··on OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI
Oracle also has a vested interest in defending an expansive view of intellectual property rights. They lean very heavily on litigation as part of their business model and will want to reserve the right to sue anyone generating software that competes with theirs when the model may have been trained on anything they hold the copyright to.

If they held here that it is OK to use LLM generated code for OpenJDK it could kill these cases later as they will have established that they believe it is fair use.

skwirl··on Apple Will 'Watch Everything Burn' When the AI Bubble Bursts
The vast majority of what I see out there is relentlessly negative about AI. It is kind of absurd to call this the "alternative" unless the implication is that the rest of AI skeptical writing is not "well-argued."
skwirl··on AI is a bad tool
> The real question is, who can verify that what the AI built is good and true? Recently, there's a lot of talk about AI allegedly finding security flaws in software. That is an unsubstantiated claim. As such, it would need to be verified by a non-machine, and arguably, the verification process would require the same amount of effort or more than would be required to find the issue to begin with.

Came for the bad AI take, stayed for the P=NP claim.

skwirl··on Dopamine Fracking
It is crazy to me that any parent of young children would let their kids watch YouTube videos on their own. Maybe this happened gradually enough that some parents didn't notice, but we had our first kid a couple years ago and I nope'd out of YouTube pretty quickly when I saw what was there. Even the channels known for being good - which we occasionally let the kids watch as long as we were present and choosing the videos - started to clearly optimize for engagement over quality, and so now we're done with it entirely. The stuff there for "kids" legitimately horrifies me.
skwirl··on Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
You have joined a year and a half ago, have low activity, and 74 karma.

OP has been here for over a decade and has loads of activity.

You aren't in a position to post this.

skwirl··on AI uses less water than the public thinks
This is even more misleading. You have to eat to live, but absolutely not all water usage for food is mandatory.

If you gave me a budget of how much water I could "use" water every year, and I was close to going over, I could easily pay for my annual AI use just by changing what I eat for lunch on a day or two. I could pay for years of AI use just by forgoing buying a new pair of jeans.

The water argument has always felt so intellectually dishonest to me because it's never approached from the perspective of "hey, we're using too much water, how can we conserve it?" If we approached it from that perspective, reducing AI usage would not even crack the the top 100 list of things we would do. But that's not the goal of the water argument, because it quite obviously actually has nothing to do with water.

skwirl··on "People who don't use AI will be left behind"
This is a HN comment reply masquerading as a novel submission.
skwirl··on Goodbye to Sora
It is wild that people are still posting this kind of thing in 2026. Some folks really are living in a different world.
skwirl··on Layoffs at Block
We’re reaching “Don’t Look Up” levels of denial about the impact of AI on this site.
skwirl··on It's 2026, Just Use Postgres
This thread is a great discussion and I have kept coming back to it over the last couple days to read more of it when I have a chance. I’m kind of disappointed that it artificially ended. I think at some useful comment threshold level you just have to let it go.
skwirl··on I know you didn't write this
>But it shouldn't matter if he gave 5 bullets to Chat gpt that expanded it to a full page with a detailed plan.

The coworker should just give me the five bullet points they put into ChatGPT. I can trivially dump it into ChatGPT or any other LLM myself to turn it into a "plan."

skwirl··on Everyone in Seattle hates AI
On this topic I think it’s pretty off base to call HN a “well insulated bubble” - AI skepticism and outright hate is pretty common here and AI negative comments often get a lot of support. This thread itself offers plenty of examples.
skwirl··on Apple revokes EU distribution rights for an app on the Alt Store
Surely we all know that when we post or upvote comments like this that we are being incredibly disingenuous.
skwirl··on Enlisting in the Fight Against Link Rot
The database is being reverse engineered and published anyways, as per the article.
skwirl··on Enlisting in the Fight Against Link Rot
They are useful for putting URLs in print materials like books. Useful for sharing very long links in IRC and some other text based chat apps (many google maps links would span multiple IRC lines if not shortened, for example). They are good for making more easily scannable QR codes.
skwirl··on Dotfiles feel too personal to share
Not when everyone logs in as ec2-user.
skwirl··on Nintendo Switch 2 account bans continue: warning after buying old copy of Bayo 3
So not being able to download any of the games you have purchased ever again?
skwirl··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
The major difference is that in the type of reading Joel Splosky is talking about, you are coming in not knowing the code's intent. It was written by one or more other people at some point in the past, likely with many iterative changes over a period of time. Figuring out the intent in this case is 90%+ of the work. With LLM generated code, you know the intent. You just told the assistant exactly what your intent was. It's much, much easier to read code that you already know the intent of.
skwirl··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
Again, implicit in this comment is the belief that I am out to or need to convince you of something. You would be the only person who would benefit from that. I don’t gain anything from it. All I get out of this is having insulting comments about my “skill level” posted by someone who knows nothing about me.
skwirl··on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts
It doesn’t really matter what this or that person said six months ago or what they are saying today. This morning I used cursor to write something in under an hour that previously would have taken me a couple of days. That is what matters to me. I gain nothing from posting about my experience here. I’ve got nothing to sell and nothing to prove.

You write like this is some grand debate you are engaging in and trying to win. But to people on what you see as the other side, there is no debate. The debate is over.

You drag your feet at your own peril.

skwirl··on "AI-first" is the new Return To Office
Do you just mean within Amazon? Because outside of Amazon, there was major resistance to AWS/cloud computing in general from older devs highly invested in the status quo. I have spent a significant amount of effort in my career fighting for cloud adoption.
skwirl··on The AI magic behind Sphere's upcoming 'The Wizard of Oz' experience
[flagged]
skwirl··on DeepMind program finds diamonds in Minecraft without being taught
>This was given to the AI by having it watch a video that explains it.

That is not what the article says. It says that was separate, previous research.

skwirl··on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT's false claim that he murdered his kids
Nobody has any idea if they broke any EU laws until regulatory agencies and courts arbitrarily interpret the laws based on their political views pertaining to the companies in question. These are agencies that will suddenly have a new interpretation of a law after more than a decade and go after companies retroactively for something they had previously been fine with. It’s essentially a dolled up version of tariffs.

I strongly suspect the EU will not find that companies must retrain models in response to GDPR requests because 1. It would destroy Mistral, one of the few beacons of hope in EU tech and 2. It would put Europeans and European companies at huge disadvantages in not being able to use these tools.

As an American software engineer I would only benefit from Europe banning these products as it would put a large segment of the low cost labor force at a huge disadvantage relative to me, so I am not really bothered by the possibility of them doing it. It would be a very interesting experiment.

skwirl··on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT's false claim that he murdered his kids
It would mean no LLM-based AI chat products in Europe for the foreseeable future. So the cost to the companies would be net revenue in Europe and the cost to Europeans would be inability to use these products.
skwirl··on New York Times shut down Tor Onion service
If you went back to 2004 and told people the NYT was trying to help re-elect George W Bush they would nervously back away slowly from you.
skwirl··on Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it
> Also, Hans Albert Einstein was born during Einstein's miracle year.

This was in an era when fathers had little to do with childcare. I don’t know about Einstein’s specific situation, but even 40 years ago almost half of fathers had never changed a diaper.

skwirl··on Show HN: My party game where AI decides if you’re funny
If you aren’t interested in the post, what compelled you to click into the comments and tell everyone about it instead of just ignoring it?
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