Hacker News Reader

sterlindon Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

expansion?

sterlindon Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

I've noticed this too. it's always towns and sports teams. but I thought I was being paranoid..

at least Eternal September was a human invasion.

sterlindon Jensen Huang says AI distillation is 'competition.'

many, many websites have terms of service that forbid scraping. how many of those ended up in the training set, I wonder?

sterlindon How we learned to stop worrying and love campus surveillance

> No. The security cameras do not record audio. Massachusetts law prohibits recording audio without the knowledge of those being recorded. Additionally, we do not use facial recognition technology with our security cameras.

could you read lips with AI?

sterlindon Microsoft abandons personal AI chatbot race with Copilot reboot

could you give some examples?

sterlindon AI safety is mostly a sex cult

I loved HP as a kid; I loved HPMoR.

Harry is a sociopath in HPMoR. he's not the hero. he's a blatant Mary Sue for the author, the book is unapologetic Rationalist propaganda, and it features such improbable sentences as: "Harry glumly considered the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1956."

I find it side-splittingly hilarious to imagine an eleven-year old magic wizard boy hero acting like he does.

maybe my sense of humor is warped, but I find it hilarious. it's like the Satanic Verses of Harry Potter.

sterlindon Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space

you need a gradient from hot to cold to generate electricity. vacuum is a poor thermal conductor, so your cold part will become hot and then no more gradient.

(I guess you could try to capture the radiative photons via the photoelectric effect?? but I don't think it works.)

sterlindon Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space

why would they sell? because of ridiculously large the valuation is? like, I guess at SpaceX's valuation there's tremendous downside and little upside (x2 growth is unlikely when it's a third of the tech sector)

sterlindon Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

many drugs were discovered, evaluated and approved without understanding at all how they worked.

iirc back in the day chemists synthesized a whole bunch of random compounds, observed their effects (in mice etc., or even the chemists tasting them!) then did clinical trials to measure safety and efficacy.

high-throughput screening of chemical libraries on in vitro assays is the modern version of this. "rational" drug design, which uses understanding of mechanisms to design chemical structures for a specific purpose, largely failed back in the '80s.

sterlindon Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

cobblers used to make and mend shoes before shoe factories existed..

sterlindon Linux Zoom client proactively reading everything written to X11 clipboard

What's it like using Qubes? How much friction? I wish I could use some Nix-flavored variant of the sandboxing.

sterlindon GrapheneOS' rewritten Messages app is released

What's so difficult about implementing RCS from a technical perspective?

sterlindon AI 2027 (2025)

The US/China divide is one thing, but if I'm asked whether I trust OpenAI or Deepseek, as companies, more, I'm not sure how I'd answer. I suppose my default is to distrust whoever is in the lead, since the lead is power, and power corrupts.

sterlindon Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?

The code generated by AI is often not maintainable by AI. It's mostly trained on one-shot tasks still, not on growing a small system into a large one. AI is not immune to tech debt.

sterlindon Don't Get in a Crash in a Cybercab

Do first responders read these guides on the scene? Or do fire departments study them when a new one is released? Seems like a lot to study ahead of time, seems like a lot to read when lives are on the line.

sterlindon Cognition launches new SWE-2 model, Rivaling Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra

I'm surprised they can post-train a closed model off of K3. Is that the norm for open-weight licenses?

sterlindon Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions

There's plenty of legal gray-hat companies that will buy a bug. Zerodium is a good example though it no longer exists. These companies in turn sell to NSA, etc. maybe even foreign governments for all I know. There's very little regulation of the space iirc.

I had a friend that worked in the space. He lived an exciting life; I hope he's still alive..

sterlindon Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1

It's like a form of magical realism. AI feels like straight up magic, like discovering a genie that grants wishes, but we all have bills to pay and projects to do so weeks later there's a magic lantern on every desk and the genie's doing grandma's taxes and wishing he'd stayed in the bottle.

sterlindon Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

DMCA seems like an ideal place to have the winner pay all parties' attorney's fees, plus damages. It's usually pretty objective and easy to see whether something infringes.

sterlindon Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

This is the reason anti-SLAPP statutes exist in many jurisdictions.

sterlindon EPA says power for data centers can sidestep pollution laws

Hoggish Greedly if memory serves. Regardless of one's politics Captain Planet is so campy it's fun to watch MST3K-style. Remember Linka from the Soviet Union? "Imperialist pigs!"

sterlindon Guillotine found near US Capitol, California man arrested

I can't tell, is there a blade attached? Seems like this was a prop rather than a working guillotine.

sterlindon uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

alternatively, keep using ad blockers.

Facebook may have won this round, but AI tilts the balance overwhelming in favor of ad blockers.

consider: you can (in principle) scrape the entire screen, find the ads with machine vision and paste black rectangles over them. or simply have an AI use playwright to scrape the page and rerender it for you. these are excellent, pro-user use cases for AI.

sterlindon Woman pulled over twice after Flock-linked software connected her to homicide

> Everybody says Trump should be impeached, nobody says the office of the president should be deprived of the powers Trump used to do the things he should be impeached for.

I've been shouting this from the mountaintops.

sterlindon England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C

interesting. so if you get a bacterial infection, you plan to succumb to it rather than take antibiotics?

sterlindon Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

also, you can do a lot to finetune or repurpose an open weight model. much more easily than you can mod closed source binaries.

sterlindon Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

llama was only three years ago? holy smokes! the industry is advancing so fast.

sterlindon Datalog Disassembly

ooh souffle! wonder how they avoid saturation explosion. that's doomed my souffle projects in the past. but obviously they've found a way to partition (maybe by block?)

sterlindon Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop

seems like:

- cop messed up, added an incomplete license plate number (34DTM) into the NCIC database.

- Flock cameras found his fancy car, a $155k Range Rover, which had a license plate like 34DTM10, and flagged it.

- cops didn't bother checking the police report before they went in and surrounded him.

thoughts:

- as much as I dislike Flock, it seems like it wasn't at fault here. this was a scene straight of Brazil, and Flock was the typewriter. it was an accelerant, not the cause.

- police are shockingly incompetent. the individual officers, the departments, the bureaucratic systems, they're bad at their jobs. probably because they're insulated from consequences - these are people who can shoot the wrong person by accident, and at worst they get fired (QI.)

- none of this would have made the news if it wasn't a $155k Range Rover being driven by a reporter. how many people in beat-up Carollas have faced this same situation?

sterlindon Microsoft raises Xbox prices by up to 43%

bizarrely self-destructive behavior from XBox. they've been shooting themselves in the foot for years; apparently they've decided to exchange the gun for a flamethrower in hopes of cauterizing the stump.