HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

svnt

3,427 karma · joined January 23, 2021

submissionscomments
svnt··on The room the economy can't see
The one they claim is in their voice [1] has zero of the tells I am referring to. You can compare and contrast it with your fully/generated reference 0 (although that is fable and I have little experience reading its writing it seems to use many similar comventions) and the title piece and see what I mean.

[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/07/labor-is-a-market-distor...

svnt··on The room the economy can't see
Parts of it seem not to be, but the bulk of it is. Here is a particularly clear example of opus-4.8-speak.

> Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it would be very easy to start waving my arms around. Every single one of these has many causes. Suburbs and cars. Television, and then phones. A long list of things that have nothing to do with me at all. I am not going to claim I have found the one secret root of loneliness, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. We cannot cleanly untangle these. That is just honestly true.

svnt··on The room the economy can't see
It is mostly written by llm. “narrower” and “I want to put a fence here” hedging, etc. This is very 4.8. Maybe llm that has been somewhat massaged by a human to sound less ai.
svnt··on How to earn a billion dollars
Founders are often synonymous with their businesses. In the case of celebrities the relevant exploitation is carried out by others in the value chain, they are just the lure/source.
svnt··on Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
It makes the government stupider so there are more excuses to bring in better private solutions.

Handicap the public services if they are working well, then talk about how bad they are to justify for-profit replacement.

Or don’t and just exploit the gaps directly with better private data, whatever increases proximate wealth inequality.

svnt··on New pancreatic cancer drug might open the door to much longer survival times
They are all about science and research. What they don’t want is for scientific discoveries to be publicly available, because then it is harder to leverage them for absurd profit margins.
svnt··on Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5
Which they anticipated, which is why they were flagging and dropping back to opus on anything they could even potentially be called on.
svnt··on Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public
Not sure but a green screen version of AWS for $500 is totally plausible and a decent metaphor for what you’d get with AI anyway.
svnt··on Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public
I have found that on long-running tasks, many of the communication (and other) invariants get dropped at seemingly arbitrary points along the way. It probably just stopped doing the log.
svnt··on OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
As I see the perspective of a typical vp champion/customer/middle manager at a large org that buys their services: if my vendor increases their prices that is usually an indication they have something of value and things are going well. It is a negotiation, buy or build business choices, not embarrassing. If my vendor doesn’t raise, and then they cease to exist, or become so weak that a competitor of mine can buy them out, then I am actually in an embarrassing place.

My main job in this conception is to not be in an embarrassing place, and grow my budgets and headcount. Prices rising can even help with this, perversely.

svnt··on OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
They are because they can, because it serves as social proof, which convinces their customers that they are doing something of deeper value. Then in reality they will use it to develop channels preparing to use their customers (and the data customers trust them with) as the product in the future.
svnt··on OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
The play is the same as it always was, I assume: your data is the long term product.
svnt··on SpaceX gets $2.29B Space Force sensor-to-shooter network contract
IIUC in this particular instance of corporate <-> government space warfare, orbital decay should clear out the debris relatively quickly.
svnt··on AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]
I agree with that as a premise, but again it seems to me you are selectively jumping way into the end game. There were early networks that did not standardize, and these nonstandard networks had advantages, and some of those advantages were sacrificed in market-driven standardization.

Intelligence must have interfaces, and those can be standardized. Businesses will try to remain provider agnostic, which will also drive standardization via standard sales and marketing methods.

Separately, we are doing our best to standardize performances on benchmarks.

I don’t disagree that right now transport of standardized mobile data vs emulation of human intelligence is qualitatively different, but perhaps primarily because it is early in development, and our vantage point this time is relatively from within the network, instead of outside it.

svnt··on Gemini 3.5 Flash
It isn’t animated at all for me?
svnt··on AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]
I agree with much of what you’ve written but think you are missing the correct alignment of the mobile data timeline — mobile data had standards because it was forced to. It was forced to early because it was not a fundamental innovation, telecom itself was the fundamental innovation, mobile was a constraint relaxation. Intelligence might be forced to have standards as well, we will see what form the regulations take when prices reflect costs and healthy margins and become existential threats for many businesses.
svnt··on It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
This argument sounds nice at a surface level, but seems deeply incoherent and wrong in a way I haven’t yet put my finger on precisely. How can you say this:

> We have souls. We have an inner self. We can treat ourselves as transcendental subjects in the Kantian sense. We have emotions and spiritual life; we experience qualia. These entities are not obtained by addition to a physical state, but by subtraction from a complete physical account. Mental processes are physical processes described in a way that captures only their salient characteristics.

followed by this:

> The reason why this picture is more credible than any dualism is not that “science explains everything” — it doesn’t — or because “physics explains everything” — it does so even less. It is because of the hundreds of years of astonishing and unexpected success of the sciences that have convincingly shown that apparent metaphysical gaps are never such.

followed by this:

> Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature, like anything else in this sweet world.

So it isn’t describable by physics but it is only physics? And there are no closures or gaps? Ok sure in one sense we can say everything is connected, but this article seems to me to demonstrate effectively that without these divisions, pursuing understanding of it is essentially intractable.

He seems to be describing the dissolution of some construct in his worldview that I am having a difficult time relating to. Anyone have a different take?

svnt··on It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
Closest thing is probably Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism.
svnt··on It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness
This is essentially where the field is going, started with predictive processing by Friston with his free energy principle, combined into Hofstadter’s “I am a strange loop” and then the continuing thrust with applying the FEP as well as Rosenthal’s higher order theories and Graziano’s attention schema theory.
svnt··on AI is making me dumb
I’m not sure you and the parent are talking about the same thing.

I think they were making a joke about us getting dumber that I am confused about the premise of.

You seem to be suggesting we are going to fill spreadsheets (which claude already does pretty well) and that spatial reasoning is an insurmountable problem instead of just something that doesn’t emerge naturally from training on text/code corpi.

svnt··on AI is making me dumb
A higher level of abstraction that doesn't require thinking? Did you mean to write thinking here?
svnt··on Heritability of human life span is ~50% when heritability is redefined
The accurate version of the result would be something like: “if you model lifespan as aging + i.i.d. noise and dial the noise to zero, heritability of the aging component is ~40-50% in our model.” Which is barely a finding, since by construction reducing i.i.d. noise has to increase heritability of whatever non-noise remains.
svnt··on Heritability of human life span is ~50% when heritability is redefined
The original paper and this post basically seem to agree on one point: in a scientific sense, the term heritability is hopelessly overloaded and as a result having a coherent discussion about the genetic and environment influences on phenotype/organism characteristics, including lifespan, is impossible with current terminology.
svnt··on A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro
Too many people are wrapped around the ego axle thinking (assuming) their ideas are both them and somehow unique and special.

It usually takes dissolving that, often through difficult experiences, before they can see it as a machine, something that could be separated from them.

svnt··on Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria
That was a joke, because the idea that your conclusion spitballed by an amateur in an hour is more valid than one published by the WHO is a joke.
svnt··on Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria
Right so this is where you can write to the WHO I guess and demand answers, or go search on google scholar and find out.
svnt··on Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria
I didn’t provide it because it is trivially easy to find:

https://www.who.int/health-topics/adolescent-health/pregnanc...

Your perfect dataset probably doesn’t exist. There may be specific countries where something else overshadows it (suicide, a specific disease) due to other conditions or lack of medical care. But we are interested in the effect of education on girls and child marriage and pregnancy, which is not an issue specific to Nigeria anyway.

svnt··on Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria
I am replying a second time to try to make things coherent with all the edits you are doing.

Your data source does not seem to break out teenagers over 15. It does focus on children under five. It has some data just on children, which seems to be under 15 in this dataset but I am not sure and don’t have time to continue to dig in on this. Your dataset is unable to answer the question you are posing as presented.

The vast majority of deaths in countries like Nigeria are young children, old people, and men. Girls and women aged in their teens, which you did not seem to find any specific data for, generally have relatively low mortality. The leading cause of death globally, centered in less developed nations, in this population, is complications from pregnancy. This was until recently generally put down to improvements in western medicine and childbirth being dangerous. Since about 2020 people have started to realize child marriage is the issue.

The reason for this is mechanical: their pelves are underdeveloped and not ready to birth a baby with a big head.

Unsafe abortions is exactly what it sounds like, and a health risk specific to pregnancy. It can be in order to prevent death in childbirth, whether done early and quietly, or during childbirth in more tragic cases.

svnt··on Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria
I take your meaning but I don't agree it is only a value judgement. It is also an evolutionary and social force.
svnt··on Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria
Your source is focused on children under five. If you data source includes children under 10, none of them will be capable of becoming pregnant. If it includes boys, none of them will be capable of becoming pregnant.

The data don't support your perspective.

← PreviousPage 2 of 34Next →