Hacker News Reader

toleranceon On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted

Good question...

Maybe the author of the actual blog post had different intentions in sharing the Mastodon post than the author of the Mastodon post did. But the Mastodon post was made in response to the event that the blog post attempts to separate itself from. It's a reasonable thing to do if you're more interested in the technical issue and not the political one that the technical issue is being compared to.

But the context of the original post is meant to respond to a (techno-)political issue. This can explain why the post's rhetoric comes across as hyperbolic.

It doesn't help that UX seems to be talked about in ways that borrow the rhetoric of ethics from other disciplines like law and healthcare.

toleranceon On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted

The entire story is a setup for a remark about a Neovim maintainer's refusal to remove a David Heinemeier Hansson quote from the Neovim homepage [0]. So with that in mind the rhetoric makes sense.

[0]: In spite of the author at Unsung saying that Neovim is "in news" for other reasons. Chisnall's account is being given in the immediate context of that news.

toleranceon On caring for user data: NeoVim caused Vim undo files to be deleted

The discussion here is going to be hamstrung without direct access to the entire Mastodon post:

https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117171776562702259

toleranceon I Have a Confession: I Built This Site with AI – Please Forgive Me

This is a silly post. No one is forcing this guy to do anything. He did it because he didn't want to take the time to learn to do this all himself or simplify his expectations so that he'd have to learn less. Or he did it because he wanted to and liked the way the website looks and it was easy and he may not actually care too much about the ethics (at least not as much as who ever he's asking forgiveness from).

toleranceon Teleoperated Humans

It's interesting how a more sophisticated term can either highlight (or obscure) the anxiety (or glibness) behind its tongue-in-cheek alternatives.

toleranceon The Claude Delusion

For what it's worth I wouldn't concede even rectitude to Richard Dawkins (he is both wrong and entirely ass), but it seems his position on AI is more nuanced than that. Or at least there is enough white space around his position to allow for people with stronger beliefs than his to obviate the distinctions between humans, animals and AI altogether.

The good news for Cory, I guess, is that he probably doesn't want to turn this into a philosophical debate and neither do his more serious opponents. It's mostly politics for both sides.

toleranceon The Claude Delusion

And in what ways do you differ on this matter?

toleranceon The Claude Delusion

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/atheist

As opposed to an "AI atheist" that Doctorow refers to in the article.

toleranceon The Claude Delusion

It's ironic that real atheists like Richard Dawkins (whose work I believe inspired the title of this post) are public about their own degree of skepticism in favor for the "personhood" of AI. And I'm confident that there are plenty others who are convinced to the tune of total disinterest in the issue of "personhood" altogether—AIs and humans alike.

This particular post is preaching to the choir of which a faith is yet to be determined or named at least. People who don't read Cory Doctorow are going to continue to anthropomorphize AI the same as they do other technologies, constructs and objects.

toleranceon I think you should almost never use AI to write

I suspect that between the advice in this article and your own...people fear that thinking is the only thing they have left to do in order to write.

toleranceon How to Write with an LLM

What this quite reasonable article has to endorse may be useless. I've read some decent articles both obviously and possibly authored with LLM-assistance and while they were well-structured and carried at least the gravitas of objectivity I couldn't help but feel like their technical fastidiousness belabored their messages.

toleranceon Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries

I can see this catching on in the US with a lot of cultural exceptions that would amplify the library as an either an ideological battleground or sanctuary.

toleranceon A coffee shop owner used AI to make a menu poster. Then came the angry DMs

> Then came a threat. An account with a much larger following DM'd her and told her to take down the sign, or they would post about it to their local artist community. The person offered to help her find an artist to pay to make a new sign, or else they would post about it.

> They gave her a day to "think about it."

When this is sort of behavior that the "good guys" advance then it's hard not to expect a "bad guy" with money to show up on the scene and thwart it.

toleranceon There's a 100% Chance AI Agents Are Ruining the Internet

They appear to stand for nothing nor care for anything but the idea that everything to do with technology is terrible—with exception for pop science discovery.

toleranceon Most people prefer traditional architecture

Once there was a blackout in my neighborhood that affected commercial properties too. While driving down the street in total darkness the only structure that stuck out when my headlights pressed them was the local Mexican restaurant which isn't traditional in the least—it sort of looks like what Davy Crockett would've built if he survived the Alamo and opened a Cheesecake Factory. But it stood out that night.

toleranceon Show HN: Neobrutalism.dev – Just added Base UI support and added new color theme

Wow, really? Nothing? Care to share why you think so?

> “Neobrutalism” might be wrong in concept, but it was coined around 2023, that ship has sailed.

Who cares. It's 2026. All it takes to sink a sailing ship is a few determined gents in a motorboat. It's called Post-Corporate Memphis!

toleranceon Show HN: Neobrutalism.dev – Just added Base UI support and added new color theme

This is actually "Post-Corporate Memphis". Says me.

These pages are closer to "neobrutalism" or what I would call "Cybermod" [0], I think...

<https://webb.page>

<https://garden.bradwoods.io>

[0]: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44415330>

toleranceon Naomi Klein: Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. Turns you into a supremacist

...which is to say that the current social condition belongs to the tail end of a continuum, the trajectory of which is less important to comprehend than the so-called "jetztzeit" is, which is supposedly incomprehensible itself?

toleranceon Naomi Klein: Extreme wealth has a deranging effect. Turns you into a supremacist

What do you think this means?

toleranceon Fuck it, make it anyway

Is there a Hacker News where there's submissions and talk about AI but it's just sort of like 7 guys in Chelsea boots while one of them doing Romanian dead lifts and squats off in the corner; the audio edition of The Origins of the Second World War has been playing on a consistent loop for the past week and they burn myrrh resin?

toleranceon Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex?

Right. But somewhere in between then and now the powers of the President expanded so that "the actual exercise of military force" in the name of defense ("preserving the freedom and independence of the United States and its allies") involved fighting in wars.

toleranceon Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables

For evidence that Bluesky is a long-term living facility operating as a social media platform...look no further than how their users employ the word "skeet" to refer to "post".

toleranceon Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

I don't think that quote helps your case or detracts from the parent. Tangentially—and perhaps counterintuitively—it can be taken as an argument in favor of the name change.

The statement also does little to address the ethical concerns at the root of the relationship between industries and the military.

toleranceon What Comes After Git

Did you know that rivers contribute a significant portion to our atmosphere's moisture?

toleranceon Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]

Nope! But I'm soaking all of this in and I appreciate these nudges.

And after some thought I'm curious whether this means that LLMs ought to be adept at forming new metaphors as opposed to handling pre-existing ones.

toleranceon Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]

I'm going to need a weekend or two to figure out what this means.

toleranceon What Comes After Git

This may sound ignorant but it looks like ERSC intends to situate itself as a middle ground between tools that are supported by more general purpose protocols (i.e., Tangled and apparently, eventually, Forgejo) and tools that trying to maintain the whole shebang (like Radicle).

The exception here being that ERSC also apparently intends to be less dependent on git than the others too.

If true, they have the clear advantage.

toleranceon Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video]

This seems like a worthwhile listen. As it stands I think that LLMs sort of suck at this. Either that or I don't understand what analogous thinking is or people who use LLMs to facilitate this kind of thinking are bad at it too.

But I think that LLMs are bad at something that has to do with taking seemingly disparate concepts and assimilating one into the other to convey a novel idea.

Like these articles...

<https://spectrum.ieee.org/jimi-hendrix-systems-engineer>

<https://zed.dev/blog/agentic-xanadu>

...are anything but convincing once you read past the gravitas that the LLM lends the prose.

toleranceon To write non-fiction, draw the trunk, then the rest of the tree

There's always hope for a Part II. Maybe on rhetoric; which is what I interpreted "The second most important thing" to be about. But the concepts introduced there are entirely new to me so I may be off.