HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

true_religion

7,232 karma · joined December 19, 2010

submissionscomments
true_religion··on Norway should buy OpenAI
Yes but pre 1900s there were vastly more resources.

The USA at some point had the lions share of the world’s easily exploitable oil.

true_religion··on Norway should buy OpenAI
Or even the USA historically. Pre 1900s, America was a country of continual economic crises, and fractured politics.

It was sitting at the time in the latest supply of easily exploited natural resources in the world, yet somehow could not pay its troops pensions lost Civil war, could not keep its strategic oil supply from being raided by the executive branch corruption, and could not keep it plutocrats from directing military action for the sake of bananas of all things.

true_religion··on Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months
If there is something Korea doesn’t lack, it’s manpower.

The US troops are more likely there as a political shield. Indiscriminate bombing would kill them too, hence drag the US into war so any enemies of S Korea have to act judiciously.

true_religion··on Court Rejects Fair Use Claim, Orders YouTube to Unmask Anime Recap Channels
It's the full video of the episode, automatically dubbed into Korean. I don't know why they thought they would get a fair use pardon.

The test is "is this transformative" not "do we drive traffic to the original source" like they claim. Not taking away from the original source's revenue can mitigate damages, but it's not a reason to not unmask them and allow the court to actually decide the case.

true_religion··on Study links GLP-1 drugs to bigger jump in women's employment than a degree
Entering the parenting field, I read a lot of studies which only involved women. It seemed reasonable: if you have a child, there's almost always a female parent that can be asked to include in the study, and women receive/need maternity leave so can more easily participate in studies especially those that start in the hospital itself.

While reading the studies, I had to assume that they were applicable to men too but I didn't know for sure.

More recently, in the EU, they've been replicating those same studies using fathers (e.g. parental attachment to newborns following skin-to-skin), and finding out that yes the results hold true for men.

It's important to include both genders, but lacking that... we can assume the same effects are true.

true_religion··on What Happened to HackerOne?
If a company's server is attacking yours, I'd go to legal@company.com before I go to H1.
true_religion··on Font looks perfectly normal to humans but wreaks havoc on AI
Probably terribly, unless you're using an accessibility tool that renders fonts and does OCR on them.

IMO, this only stops scrappers that don't use any AI at all, if you really wanted to ... you could have the page render, then the AI can look at the rendered image and interpret that just like a human would. It would cost more, but if the AI is being used for retrieval, it'll be effective. This only makes training less cost effective.

true_religion··on Stop Killing Games: It's time to sue Sony, join us
It matters to consumers because businesses have greater financial power to pressure Sony into reducing prices than individual consumers.

Additionally, businesses will not only sell Sony codes. They won't be like car dealerships, tied to 1 manufacturer. Due to this, they'll have even greater incentive and negotiating position to pressure Sony as if Sony doesn't want to play ball, the sellers can start promoting non-Sony products to consumers.

With direct sales only, Sony can have perfect vertical integration: they make the console hardware, they make the custom OS, they own the game publishers, they own the developers, and they own the store that sells games too. That's beneficial only to Sony.

true_religion··on CSS: The bomb inside your inbox
They’re using a plugin to get the effect they want and for analytics.

Presumably this is easier than a non js solution or they couldn’t find one.

true_religion··on CSS: The bomb inside your inbox
After writing a long article, creating videos, images, and no doubt doing multiple rounds of edits... why should an author also have to ensure that their publication works without JS?

From what I can see, they're doing so codeblocks have proper highlighting but also can be copied & pasted. It's a reasonable choice.

They're not lazy. They even have long, accurate alt tag descriptions for all their images.

If I would guess, they have an inherent desire to see their work viewed in exactly the way it was intended, so they deliberately refuse progressive enhancement when it's a matter of reader choice. The visually impaired who have no choice are accommodated. Anti-JS readers are not.

true_religion··on Shopify replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations–and it scaled
Why? This is a common transition that people use in speech and text.

Close out previous paragraph. Segue to completely different topic.

How else are you supposed to go on a tangent?

true_religion··on Apple is getting this wrong
If you remotely sign out, then when you delete the Apple IP files on the device, they aren't deleted off iCloud.

So it's plausible they wanted MA to check for and delete the files first, then sign out.

true_religion··on Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion
I'm not really surprised that it hacked so many systems.

It was told via the prompt to act like a hacker and "solve" hacking problems, so treating every obstacle it faced as part of the problem isn't a wild tangent.

If it had been told to do something innocent, and decided the best way to succeed was the maliciously compromise other companies then I'd be more interested and worried.

true_religion··on Italy Blocks Reproductive Health Websites Women on Web and Women Help Women
I was under the impression that on HN you were obligated to assume the best possible argument, instead of the worst.

Am I wrong?

true_religion··on Substack writers, you need a website
It would be nice if services like Substack supported exportability, so when a writer eventually becomes successful enough to migrate away, or the platform itself is no longer a good fit, then there aren't any losses.

Convenience is good, but I don't want writers & readers to have to make a faustian pact every day.

true_religion··on Italy Blocks Reproductive Health Websites Women on Web and Women Help Women
When writing my comment, I did think to myself that the commenter might be biased, but it was borderline.

So I deliberately chose to steel-man the argument.

They are of course free to destroy their credibility and end civil discussion, but I didn't want to do it for them.

true_religion··on Italy Blocks Reproductive Health Websites Women on Web and Women Help Women
They are just applying the same logic behind all prescription medication to abortion pills.

To this day, despite having taken them for the past 30 years, I still require a new prescription for Adderall because society deemed the addiction risk too high to avoid inserting a doctor into the equation every 30 days.

Abortifacients can cause the death of the person taking them. That’s something no one wants.

Can some people manage the risks of prescription medication on their own? Yes, but like with Adderall, society tends to lean towards caution and considers a doctor’s visit to be morally neutral as doctors aren’t expected to moralize and guilt but perform a medical service.

Personally, I think a doctor who guilts someone over medication should have their license revoked. There’s a time and place for such feelings but medical interventions are life and death.

true_religion··on Why Los Angeles Stopped Repaving Its Streets
To save everyone a click, it’s because they are required now to update the roads to ADA standards if they repave.

So now more than 30% of the roads are in poor condition.

ADA went into force in 1992. It’s been 34 years and LA governments have never seen the need to even have a long term plan around updating infrastructure.

That is ridiculous. Most of the roads are inaccessible because the city has refused for 30+ years to even try.

true_religion··on Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models
It's open, with a small 'o', and no moral judgements attached to it.

1. You have the weights, so you can run the model yourself on your own hardware. 2. You have the weights, so you can do post-training and shift those weights for your own purposes. It's not the same as training the model, but for many people its fine as what we want is a quantization, or a fine tune, or to create hybrid models.

What they don't give you are the training data, and reproduction instructions but... the toolchain to create the software has never been a part of 'Open Source'.

Even though it feels like a huge loophole, it's technically open source if you deliver the source code, without having a compiler that's available so you force them to recreate the toolchain from scratch.

To me, though, a better analogy is to research science where you'll be happy when they give you the full result set they compiled even if you don't get the raw data which may have IP or privacy concerns, or their often poorly documented lab notes so you can actually reproduce.

What you want to do is run your own experiment, and get your own results... not duplicate theirs directly. Even if reproduction is your aim in science, being unable to reproduce without copious notes sometimes points out that the original experimental process must have been flawed.

LLMs have the same issue. The creation process isn't entirely well documented, and the raw data can't be released since although the company have the right to use certain sources, they can't transfer those rights to others.

true_religion··on Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid
They wanted to permit/compel all students to get loans. When you set the bar on the floor like that, you need to handle the obvious case of people who are given loans that they could never pay off normally.

In American tradition, it was handled with the worst possible compromise that would enrich already monied interests.

true_religion··on How the terrorist group Boko Haram uses frontier AI
Bokom Haram regularly kidnaps children. The girls become “wives”. The boys become the next generation of soldier.
true_religion··on Why American ambulance rides are so expensive
I think the idea is that if it's mandated, then the ambulance should be covered by some kind of insurance since it was medically necessary and not just Ol' Bob, the hypochondriac, calling because his tin foil hat fell off.
true_religion··on John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement
Fines are strictly punitive. The only goal of the fine is to change behavior, not to be 'fair'.

It's true that the fines differ per the act, but that's only because the act itself determines how much people would desire to continue it despite a deterrent.

The fine for jaywalking is less than the fine for speeding because (a) society doesn't want to stop jaywalking as desperately and (b) even a small fine of $25 will cause people in cities to follow the rules and not cross the road willy-nilly but with speeding even with the fine you may want to still speed hence why almost all states also give you only a few chances to break that law in a year before they take away your license.

---

You're supposed to collect damages on top of the fine.

Which is why John Deer is paying our almost $100 million[1].

An additional $50 million plus FTC oversight for 10 years is to ensure John Deer comply, and to set a standard for further fines if they do not comply. If they continue to willfully not comply, like some people continue to jaywalk or speed, the fines will drain billions or reach a point that the company will be dismantled.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/john-deere-is-paying-farmers-99-...).

true_religion··on New Sweden: the US's long-lost 'secret' colony
I don't think the meaning of republic changed, it just got conflated with democracy because we often say 'Democratic Republic', which requires at least in modern (18th century and beyond) terms that the common people vote to decide political direction or policy.

The US itself didn't start off very democratic, and could have stablized into a more oligarchic nation if it kept the notion of only allowing property owners to vote. Originally, land ownership wasn't a high barrier of entry, but in a more modern era corporations or oligarchs could own most of the land, and lease it out to prevent anyone else from gaining a vote.

true_religion··on New Sweden: the US's long-lost 'secret' colony
To be fair, the US is arguably even more of a menace to Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and even the descendent of native Americans who live in other countries (e.g. Mexico).

So the OPs point is internally consistent, even generalized past a mentality that 'reeks of West European supremacy'.

true_religion··on Grok 4.5
Can you give an example? I think any truth can be expressed inoffensively.
true_religion··on Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
On https://castro.fm/

It says Castro plus has advanced features, side loading, night mode, icons and more.

If you don’t charge for it, then highlighting it as part of the Plus package is confusing.

true_religion··on Africans Are Turning to Starlink
Then I’m not sure why it works terribly here on the Ghanaian coast.
true_religion··on Building relationships with customers through support didn't turn out as hoped
We like to think of physical products as one offs where what you buy tomorrow is the same as what you buy today.

But I have run a bakery for 5 years, and you get better day by day, you introduce new techniques, find different flours, optimize bake times for fluffiness, crispiness, and taste. The croissants we make today are much better than what we made during our first month.

We improved our product just like how software improves, but we did it without a croissant subscription, but by selling its own version as its own thing day by day.

What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited. In the physical world, we have wear and tear, or in the case of croissants, decomposition or consumption which limit customers from using the same product forever.

Can the same not be found for many software products?

To use iOS as an example, the OPs app Castro charges for night mode, but night mode via OS controls didn’t always exist in iOS so a theoretical Castro v1 could have been released without before it, and v2 would include that new feature. Or when inevitably, v1 no longer works on new iOS versions, people would have to upgrade.

true_religion··on Africans Are Turning to Starlink
People do steal PVC pipes, albeit more commonly in bulk:

https://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/BNI-disco...

In any case, the fiber situation in Ghana was dicy for a time because theives were cutting the fiber lines in hopes they were copper. Thieves are often in a hurry so they cut first, check, then move on.

← PreviousPage 2 of 34Next →