HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

burkaman

16,885 karma · joined May 29, 2014

submissionscomments
burkaman··on California Gov Newsom commutes death sentences for all 548 people on death row
In what way is he making a scene? All he did was release a written statement, in the midst of ubiquitous coverage of a hugely significant national election. If anything he is trying to minimize publicity.
burkaman··on Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse
Can anyone knowledgeable interpret what was actually done here? It doesn't sound like "performed brain surgery" is accurate.

> Watching our surgeon do the craniotomy, which the agent is not allowed to do yet for safety reasons

I think the only action it took was sending commands to lower a needle to a certain location, inject, and then remove it. But then it sounds like it couldn't actually choose a valid location and this guy had to manually override it? Maybe I'm misunderstanding, talking about this post: https://x.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442968874139867 (https://xxcancel.com/OcanaSantero/status/2115442968874139867).

I know there is always endless goalpost-moving in these kind of discussions but I really do think there's an important difference between "performed brain surgery" and "observed brain surgery and ran inject(3.9, 4, 4.3) at one point". And there's also no discussion here of whether this decision made any medical sense and what impact it had on the mouse besides not killing it.

burkaman··on Patch the Planet: global response coordination as agents uncover vulnerabilities
> It highlights how AI can uncover security flaws with internet-scale impact

> To our knowledge, frontier AI found these vulnerabilities before attackers did

I don't know who/what Calif is and there's no link to them, so if I were only reading this article I would definitely get the impression that "AI did all the work here".

burkaman··on The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
We are not trying to literally revert the planet to how it was 100 years ago, we are "just" trying to stop these trends as soon as possible so they don't continue for another 100 years. There are going to be consequences regardless, but they can always get worse.
burkaman··on The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
What is your approach to changing the global economic system that doesn't involve trying harder? That sounds very hard.
burkaman··on The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
> Normal people don't care about climate

This is not true, it's fossil fuel propaganda that has been very successful. The overwhelming majority of people are concerned about the climate but assume that they are in the minority. See https://ourworldindata.org/climate-change-support for example.

"Fight pollution" is the old approach, it doesn't work as well because greenhouse gases are generally invisible and cause no noticeable short-term impacts, and because in the US the industry has been successful in distorting the law such that greenhouse gases do not legally count as pollutants.

burkaman··on Show HN: Wonderhop – A daily game: guess what most people say, or what none do
Yes this is clearly just a minor extension of Krillion, but that one was also AI-generated so it's hard to feel bad for them.
burkaman··on Norway Eyes Partial Ban of Smart Glasses
It's like treating concealed carry of a weapon differently than open carry. I think it's reasonable to say "you can do this in public but only if it's clear to other people that you're doing it".

Targeting smart glasses specifically seems to narrow though, because there are obviously many other ways to carry around a hidden camera in public, like one disguised as a pen in your pocket or something.

burkaman··on François Chollet: "OpenAI basically set back progress to AGI by 5 to 10 years"
This is an article from two days ago reporting on a 2+ year old podcast episode as if it just happened.
burkaman··on Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city
I doubt he wrote that himself, it's just engagement bait for the betting ad in the next tweet.
burkaman··on America.gov
The poem is here, triggered by "play the block game" or "play minecraft": https://america.gov/_astro/block-game-poem.Khrmh8AU.js
burkaman··on America.gov
This is bizarre. It's a parody of the Minecraft end credits (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/End_Poem), and it must be an intentional easter egg as I got the exact same text as you. It also doesn't trigger a network request so it must be built into the page somehow. Very strange thing to include. Also, how did you find this so quickly? I haven't found any other way to trigger it yet.

If you try to continue the conversation, the entire response is not included in the context.

burkaman··on America.gov
> There I met many fine Canadians, visiting for work, education, and play. Were they not Americans too?

I feel very confident that Canadians do not want to be referred to as Americans.

burkaman··on Google's first Suncatcher orbital data center test launches October 1
Google's blog post (https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/go...) describes the goal of the launch as "designed to gather in-orbit data on how our TPUs handle the physical stress of spaceflight and the radiation and thermal extremes of space." That doesn't sound like a bad idea, obviously it might be useful to have dedicated machine learning hardware on spacecraft or satellites for local processing. Maybe they just framed it as an orbital data center test for marketing, because that's a trendy topic and sounds more newsworthy than "hardware durability test"?
burkaman··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
You're right, what an incredibly dishonest statement. The actual contract language in there makes it clear that there are no restrictions. My bad.
burkaman··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
There are three restrictions:

> No use of OpenAI technology for mass domestic surveillance.

> No use of OpenAI technology to direct autonomous weapons systems.

> No use of OpenAI technology for high-stakes automated decisions (e.g. systems such as “social credit”).

These are stronger than Anthropic's restrictions (https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war), as OpenAI says themselves: "We think our agreement has more guardrails than any previous agreement for classified AI deployments, including Anthropic’s. [...] Based on what we know, we believe our contract provides better guarantees and more responsible safeguards than earlier agreements, including Anthropic’s original contract."

Edit: I was wrong, see my original comment. Sorry.

burkaman··on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk
The reason it appears corrupt is that OpenAI has the exact same restrictions (https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-o...) but was not declared a supply chain risk. If two vendors have the same restrictions and they only designate one, then the designation must be arbitrary and/or capricious.

Edit: I was wrong, the statement I linked is extremely dishonest and I was misled. The contract language lower down makes it clear that there are no "red lines", and OpenAI products can in fact be used for mass domestic surveillance, autonomous weapons, and social credit systems as long as they are considered legal.

burkaman··on Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech
Technologically incredible as in "I cannot believe it's possible for a computer to do this" and not very good as in "these examples are not what was prompted and I can't think of a use case where these would be acceptable".

Imagine someone showing you that they've trained their dog to hold a paintbrush and paint. There would be no contradiction between "this is incredible" and "these paintings suck".

burkaman··on Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Speaking About Flock at City Council Meeting
I agree it is disruptive, obviously that was the point, but it is not "depriving the rest of the people of their abilities to comment". Had she been allowed to finish her comment, nobody would have been deprived of anything.
burkaman··on Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech
None of these examples are really what the prompt asked for. It's just like image models, once you get over how unbelievable it is that a computer produced this you realize the result isn't actually what you want.
burkaman··on Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech
Seems like voice actors are safe for now. This is technologically incredible, but the results are really not very good, and usually not particularly close to the prompt. In basically all of these examples some core part of the prompt is completely ignored.
burkaman··on Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Speaking About Flock at City Council Meeting
There is nothing in the article about exceeding allotted time, and from the video it seems like she had just started speaking.
burkaman··on ZuckOff is a free app that sees Meta glasses before they see you
It was equally popular here, it was just a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47140042
burkaman··on Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap
"you [...] sound sus af" at the end of the comment. sus means suspicious and af stands for as fuck.
burkaman··on Bend 2 and the Vibe-Coding Trap
It was a fair critique, but if you're looking for feedback I think people were probably responding to your last line.

"I'm glad you're having fun vibecoding" comes across as very backhanded and condescending. It sounds like you may have actually meant that genuinely, but it doesn't read that way in text form.

"you sound sus af" is not respectful or constructive in my opinion. It's a description of your own feelings, not a critique of the project, and there's not really any way for the author to respond besides ignoring it or saying "sorry you feel that way" or something.

I think that line undermines the rest of your comment, because I'm left thinking that you don't really expect good answers to your questions and you just think the whole thing is dumb.

burkaman··on Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023
Many of these quotes are technical or social critiques of Bitcoin, not claims that it is "dead". Here's one for example: https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts/2023-10-26-every-single-bitc.... It is dishonest to frame this as a disproven claim just because the price has gone up since the quote. The truth of this claim has nothing to do with the success or failure of Bitcoin.

A couple other examples: https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts/2019-02-07-bitcoin-inefficie..., https://bitcoindeaths.com/posts/2024-11-20-nobel-prize-winni.... This bothers me, you can't respond to a genuine critique with "but look how much money I've made!"

burkaman··on Global Glacier Extinction Explorer
The data comes from this paper, I don't immediately see an answer to this question though: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-025-02513-9. My guess is that the climate is complicated and the planet doesn't warm evenly, so different emissions scenarios might imply different regions warm more quickly. Not all the glaciers on the site survive longer in the +4 scenario, it's only some parts of the world.
burkaman··on Forgejo <=16.0.3 Critical RCE
Ah sorry, didn't realize they had their own policy. This is a little stronger, but you can certainly still use an LLM to search for vulnerabilities, you would just need to write fixes yourself and mention if you used an LLM for assistance.

The rule you quoted is about code reviews, they don't want you using an LLM to write reviews or leave comments.

This is a pretty poorly written policy to be honest, so I understand if you interpret it to mean "no LLMs in any capacity", but I think if that's what they meant they would have said that. In fact they explicitly allow content "made with the help of AI", you just have to disclose it.

burkaman··on Forgejo <=16.0.3 Critical RCE
They did not disallow LLM contributions, and they definitely didn't disallow using LLMs to research security vulnerabilities. They only disallowed projects that are majority LLM-written.

https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/71149c7fc95ccfeae36...

burkaman··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
Wow I had no idea Pocket Casts was open source now. I still have a subscription because it's a perfect app I use every day.
Page 1 of 34Next →