Hacker News Reader

darthoctopuson Roblox downloaded 145GB models from us (including adult content) without asking

would the implied intent (from the inclusion of adult content) of training models on open3dlab content, without asking them, render Roblox's actions _less_ antisocial???

darthoctopuson Credit where credit is due

"it's ok when _I_ use LLMs"

edit: you're making literally the same argument that Provost Santiago Schnell is quoted as making in the article, and the entire article is dedicated to dismantling it. Please have a read.

darthoctopuson British PM says it is 'clear' Russia interfered with Brexit vote

> change the past

I don't think this is being argued in good faith. I don't think Nigel Farage in particular (among the rabid Leave campaigners quoted to substantiate said backlash _from Leavers_) has changed his position. And I also don't think that Russian "interference" in the sense that Andy Burnham means it is simply the making of public statements that this crowd was opposed to (just as Russian interference in Trump 2016 was also more material).

darthoctopuson Cleo (Mathematician)

The negated statement --- that LLM progress will never stall in any area --- seems trivially falsifiable, so why is the GP's statement unfalsifiable?

darthoctopuson NASA: Fill in a name, and you can have an exclusive coordinate in the universe

that's only true if Roman were to do a continuous stare. However, it (as with any telescope) has to re-point from time to time in order to look at different targets.

darthoctopuson Servus München: Waymo Is Coming to Germany

I think it will be interesting to see how this plays out for Waymo, as (unlike Uber in Zagreb) they will be competing with a world-class public transport system. A bold move! But perhaps that only goes to show how far ahead of the competition Waymo is, if they are this confident.

darthoctopuson Amazon hikes hardware prices by 60 percent, blaming memory shortage

market conditions _that they participated in causing_.

darthoctopuson The Citizen Developer

That makes the typewriter the actual writer and you the credit-taker, just like in present ghostwriting arrangements

darthoctopuson Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

why do you think that implies leaving out the modern food industry, rather than suggesting that they, too, should be held accountable for flooding us with hyperpalatable foods to addict us? After all, they were literally engineered by the same people as Big Tobacco [1]

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...

darthoctopuson Norway should buy OpenAI

> one could also question the ethics of buying rare, second-hand books and then destroying them

I believe that is exactly what the parent post is doing

darthoctopuson Qwen3.8 27B

this page gives a 404

darthoctopuson Twenty Years of Pandoc

Yes, in my field (astronomy), Overleaf is also ubiquitous, especially for observational papers with long author lists. However, by the same token, this means that most of my collaborators are distant ones, and from experience many are happy (and occasionally prefer) to conduct business by way of emailed PDFs. My close collaborators have been happy to co-edit a Markdown file by way of GitHub pull requests or directly committing to a shared repository.

I have, for a while, been toying with the idea of maintaining a fork of (or plugin for?) Overleaf CE that runs pandoc-powered build scripts instead of using latexmk directly. Perhaps this might be something vibe-codeable.

darthoctopuson Twenty Years of Pandoc

Thank you for pandoc. I made the (at the time perhaps not transparently wise) choice to go all in on it when I started my PhD, and that decision has paid nothing but dividends since. I owe my career as a scientist to it.

darthoctopuson Leo's first encyclical attacks technological messianism

What is definitely being argued unironically is "it doesn't matter that humans are sentient", and I would still consider that misanthropy

darthoctopuson The C++ Standard Library Has Been Walking Itself Back for Fifteen Years

this kind of overt inevitabilism is complicity in the death of good writing.

darthoctopuson Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone

darthoctopuson Microsoft admits Windows 11's dedicated Copilot key breaks certain workflows

Can we finally stop having business people forcing product decisions on us? Microsoft's recent history suggests not… and I fear the facade of empowerment by LLM will only make things worse in the near future.

darthoctopuson We Are (Still) Living in the Long Boring

> You have not heard any of the many, many excitable AI maximalists in the media address this reality, the bits vs atoms barrier, because they have no response that can preserve their intense attachment to the idea that the world is about to change forever. So they resolutely ignore this basic reality: most of the world is not computers. Most of your life is dependent on technologies other than computers. Inconveniently, we also have few arenas of human endeavor that are seeing rapid development other than in computing.

I suspect stark wisdom of this nature will, unfortunately, not find HN to be fertile ground. At the same time, I am glad these other arenas, few though they be, still exist.

darthoctopuson If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos

subtlety is dead on the internet of the lowest common denominator, and that enabled by AI assistance is very low indeed

darthoctopuson Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

wanting to be good at something is not exactly the same as being interested in getting good at something, which carries the additional, nuanced, connotation of investment (or willingness to invest) towards this goal.

e.g. many people want to live an active healthy lifestyle, but fewer are actually interested in doing so.

darthoctopuson Walmart: ChatGPT checkout converted 3x worse than website

> don't want to put in the human time and effort to do so

In most circles, that is "not that interested in getting good at it".

darthoctopuson Wayland set the Linux Desktop back by 10 years?

> Who is forced to use it? Just use X11, as you said (many times) you do already.

I can no longer use GNOME on X11, and the decision to remove support was a deliberate one. Users are definitely being forced.

darthoctopuson Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

> Why is that not going to happen next time?

Because this shortage isn't natural, it's the result of OpenAI flexing monopsony power to deprive everyone else for its strategic gain. Unlike an organic shortage, there is no compelling reason for otherwise excess capacity to be built, since this artificial shortage can end as arbitrarily as it started.

darthoctopuson Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

Lest we forget, this memory shortage was deliberately engineered [1]. Thanks, OpenAI.

[1]: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

darthoctopuson Georgian wine culture dates back, uninterrupted, approximately 8k years

what _is_ that reason, out of curiosity?

darthoctopuson Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app

I think you may have fundamentally misunderstood what a technocracy is: it has nothing to do with tech companies whatsoever. From literally the article that you have linked:

> The technocracy movement proposed replacing partisan politicians and business people with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy.

darthoctopuson Web Browsers have stopped blocking pop-ups

I would absolutely love for this proposed blocker to happen, but I have zero faith in it actually happening given the user-centred nature of this feature and the user-hostile origin of Mozilla's funding situation…

darthoctopuson Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal

every one of these things that make the deal "good" for OpenAI is a direct result of negative externalities for everyone else: competitors, consumers, and people who wouldn't care otherwise.

darthoctopuson The fall of Labubus and the mush of modern internet trends

Indeed, I find it very hard to take the article seriously given that every one of the notionally decentralised trends it's described has propagated on a very small handful of highly centralised platforms. For that matter, it's very difficult for me to imagine how these trends might have spread in the first place without access to large-audience virality directed by algorithmic recommendations precisely enabled by such severe centralisation.