Hacker News Reader

delichonon Where each U.S. state gets its tax revenue from

Alaska gets a huge portion of its revenue from taxes on extracting oil and gas. This is a model that any state could apply to data centers extracting compute from local resources. And if demand for compute is actually heading up the Kardashev scale, it could eventually fund the whole state and subsidize resident incomes. It would act as a hedge against possible disruptions by AI.

delichonon Tesla winds down Cybertruck production after years of poor sales in few markets

The DeLorean was yesterday's Tucker Torpedo.

delichonon Stringman, an $800 open-source room scale gripper robot

They compare it to a robotic arm, but they are a natural combination. Two arms, even, floating above it all, could scratch the dog, make breakfast, and maybe someday, fold a fitted sheet.

delichonon Charles Tandy, the mastermind behind Radio Shack

> Since Tandy was a private company, his death would have forced a liquidation of the company in order to pay the inheritance taxes.

So much value is destroyed by this form of taxation. It's inherent in having to liquidate much wealth in a short period of time. There should be a way to match the time scales better, as opposed to forcing a company to go public. Like putting non-voting shares into escrow and allowing them to be sold over years or decades.

This would come with the loss of taxes as businesses go under, but at least some offsetting increase from successful businesses that are allowed to continue operating.

delichonon The 'Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen' post is misleading

> ...imply ... a sort of transcendental introspection into their own brains, which if true would be absolutely groundbreaking.

> but ... it's bog standard reverse engineering, like any human would do, just vastly faster

For some values of vastly faster these are functionally equivalent and so equivalently groundbreaking.

delichonon Just a little AI resistance, as a treat

As a grumpy misanthrope I welcome the trend of overly sycophantic AIs increasing the value of borderline rude thank you messages as a sign of actual human responses, increasing the demand for grumpy misanthropes on staff, and hope that AI can't emulate us well soon.

delichonon School has given straight-A grades to the student, who can't do masic math

New Mexico has been the lowest scoring state for academic achievement for eight years running. I had no idea when I started substitute teaching last year, but learned fast. In an algebra class for tenth graders, there were two kids ready for it out of twenty. I kept backing up to reach the LCD to start teaching from, and discovered that most of the class were not competent at addition and subtraction, let alone advanced topics like division and fractions. Yet they all get passed along with their peers.

This is the cohort that was supposed to learn this material during the covid years, but got a free pass. I think most of them will probably not catch up, and their career choices will be circumscribed by it. The overwrought covid safetyism with regard to children has untold numbers of lifelong victims.

delichonon AI agent swarms in Minecraft fail to build civilization, drown in bureaucracy

Humans arrived at a capacity for social cooperation via millions of generations in which it has been a force on reproductive fitness. That created deeply rooted phenotypes like empathy, loyalty, hierarchy, and morality. Even if such concepts can be well described in a statistical model of language, there is no reason to think that they automatically become embedded in motivation. Without that, they may as well be anthropological observations by Martians.

To embed them as motivations, we can embed neural nets within a framework of genetic algorithms, in which successful cooperation is a gate to the next generation. It seems to me that this approach should be not just about creating efficient agent swarms, but should also be at the core of alignment efforts.

delichonon US Reps Lead Democratic Resolution Opposing A.I. Bubble Bailout for Big Tech

I don't doubt that there are possible bailouts with potential net positive outcomes, just that legislatures are capable of distinguishing them with an overall net positive outcome. Or that the benefits would outweigh the moral hazard of becoming reliant on them.

delichonon US Reps Lead Democratic Resolution Opposing A.I. Bubble Bailout for Big Tech

Better to just oppose all bailouts for all sectors, always.

delichonon Finland investigate Google over destruction of 250k trees

  Growing stock volume: ~2.66B m^3
  Annual volume increment: 103M m^3
  Approximate number of trees: 20B
  Implied average tree volume: ~0.1275 m^3
  Volume of 250K trees: 250K x 0.1275 m^3 ~ 32K m^3

  Time for remaining trees to grow that volume back: 32K m^3 / 103M m^3/year ~ 0.00031 years ~ 2.7 hours

delichonon The first wired XR glasses powered by Android XR

The opposite of creating new labels to amplify such dangerous expressions of opinion would be to reduce and simplify vocabulary into a kind of newspeak in order to unworsen such thoughtcrime.

delichonon A Health Update

My mom fought like this and died slowly. Dad didn't and died fast. I admire Mr. Hockenberry's courage and my mom's, because I'm pretty sure I don't have it. It's easier for me to face death than that injection. I guess I take after dad. I plan to rage against the dying of the light, and then fold.

If you can make that joke about your spinal tap going to eleven, you are a tough motherfucker.

delichonon The first wired XR glasses powered by Android XR

> Real-time AI perception

Continuous AI dependence of a large fraction of society is coming fast. It needs a name. Cyborgism? Umbilicals?

We'll also need to coin some names for the symbiotes to call the resistors. Neoamish? Analogues?

The economic power difference between the two groups may justify calling them the Eloi and the Morlocks.

delichonon The Brutal Harvard Class That Suddenly Everyone Wants to Take

It's a sanctuary from AI.

delichonon An examination of lost firefly species of the US and Canada

In this rural area the closest kids get to cocaine is methamphetamine.

delichonon Genie 4

Every increment of advance in this field is an increment of evidence that we are simulations.

delichonon Wikipedia's Cleanup of AI-Generated Content

Effectively this is a project to help evolve AI to pass the Turing test for Wikipedia contributors.

delichonon Somebody please stop the spam texts

A technical fix is waiting in the new toolbox. A decision model can filter out most SMS spam with adequate accuracy, speed and cost.

delichonon Eunice is almost here

I made it in the sense that a father makes a baby. I provided a little input at the conception and then someone else did most of the work. In this metaphor, fecund uteri have been commoditized.

delichonon Eunice is almost here

Over the last four decades I've written several food logging apps for my own use. They've never been good enough to release, because I've always wanted more from them. But last week I made one in about a half hour that is by far the best I've ever written or used.

I added a GrokBot, told it that it is my food logger, and to create a Google spreadsheet with the columns and sheets I need. After a couple of short iterations it was ready to go. Now to log anything I just prompt the bot with a little voice, text, or a photo of a meal, and it makes a (usually accurate) guess about what exactly I mean, looks up the nutrient stats, and logs it to the spreadsheet. To change any feature or refactor the spreadsheet I just describe the change and boom.

Before LLMs this would have been magic for a sophisticated developer, now it's table stakes for the frontier AI vendors available to any muggle. This was Eunice slapping me in the face and shouting Wake Up!

delichonon Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology

  Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS. Starlink is a commercial service owned and controlled by SpaceX. Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defensive activities and cannot be used for offensive military action, as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2110445577184133456

delichonon The Best Monopoly Strategy, Tested on 300M Games [video]

Forty six years ago this was the second thing I ever programmed on a computer. It was a TRS-80 model 3, and initially Quick BASIC was the only software I had for it. My first project was a todo app. The second was a Monopoly simulation that just ran around the board to estimate which squares were landed on most often. It worked, and the high I got from that addicted me and kicked off a coding career. That damn computer should have come with a warning label.

delichonon Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you

The nearest Wikipedia entry to me is about a 3 hours 15 minute walk away, the nearest town. But there are so many interesting things closer, perhaps I should add them to the wiki. Twenty minutes to the north there's a pleasant shady area at the bottom of a canyon with a fallen log with a curve that fits my buttocks nicely. Fifteen minutes to the southeast there is a dead elk cow that has only been 3/4 eaten by the local coyotes, etc., and has a quite remarkable odor. To the northeast is the spot where I found a perfect arrowhead, the prize of my collection. But maybe it's better for me to horde these places to myself.

delichonon [dead]

The flying version is a concept car that was announced as "invitation only", meaning not planned to be for sale to the general public. There was no claim that it will be street legal to fly. It can in fact leave the ground under its own power, stay airborne for seconds, and land safely. Where is the lie?

delichonon The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck

It's a good sign when people have to resort to protesting a one hour suspension of one social media account to get worked up about corporate tyranny.

delichonon Europe EV sales rose 70.3% in September, 32.6% of market share

Is there anyone in the world who did more to make this happen than Donald Trump? Maybe Vladimir Putin?

delichonon I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories

You can't both be nice and believe that LLMs are useful tools?

delichonon A death, a plagiarism scandal and a quest for revenge: the tale of Otto Z

Conspiracy theorists, unlike normal people, find it easy to believe that people will expend enormous effort to create an illusion. I'd like to take this opportunity to say we told you so.

delichonon Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse

We're a rural subdivision that just needs to share private road and water system maintenance between land owners. HOAs are a simple lightweight form of governance for this. We can't add more services without pricing residents on fixed incomes out of their retirement homes. There is no growth or common development to manage. We don't need or want police or tax power or the overhead of incorporation.

Our property taxes are so low they have made previously suburban grown men shed tears of joy.