Hacker News Reader

eventualcompon There are no "rogue" AI agents

Legal culpability is one of the few motives for working appropriately on misalignment. If I/my startup can self-absolve from an infinite paperclip machine problem while getting rich off of it, why should I not?

eventualcompon PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock

I would like to define my own thresholds for exploration/exploitation so that I can shape the person I want to be, thanks.

eventualcompon I don't want the details

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945241#48951538

Quoting myself here: Amazon is heterogeneous. So much so, that positive anecdotes and negative anecdotes are near worthless without specifying the org. I don't want to name bad orgs but what org are you talking about?

eventualcompon ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector

> created in under 15 minutes

This is an artificial constraint that does not serve the reader. Where did the 15 minute constraint come from?

eventualcompon Compressing a flag to 11 bits

That is an orthogonal matter and maybe my imagination is limited. But when I think of realistic new flags I do not think of a union jack missing its right diagonal in the corner (e.g. if we decide to decompose the UJ primitive).

We could also complain that the crescent is a complex primitive. Why not define it with three parameters: two circle radii with a center offset?

Choosing the primitives is hard and requires domain knowledge/taste, and finding a simple enough implementation solving for key usecases (e.g. decent coverage of maps, meaningful bit encoding) and descoping (e.g. deciding on no emblems) is also hard.

But I am personally impressed with the primitives the author created and the scope simplifications done to achieve it.

eventualcompon Compressing a flag to 11 bits

Maybe there's an allegory to the sciences. But I rather a model be suboptimal in encoding that can be used to generate hypothetical reasonable flags in its unpopulated states, than having an optimal encoding which doesn't answer questions or reveal possibilities in its unpopulated states. Like what does flag #0xFE look like in an 8-bit encoding? I really like the idea of driving compressed trees in reverse with random data to generate new fascinating (valid) sequences.

Also, for compressing into 8 bits - is this not like saying "I can compress all of Shakespeare's plays in 6 bits" because there are ~39 plays, but then the size of the "shakespearezip" is just the sum of the works?

eventualcompon We must pace the frontier

I think if nuclear weapons were unregulated then we would probably have blown up by now.

eventualcompon What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?

I feel like there would either be too many locks or too much contention on something like /var/log or /tmp if that API was ever exposed to userspace.

eventualcompon Intrusive linked lists (2019)

Waiter, waiter! More optimization articles without benchmarks, please!

eventualcompon The Internet Is Kind of a Predatory Cesspit Now

Thanks for commenting and acknowledging that it's challenging. My mates and myself have definitely fallen into this. Reminds me of that hackernews post about how doomerism is a siren's song for genZ, forget where it is.

eventualcompon SQLite as a Document Database (2020)

Almost 6 years old. (2020).

eventualcompon AWS Acquires DuckDB

Devs gotta eat. Yeah the code is out there but the code is a result of a lot of thinking, prioritization, research into what is needed from the actual product. So now AWS owns that mindshare and talent and will (probably heavily) influence its decisions. I just hope DuckDB doesn't stray from its goal of being the SQLite (e.g. embedded) OLAP.

eventualcompon Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

> I declined to take that offer. I had missed several business meetings that cost me actual money. I couldn't donate blood for years because I had been to the Amazon and was tagged a malaria risk.

RTFP?

eventualcompon Protobuf has LSP support. You're welcome

Checked the contributor list, please disclose that you're a primary contributor.

eventualcompon A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life

No such thing as a too-low risk to reward ratio. That's basically free rewards.

eventualcompon Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

Why are we citing novelists for appeals to authority on something like intelligence. I thought this might be a figure on developmental psychology to give value to your comment, but it's not even that. Should I be citing George Orwell's doublethink to counter you?

eventualcompon Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal

Did you deliberately not address the prices skyrocketing comment? Not that the price is what it is, but that the price changed?

eventualcompon Proxmox VE now available for ARM64

If I could install PVE on my M series Mac, nothing would make me happier. It would be such a nice way to recycle such hardware once I finally upgrade.

eventualcompon TSON – A JSON superset with immutable, hash-pinned schemas

I just use Amazon Ion as my JSON superset of choice for my own sanity, and downconvert to JSON when (if) it matters, it's not even bad and it supports comments. Hell there's a freaking Lisp for it now, too (Fusion). https://ion-fusion.dev/

Given also that it's a big tech technology I am going to wager that it's not going away anytime soon.

eventualcompon Thanks FedEx, This Is Why We Keep Getting Phished (2024)

If I had a nickel for every post I saw on HN front page involving companies confusing people on phishing-like patterns today, I would have two nickels. Which is not a lot but still weird that it happened twice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49172834

eventualcompon Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

A few days multiplied by the number of skills I once had translates to well over two months of lost time.

eventualcompon Teach yourself programming in ten years (1998)

Programming without writing, to me, feels like doing mathematics by reading proofs but not doing proofs. Which quite frankly works very poorly for me. I write code if, for nothing else, so that I can spot bad code/proofs with an easier time, rather than dealing with an equation that blew up in prod.

eventualcompon Recursion is lying to you

no mention of dynamic programming for dealing with recursive functions? Dynamic programming was built for this, you don't even need to thrash the heap as much as that trampoline. Instantiate your array, make sure you set your base cases and loops so that you don't step in an `undefined` hole, and then recurse in reverse.

eventualcompon Design is compromise

Is this a response to marketing lingo specifically or some other cultural phenomenon? There's a difference between what you want to do to advance your goals (e.g. compromising), and what you want to say for visibility for whoever's goals they are (e.g. "uncompromising" the customer's goals).

There might be a deeper point being communicated, not sure, but I see no issue here.

eventualcompon Asked Codex to redesign a page; it pushed my repo to OpenAI infra

Why? Why do people submit content for our reading when it is not their words? Does it give legitimacy to them? Does it push an agenda? Does it make you look professional? Is this for some kind of executive or boss?

"The part I have to be Fair about" "Why it did this", "Why this should bother you", "honest framing", ...

The things you are doing differently are not legitimate guardrails either. An AI article warrants AI-generated criticism, so I'm not going to say more.

eventualcompon Why do you suck at juggling now?

That way, you can get promoted from Loser to Clueless. [1]

[1] https://ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-t...

eventualcompon Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality – Worse on Purpose

The market for lemons is always bustling, I guess [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

eventualcompon Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

Any mechanism you find that can do this could also be used for money laundering, no? By way of identifying that money laundering in the US should not be possible (meaning without legal consequence), then this too should not be possible.

eventualcompon Qwen 3.8

Ad hominem is good for the heart, I hear.

eventualcompon Setting up your spare Mac for Claude Code to control, a step-by-step guide

Your LLM can fuck that up badly if your LLM starts to take loans, right? Or BNPL regardless of sandboxing?