HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

popalchemist

611 karma · joined July 17, 2022

submissionscomments
popalchemist··on Tell HN: HN has lost the joy for me
Broadly speaking, all the progressives and creatives have left HN.

It began several years ago. Now, this place is filled with a certain type of person...

There are many reasons for it but part of it is that the moderation team actively curtails all discussion of progressive or political topics even as the world tilts into chaos and strife due to technological issues that are relevant to this community and its parent company.

They claim it is in service of maintaining a conflict-free community and that they are "apolitical" but that is a deception, a straight up lie - censorship of speech is INTRINSICALLY political and the class whom it benefits the most is the class in power. That means the censorship policy here is literally authoritarianism in action. Just dressed up as innocent old "moderation policy". It's a lie. And anyone and everyone who has ever spoken out against Trump, Sam Altman, etc, on this site finds out very quickly that they are subject to thought policing. Either explicitly with moderation actions or implicitly with the threat of a ban -- or, more insidious, the shadow ban. Which the mods here are known to use. (You are silenced without knowing it.)

So, naturally, the only kind of personality who would condone or enjoy such authoritarian suppression of speech which benefits the rich and stifles all opposition to their will would be -- you guessed it -- people who are themselves uncritical authoritarians. The "top down authority" model makes sense to them.

These people may not recognize themselves by that label. Nevertheless it is a psychological type and it has to do with the structure of the parent-child relationship. It is still prevalent in America, especially in red states (though it isn't limited to red states -- other cohorts might be religious families, families of european descent, families with old money or strong patriarchal figures...) where the parent is the "boss" and the child must conform to what is expected.

Those people internalize a "whatever the boss says is right and who am I to fight it" attitude.

Those are the ones who are left behind when all the sensible adults recognize that the speech here is cooled, stifled, or outright silenced in service of the VC's who are actively burning the world to the ground.

popalchemist··on Are Babies Conscious?
[flagged]
popalchemist··on Clean room implementation of Adobe products
The worst thing that can happen is a photoshop file save gets corrupted. You can mitigate that completely with backups.
popalchemist··on Clean room implementation of Adobe products
how was this achieved? Is this group super well funded? Is this just Claude churning for 3 months?
popalchemist··on AnyPS5: Port PS5 binaries to PC without emulation (87% system libraries mapped)
It's a response to the loss of ancilliary income that used to be derived from "home video" (which used to make up about 50% of a movie's total income). So it's directly analogous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6n0rinKTFY

popalchemist··on In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life
I didn't say anything about the question of the origin of life being irrelevant, but nonsensical, in that if consciousness (which can also be framed as life-force, rather than seeing those as two distinct subjects) IS fundamental, and thus is the first-mover, then conceiving of an "origin" of it is a category error, as space-time would be made FROM it, rather than being the substrate within which it appears.

It is not a discarding of the question but a recontextualizing.

popalchemist··on Shaders, WebGPU Components for React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, JavaScript and Framer
It's unclear where the boundary is between the open source repo and the paid product. Which is which and can the repo be used without the product?
popalchemist··on Are Babies Conscious?
Logic does not have any bearing on what is sacred; meaning arises from a domain of experience that lies outside logic. That is well known both ontologically and in the realm of neuroscience - not that someone with such a narrow view of the world as you would care. It's clear all you are trying to do is defend a view you hide behind. What is below that is despair, and below despair, fear, and below fear, feeble mindedness.
popalchemist··on Are Babies Conscious?
Not being able to speak doesn't = not having language.

https://theconversation.com/babies-can-learn-language-sounds...

https://www.monoglotanxiety.com/blog/sciene-of-language-newb...

https://www.aaas.org/news/babies-brains-are-primed-their-nat...

I could go on for each of your claims but this should suffice to make a curious person want to revisit their assumptions. Each one touches not only on speech but memory.

You moved the goalpost in your second comment, so I am not going to consider you worth engaging beyond that - you're clearly a bad faith arguer.

popalchemist··on AnyPS5: Port PS5 binaries to PC without emulation (87% system libraries mapped)
The Hollywood equivalent to this is to make only AAA blockbuster titles in order to drive theatrical ticket sales. It is a strategy with diminishing returns - just look at the box office trajectory over the last 25 years.
popalchemist··on Photocraft: An open-source, clean-room reimplementation of Adobe Photoshop
Seems legit. Wonder what it would take to get this working in the browser.
popalchemist··on Account bans on Reddit
reddit is no longer what it once was. it is now an ai-content-generation farm. It years ago abandoned its original ethos in favor of ever more fascist tendencies such as this - the unilateral silencing of individuals without cause or recourse is just one of many. There are outright bans on opinion. The overton window is now enforced via LLM.
popalchemist··on Paramount Skydance has completed its $111B merger with Warner Bros. Discovery
Have you been paying attention to american politics the last 15 years or so? It's become astoundingly clear that Mossad has blackmail material on virtually every major politician and uses it to get its way - including billions of dollars in funding and drawing the US into conflicts that do not benefit us and instead result in the deaths of Americans (and as of Trump's statement yesterday, the threat of bombings on American soil.)
popalchemist··on Paramount Skydance has completed its $111B merger with Warner Bros. Discovery
The most significant thing here is not just the inevitable loss of jobs and the adverse effects of conglomeration/monopolies, but that the most historically filmmaker/artist-friendly studio is now co-owned by MAGA billionaires and the Saudis, direct opponents to democracy.
popalchemist··on Are Babies Conscious?
You've misunderstood if you think I am making a religious argument. I am simply pointing to the religion as evidence that the belief in the sacredness of infant life is universal.

You are the outlier with your misanthropic belief.

popalchemist··on Nuxt 4.6
I love Vue. Got sick of Nuxt and the Nuxt Team's chaos years ago. Went pure vite. Never missed it once.
popalchemist··on Coyote vs. ACME pro AI rights?
no. the cartoon characters are never questioned as being sentient or not, which is the thing ai rights hinges on.
popalchemist··on Are Babies Conscious?
That is actually a belief (or an ideology), not a self-evident truth.

Not all conclusions must be checked. If that were the case we could never act.

Every decision relies upon nearly-infinite unstated assumptions or presumptions that do not have as their basis definite knowledge.

Specifically, with the idea of babies being conscious or not conscious, if they are not conscious, then the alternative is that they are a sort of vegetative being. Which then raises the question, why not kill them?

Surely you object to that and not just on a logical level but on a deeply felt level. You know it to be wrong. Which brings me to my next point:

There ARE other ways of knowing besides logic - the greeks referred to gnosis, Dianoia, Sophia, Mathesis, Aletheia, Oida, and so on... scientific knowledge would be just one of many.)

Furthermore, in philosophy it is long acknowledged that there are truths that are beyond our capacity to know in any kind of definite or ultimate sense -- some even say that ALL knowing can NOT be definite (Münchhausen Trilemma / Agrippa's Trilemma)...

I would posit that the domain of science is not the place one can make an arugment about meaning - such as assigning something sacred value -- so it is the wrong argument to force empiricism or logical proof as the approach for this question.

You need only have a child (or even a pet, for some people) of your own to understand that such experiences of meaning are known directly, not through formal proofs. They are felt before they make it to the cognitive consciousness, where logic occurs.

I feel like I am explaining being human to robots in this thread, so I will stop here. (If you are on the spectrum or there is any other explanation for why you would not understand this already, please say so. It would relieve me of a great discord.)

popalchemist··on Are Babies Conscious?
You're wrong on every one of those claims. Would you like links?
popalchemist··on JayDB – Ship apps with no back end at all
But obviously not all apps can work without a runtime (server, edge functions, etc). So this must be meant for a niche type of app. What type of app is that? Who is this for?
popalchemist··on Are Babies Conscious?
LLM's etc probably do have some part to play in it; but I would go further and say that the the hyper-fragmenting of what used to be social spheres with a shared sense of reality into a party-of-1 "recommended for you" algorithm has reduced the abiltiy to "mentalize" across the board for the perpetually-online generations (millennials onward). I think it's an epidemic of cognitive blindness that has traits similar to sociopathy as a byproduct.
popalchemist··on Anthropic reported diary entry to police, woman faces felony charge
No good evidence other than their openly stated desire for that regulation? Dario and Sam have both made open pleas for it, repeatedly.
popalchemist··on Are Babies Conscious?
It's not bizarre. What is bizarre is questioning whether babies are conscious.
popalchemist··on I built a $5/month TV app because I got tired of how expensive streaming is
They don't. The landing page says "We do not sell or provide any content or IPTV services." Seems it's for local media.
popalchemist··on Are Babies Conscious?
Yes, it's good that the science exists. But framing an obviously true fact - one which underpins so much of our morality - as up for debate (as the headline does), is caustic.
popalchemist··on Are Babies Conscious?
This is a bizarre question to ask and frame as an unknown. Anyone who has held or had to watch after a baby can tell you that, although there is plenty of "autopilot" software running the show, there are moments of complete lucidity.

The complete disconnect between journalism and literally the most fundamental of basic human experiences is astounding.

If babies were not conscious then killing them would be no problem. It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred.

popalchemist··on Show HN: SoldStack – sold prices API for secondhand clothes
AKA how to further minimize the value of what poor people own, at scale. Great.
popalchemist··on Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious? – David J. Chalmers (2024)
Can't stand Chalmers, or clickbait titles. The rule is - if there's a question in the title, the answer is no. And of course for anyone invested and intellectually honest enough to care about the question, one need only point to the fact that it's just math.
popalchemist··on Altman: `World should accept some bad things happening' for the benefits of AI
You can't just assert machiavellianism as the norm. Sam is an extreme edge case, and while the system itself may be machiavellian, the majority of people live within it despite disagreement with it, or even with active animosity toward it. That has been my experience my whole life. The only people who are actively expressing joy with capitalism come in 2 flavors: people who experienced something much worse in a country with a different system, and the uber-rich.
popalchemist··on The Tao of Backup
HTTPS cert is invalid
Page 1 of 22Next →