Hacker News Reader

rendxon Side-by-side comparison of how AI models answer moral dilemmas

Nice exchange, thank you! The idea is to not ask either one of the groups to change their behavior, but to show understanding first. I agree that certain actions are 'wrong'. Things people do can be very wrong, and understandable at the same time. People quite often do not act out of rational thinking but out of emotions. And these emotions can be very strong and very 'old'. When I remind myself I am not "meant" by them I can feel less offended, which allows me in turn to both stay in understanding and protect myself. Speech is just words after all.

rendxon Side-by-side comparison of how AI models answer moral dilemmas

I can, but I doubt you're going to like it. I invite you to reflect on it before you reject it outright, and maybe ask your favorite LLM or search engine for more information on this train of thought. Thanks.

Because of systemic racism, treating you and me "equally" as you ask for would continue the discrimination. In order to undo the discrimination, we're asked to take a step back and be truthful to ourselves and others about our existing privileges and about all the systemic racism we're benefitting from. We don't have to agree with every single action of those trying to change it, and it's certainly not our "fault", but unless you have better ideas on how to fix the issues and repair some of the damages, and put those ideas into practice, we can at least show some respect and dignity in the face of centuries of very violent suppression of minorities and natives. Because not doing that would make us 'supremacists' indeed. We have the privilege that we don't have to experience outright racism day by day by day, generation over generation over generation; we're asked to at least educate ourselves about it, instead of crying out for not being treated 'equally' here and there. Some humbleness.

It's not meant to offend you as an individual. It's not your fault. But what we can do is (trying to at least a bit) understand where all the rage and despair is coming from, bottled up for so many generations, and that while we're "innocent", we're still "targets", and rightfully so -- our ancestors profitted and so did we, by association. I agree that it can hurt to experience it in little things, but I am mindful that it is part of my tiny contributions to accept it, and I understand that if I express my frustration it will cause pain in those that don't have my privileges, and will not in their lifetimes. I do not want to be treated equally. I really have sufficient privileges that it's fine to take a step back in some situations. I don't have to take it personally.

There's plenty of good literature about these dynamics. If you're interested, I can recommend some. We can at least try to listen and understand what is being asked of us.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_defensiveness#White_frag...

rendxon New information extracted from Snowden PDFs through metadata version analysis

Are you confusing me with the authors, or why would you think I could? And I'm asking 'tolerance' to clarify their question, which means I wouldn't be able to answer it even if I had the knowledge they were after, since I don't understand what they're asking.

rendxon New information extracted from Snowden PDFs through metadata version analysis

Are you asking how much was done with pen and paper, and how much of it was done on a computer, i.e. machine assisted? Where do you draw the line? How is "hands-on" in contrast to anything? Is it only "hands-on" when you don't use any tool to assist you?

I suspect you're inquiring about the use of LLMs, and about that I wonder: Why does it matter? Why are you asking?

rendxon FFmpeg 8.0

I guess you're getting downvoted since the claim that "FFmpeg is now somewhat broken" remains unsubstantiated. You're relying on information from LLMs which by definition are closer to random guesses than anything else. Effectively, what you're saying is that you cannot be bothered to learn the actual, albeit complex, syntax of FFmpeg to solve your problem, which is totally fine and up to you, but your conclusion that the tool is broken is like saying "this car is broken" when you don't know how to operate it and drive.

rendxon European Commission issues call for evidence on open source

They do, and have been for a while now.

https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/

https://nlnet.nl/project/ currently listing 1566 foss projects that have received financial support

rendxon Memoir by Steve Jobs’ eldest daughter describes ways he was cruel to her (2018)

You are. We are. With our powers, and money is one of them, comes responsibility. We can decide how and if you respond, but it's still ours.

rendxon Memoir by Steve Jobs’ eldest daughter describes ways he was cruel to her (2018)

For me, it is important to know and reflect on these stories so we can collectively heal and learn from them, regarding child abuse, narcissism, and especially (what is also mentioned in the article) enabling such abuse. This is why I posted it.

If we bury these stories, and always only talk about it when people are long dead or not at all, we as communities will not evolve out of those patterns. A culture that "honors the dead" by not talking about the bad stuff they've done is catering to its abusers.

Today, we should talk about Trump, Musk, etc, also in the light of how they treat their children. And what we can and should do to protect those that cannot protect themselves.

We all have responsibility - the ability to respond. If we look away from the stories, we will also look away when something happens near us. And it should encourage us to grow in how we treat other people (especially children) around us. Yes, this can bring up difficult feelings about our own acts, and our own childhood experiences. And it should.

rendxon Eat Real Food

Who or what defines what is "too much" of any ingredient? Isn't that a scoring system too?

European NutriScore "assigns products a rating letter from A (best) to E (worst), with associated colors from green to red. High content of fruits and vegetables, fibers, protein and healthy oils (rapeseed, walnut and olive oils) per 100 g of food product promote a preferable score, while high content of energy, sugar, saturated fatty acids, and sodium per 100 g promote a detrimental score." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutri-Score

rendxon The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

> "relax" or "do not disturb" modes - curious if that actually works for anyone?

Ever since I've owned a smartphone, they have been on "do not disturb" 24/7. People that know me know they won't reach me directly, but that I will call them back eventually. I do have a couple of voice calls every day; I schedule them ahead of time based on my own actions, and set an alarm to take out the phone.

I am typically involved in something and I don't want to be disturbed during it; it may just be thinking, or reading, or actually talking to a human being present with me; why would I ever want to be disturbed? I only check my phone when I want to actively perform some task with it anyway, e.g. to look at maps, and then I put it away again. I don't mind carrying it around and needing to use it increasingly for tickets and such. I do not experience this as "self control". I don't have the urge to take out my wallet or keys or umbrella unless I need them either. Why would I.

I typically (also) carry a paper book to read on public transport or in cafés.

rendxon Los Angeles ends strange rite of passage with new fridge law

I've lived in Germany for four decades with plenty of moving around, and have yet to move into a place where a kitchen was not either provided or left there from the previous tenant (sometimes with a more symbolic compensation; it's not worth to rip it out since it often only fits that particular place anyway so there is pressure to give it away cheaply).

rendxon The most friendless place on Earth

"In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

rendxon Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust That Society Needs to Thrive, 2nd Edition

Underrated!

rendxon Children and Helical Time

"The basic stratum of the personality and the associated underlying belief systems that hold it in place derive from a number of factors: the shadow aspects of parents; the same unresolved elements in the lives of grandparents (the ovum from which the mother sprang was already formed at eleven weeks gestation in the maternal grandmother); a commensurate and immeasurable twine of psychogenetic ancestral memories; the prenate’s own “baggage” from pre-conception; the experience of the conception itself; the phenomenology of implantation; and the whole duration of the gestation period; all together form layers of affect in this self-forging process."

William R. Emerson, Ph.D. https://emersonbirthrx.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Journa...

rendxon The Sacred Story Book – Powerful Stories That Will Transform How You See Trauma

PDF: https://cdnc.heyzine.com/files/uploaded/v3/4d01e27a7c37dadb6...

rendxon Nicolas Guillou, French ICC judge sanctioned by the US and “debanked”

You may want to look up "sanction" in a dictionary, and then come back and explain how the ICC sanctioned anyone. They have zero executive power.

rendxon Nicolas Guillou, French ICC judge sanctioned by the US and “debanked”

It's still going. NGI ("Next Generation Internet") is a Horizon Europe program, part of the EU's mission to strengthen European economy. It doesn't mean that any of the projects that receive subgrants from that pot are officially adopted for anything. It is the NGI grantees who decide which subgrantees receive funding, not the EU (in this case, NLnet Foundation). Hundreds of open source projects have received financial support from this pot.

rendxon No Longer Burying the Lead: A New Media Culture for the Metacrisis

It's the title the author, a war journalist, chose for his article. It may be a mistake of his, or, my interpretation, it may well be a wordplay, given the content he is discussing.

rendxon CIA Star Gate Project: An Overview (1993) [pdf]

In case anyone was wondering:

> $2,000,000 in 1991 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $4,759,500.73 today

https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1991?amount=20000...

Second source: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=2%2C000%2C000....

> $4,816,077.27

Still not a lot.

rendxon [dead]

Proper markdown: https://write.as/3k6gb4heu8whz.md

If mods see this: please edit. Missed the window.

rendxon The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300

In the video, the guy is looking for some official contact at SONY to authorize an interview with a long-term SONY CRT designer and employee who already agreed to give it but can't do without official approval. Public channels all yielded no response.

Leaving this here just in case! :)

rendxon Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

> "Gaslighting" would be suspect

Gaslighting would be simply incorrect, since gaslighting refers to an elaborate scheme of making somebody doubt their own perception/sanity. It a a severe form of abuse, requires an ongoing relationship with power dynamics (it cannot happen from a single instance of interaction), and typically results in long-term PTSD for the victim(s).

Agree on the capturing. Watering down terms is highly unfortunate for everyone.

rendxon 'It's surreal': How US sanctions lock ICC judges out of daily life

> This isn't really accurate from a strict reading of the Rome Statute, there are treaty obligations for party states

Which are members voluntarily, and are enforcing whatever law they want on their own, national territory; not outside of it.

> Since the US considers the ICC a serious threat to sovereignty

Again: Fact is, the ICC is writing policy recommendations. Member states decided to adopt/agree with them, and enforce them on their own territory. It is a US invention to claim this a threat to the US national sovereignty. Nobody is arguing to enforce ICC rulings on United States territory.

> Making friends is not really the end goal of foreign policy.

You can claim that it isn't, OK. But I don't get how you can write it as if that was a hard fact. You make it sound as if that was a universal definition, which it isn't. Nobody, and no country (as in "the sum of its citizens"), likes it when others enter their boundaries and act like they have permission to make or enforce rules there without a contract/agreement. It's fine if you don't like the friend/enemy wording. It still is a hostile act.

rendxon 'It's surreal': How US sanctions lock ICC judges out of daily life

ICC claims jurisdiction in Palestine. Whether Israel or the US accept that is their business. Nobody is interfering with their national autonomy. I see no "imposition" of jurisdiction here by the ICC. The only country that is imposing their jurisdiction here, and enforcing it outside of their own jurisdiction, are the US. The ICC merely issues documents; everybody is free to agree or disagree with their documents. They have no power of enforcement. The ICC is only doing what they received as a task by the signatory countries of the Rome statute, which ultimately decide what actions to take or not. As such, you could say the ICC merely writes "policy recommendations". The US is the one taking action.

Can you point me at any action that the ICC has taken in the United States or Israel? No, because it is a court. It publishes documents. Legal opinions. You're totally free to decide whether you accept it as a "court" or not.

Can't you see that it is exactly this kind of US exceptionalism and international interfering that stirs hatred, and does not bring peace but breeds terrorism and war?

rendxon 'It's surreal': How US sanctions lock ICC judges out of daily life

A warning about what? That the US thinks it rules the world and is terrified enough to go after individuals who just happen to work for the wrong employer? That other parts of the world are not allowed to have their own sense and modalities of justice?

rendxon 'It's surreal': How US sanctions lock ICC judges out of daily life

Luz Ibanez: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/life-icc-judge-sanctioned...

I have few words to argue against what I consider to be 'midieval practices' that should not even exist as a thought in 'modern' Western 'democracies' on how to deal with international relations and law. Can you point me at the legal basis for this decision apart from "because we say so"? What crime did they commit? What they did as part of their job is not illegal. The US is not required to join and help actively enforce the court's decisions.

I don't mind differences of opinion. I do mind authoritarian, purely escalatory behavior not fit for a modern society with no rational basis behind it other than rage. There is no educational, pedagogical message behind this. The thought process behind actions like this seems to purely be "We happen to not agree with you, so we are in the right to hurt you" territory. Law enforcement is not meant for punishment for punishment's sake, it is meant to aim for correction. Anything else just creates more polarization and leads to more violence. I thought we had figured that out as civilization. It makes no sense.

rendxon 'It's surreal': How US sanctions lock ICC judges out of daily life

So? How is that the fault of the people working there? Would you want that to happen to you if you were working for a McDonalds, and McDonalds was deemed unhealthy in Europe and banned?

rendxon Our emotional pain became a product

> Has that understanding changed?

All you can measure is correlation. The rest are theories, and always have been.

"Heritability" is a misnomer, since research into genetics relies on twin studies, so it is impossible to delineate what is 'inherited' from influences during prenatal development. Since technology to "look into the womb" has vastly improved in the past decades, there is more and more research into prenatal effects, which shifts the potential narrative (working theory!) from "it's in the genes" to "it is prenatal trauma due to adverse environmental circumstances".

We don't really know if there ever was or is a "genetic predisposition". Remember, in contrast to "diagnoses" in medicine, psychological classifications such as "schizophrenia" do not describe etiology or biology, they merely describe observable symptoms, with a lot of overlap and redefinitions in between the different categories. More and more voices in the psychotherapeutic community argue that these classifications do more harm than good and should be replaced by a multidimensional system. At least in Europe, my understanding is that they serve mostly health insurance billing purposes, not patient-oriented treatment purposes.

The danger in the "genetic predisposition" line of arguments is that it may sound like something that cannot be "healed", only managed, which we know now thanks to epigenetic research and [brain] plasticity is not the case. Modern therapies can achieve more than merely manage symptoms, and what was previously believed to be "untreatable" is now known to be fixable. Which, as an aside, is one of the reasons why "narcisstic personality disorder" has been dropped, so "it doesn't exist any more".

rendxon Amazon: DRM-Free EBooks Will Be Downloadable in ePub and PDF Formats Soon

> Effective January 20, 2026, readers can download EPUB and PDF files of your DRM-free books from their Manage Your Content and Devices page on Amazon. Only verified purchasers who have bought your book can access the EPUB/PDF files. Customers who borrowed your books through Kindle Unlimited or other services can’t download the EPUB/PDF files, even if the books are DRM-free.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GDDXGH9VR22ACM8U

rendxon Our emotional pain became a product

> Severe mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar) is neurodevelopmental in origin

This is a theory, not fact. There are proponents from the medical community that argue otherwise.

Professor Jim van Os at Maastricht University Medical Centre: 'Schizophrenia' does not exist https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/02/160203090208.h...

Robin M. Murray, Department of Psychosis Studies, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience: "In the last 2 decades, it has become obvious that child abuse, urbanization, migration, and adverse life events contribute to the etiology of schizophrenia and other psychoses. […] I expect to see the end of the concept of schizophrenia soon." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5605250/

The Role of Childhood Trauma in Psychosis and Schizophrenia: A Systematic Review: "There is a correlation between histories of child maltreatment with several structural changes in the brain." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8858420/