Hacker News Reader

smitty1eon From confession to conspiracy: How the Wedgewood fake polls story spread

That kinda rings true here.

Would we have obtained the same "confession" after next Tuesday had they remained unexposed?

smitty1eon What Security Teams Need to Know About Agents Using Abliterated Models

One hoped to find the definition of obliterated, but those hopes were obliterated.

smitty1eon Free Software Is a Failure

Needs a (2021) in the title.

smitty1eon Danish Government silently drops plan to dump MS Office

The Danish effort to emancipate themselves did not last as long as Munich's => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

Possibly some of the newer technologies (to avoid the first and third vowels in the Roman Alphabet) will one day bring liberty.

smitty1eon Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology

Maybe generalize and be thoughtful about all dependencies across the board.

smitty1eon Corporate Linux

At the other end of the spectrum, I have never written a line of assembly code, much less used a punch card.

smitty1eon Flatpak – An Insecurity Nightmare

My chief grief with flatpak had more to do with the composition policy than the mechanism.

If one's use case for a tool (e.g. QGIS) requires extensions that sit outside of how the flatpak was composed, well, sorry.

smitty1eon US federal budget deficit jumps 12% in one year to nearly $2 Trillion

“America has the best politicians money can buy.”--Will Rogers

And look at the mod cost of telling the truth. #hahahaha

smitty1eon US federal budget deficit jumps 12% in one year to nearly $2 Trillion

1. Elect Claude.

2. Prompt Claude for a balanced budget.

...

??? Profit!

smitty1eon US federal budget deficit jumps 12% in one year to nearly $2 Trillion

It take a hero to dive on the grenade.

Such dives tend to be fatal.

Until AI can produce a blast-management plan to ensure the hero's survival, the necessary courage shall remain elusive.

smitty1eon How to Formalize All of Mathematics

I thought Stephen Wolfram had already done some victory laps.

smitty1eon Vi Hart's Big Navier-Stokes Post

Glad that this is a real person.

smitty1eon X Is Bad, Though

Thank you. That was far more nicely put than I was inclined.

We'll have to give it at least another decade to assess whether Musk is a hero or villain, but nothing in TFA pushed me toward the latter.

smitty1eon So, you’d like to sell your print issues of The Onion?

And yet, moderH8ers gonna hate.

smitty1eon So, you’d like to sell your print issues of The Onion?

They had a mood swing ahead of the 2008 election, and truly hilarious characters like Herbert Kornfeld were canceled.

https://theonion.com/cash-room-bitch-be-havin-my-shortie-181...

smitty1eon You might want to try being less creative

I'm reminded of the Nick Raskulinecz interview[0], where he prevailed upon Rush to re-use some of their motifs because "you own that" and there would be no shame in alluding to their own art instead of always doing something fresh.

So you hear a little "Bastille Day" in "Headlong Flight". Oh, yes.

[0] https://youtu.be/oQognzPVOIo?is=XAiy0EhMps3QrdrR

smitty1eon I'm still around.. I'm just not writing here

Hope she keeps her pimp hand strong.

smitty1eon MXC - a sandboxed code execution system

Asked Grok the difference between mxc and flatpak:

"So MXC is a cross-platform “what may this workload touch?” layer aimed at agents. Flatpak is a Linux app format whose sandbox happens to share a backend with MXC on Linux."

smitty1eon An algorithmic failure beneath the secret ballot

> Why?

For a non-trivial amount of ballots, the overhead of securely managing the ballots is substantial. You're casually driving up staffing costs all over the place, and legal challenges will ensue if everything is less than meticulous.

To your point, though, Virginia blows a great deal of money on elections. Check out all 19" of our local glory: https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/elections/sites/elections/file...

smitty1eon Ask HN: How would you feel if we nationalized Google?

Given how sucktacular Google's basic search has become, I don't see how dropping it into the Swamp can worsen it.

smitty1eon An algorithmic failure beneath the secret ballot

This is the United States, where the need to over-engineer everything is never suppressed.

smitty1eon An algorithmic failure beneath the secret ballot

> Extend the question why are rapidity of results and ease of setup/teardown of the voting place design goals at all?

Because it is a low-frequency, high-importance activity that uses public facilities.

smitty1eon An algorithmic failure beneath the secret ballot

Because people instant gratification.

We close the polls at 1900 and have a Collector Officer run one copy of the data on a thumb drive to the County.

The Chief gets to deliver a backup a couple hours later.

Hand-counting the ballots instead of scanning would be expensive in terms of time and money, and error-prone.

I'd argue that Fairfax County, VA is about optimal, all factors considered.

As I'm fond of saying: "Virginia is for lovers...of elections."

smitty1eon An algorithmic failure beneath the secret ballot

I've got over a decade of experience supporting elections using a ballot scanner.

The need to balance voter security, with auditability, rapid Ness of results, with ease of setup/teardown of the voting place, is hard to beat with scanners.

smitty1eon The mental health of young men is declining. Experts warn it could get worse

Just telling the truth,

Even subtexually,

Seems an inevitable

Underbussing on this

Site.

smitty1eon AI Companies Are Parasites

> Reddit is selling access to its data, but that data is human-generated and depends on a flagging community the company seems, at best, indifferent to.

Well, how much genitAIlia do you need to see?

smitty1eon What's the future for pure math research in the age of AI?

It's not my contention that AI & people do not both conform to Sturgeon's Law[0].

Rather, that AI is unlikely to produce a fresh Marcin Patrzalek[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

[1] https://youtu.be/zbfKFa-reBE?is=pHxTCFcfyU0evbvi

smitty1eon The evolution of effective altruism

If this is "conquered the world", one wonders what The Economist thinks defeat would resemble.

smitty1eon What's the future for pure math research in the age of AI?

One wonders at the fresh/derived breakdown.

"AI slop", for example, appears a regression toward some "mean".