HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

tarpitt

248 karma · joined May 31, 2026

submissionscomments
tarpitt··on Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance
Well maybe it could happen with actual reserve currencies, but it certainly doesn't happen with platinum level, diamond tier luxury fiat currencies.

Oh you didn't know? I bet you trade in "dollars". That's cute.

tarpitt··on We won't "just hang out"
Technology is this one-way ratcheting mechanism which will crush everything dignified within its trajectory. I'm attached to the idea that only the way out of this is up and out. That the solution is to escape into something(?) hyperreal that confounds the assumptions of our unescapable problem.

Not cyberspace or VR as we know it, but maybe something more real than that. Something that is limited in the way reality is limited.

>People used to settle towns in the dirt when they scarcely had anything to eat and what, we now can't open a community center, or a maker space?

The problem, which i have been grappling with for the past decade, is precisely that there is too much opportunity. there are too many options. Things are too interconnected. Human connection is devalued. I don't think you can merely solve it with more interconnection (although I will try).

When the founders of this country got here, they similarly did it to embrace the problems of a dynamic, dangerous, unsolved world, and to leave the glacial solved world behind them. They went from an old occupied world into a new virgin world.

And I agree with you that we need to be like them, founders of a new world, but I disagree with you about what that new world entails because we don't know of virgin lands that would free us from the grip of the old world anymore.

It used to be that if you wanted to go to a virgin land you would sail out into a remote island or rainforest something. But now that remote island also has sattelite internet and we have airplanes and boats and we realize it's not really that remote. We could go to mars and the technological arm of the old world would reach us. Maybe the virgin, disconnected world I seek could be an underworld or something, so that there is justification for it to be close and meaningful and disconnected from the overworld. I don't know.

We need to discover an unsolved world. Up and out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUvIiBUBe-g

tarpitt··on We won't "just hang out"
I think you make a good point. If BCI is limited or impossible then then the future may be very intricate - perhaps Dune-like in the sense that natural human capability becomes the measuring stick for achievement. Humanity will become a beautiful anachronism like mechanical watches or bonsai trees or something. We will become dedicated to the art and science of our own self-cultivation.

On the other hand, If BCI is possible and useful, life will be miserable and we will borg ourselves just to keep up with the cost of living. We will be brains in jars on server racks solving captchas or something. We'll be the solution to AI hardware prices- the paperclip machine will be capitalism and nature itself.

tarpitt··on I went to Mexico to test-drive the cars Americans can’t buy
They could open-source all of the car software/firmware and eliminate this regulation issue entirelty
tarpitt··on We won't "just hang out"
What are the qualifications to be a professional philosopher? is there a bar exam?
tarpitt··on We won't "just hang out"
Never say never
tarpitt··on We won't "just hang out"
The way I see it, we have two good options here. We can let go or be dragged.
tarpitt··on We won't "just hang out"
>take a dancing lesson

This is gonna be boring as hell, especially if you can download justdance.exe to your brain.

>get laid

It's not possible or desirable for many thanks to the current state of sexual involution. I suspect that the hyperintelligent sex robots might also may make this inviable as a source of human-human connection.

>Grow some vegetables, build a castle, anything

You need land ownership, which, as one of the few limited things in a post-scarcity society might just explode in value. But I admit it would be pretty cool if the post-scarcity world is basicially just like minecraft creative mode do whatever you want type of environment. Still, with some limitations still in place, I imagine it will look more like 2b2t.

tarpitt··on We won't "just hang out"
There is no life outside of the internet. The nexus of canonical, shared reality now exists online.

You can try to make friends outside of the internet, but all of those friends will use the internet, or their friends-of-friends will use the internet. Eventually you realize that the social group is centered on the internet, and by trying to avoid the internet you separate yourself from reality more than you connect with others IRL more by avoiding it.

Not to mention people have their social needs met by the internet that would otherwise force them to go out and form IRL friendships. So people who would otherwise be friends with you aren't available in the real world. So it's this social involution.

Before the internet was this sort of escape from reality for nerds, but now it IS reality. It is super-real. You are a dork if you don't use it.

tarpitt··on We won't "just hang out"
The person reading this comment is living in such a simulated reality, but forgot. Can you wake up?
tarpitt··on Show HN: Steal My Bitcoin
Now if I find a $100 in a dumpster, that's a different story...
tarpitt··on Show HN: Steal My Bitcoin
It's increased! It was $500 an hour ago and it's 2k now. I didn't bother because I figured I'm not fast enough
tarpitt··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
2xCMP 170 HX, epyc 9654 ES. I won't pretend its cheap, the value of this setup has probably doubled or tripled since i've bought the components.

On the cheap end you can do something like qwen 3.8 27B with 24GB on a laptop, and a very minimal linux configuration. That's more similar to my previous setup.

You can also do a lot more with mixed setups like cpu-moe. I could probably run GLM 5.2 on this hardware with the right setup, albeit without LoRA. I know people have been doing this to run qwen 3.8-flash-next with 32GB cards.

tarpitt··on Dessa: Conversation Model trained only on speech
What do you think human relationships and intimacy entail and why can't some sort of high-tech robot legitimately emulate that?

>it sounds like you view women as a warm fleshlight

I think most people accept the fact that women and men are sexual objects. If you view me as a mysoginist for believing that, then I think I understand why you might think our society is still patriarchal or something.

In fact, I can't say that most straight men expect something cerebral or spiritual out of their partners. But even if it was the case, you could expect that a hyper-inteligent machine would exceed human capabilities in this regard.

The only types of people who aren't going to be humping robots are members of isolated societies who have a grudge against technology. Hence the amish.

There are an increasing number of loser men and women who have these AI partners. I think we may see a tipping point where "genetic dead ends" comprise the majority of the population.

With this level of sexual competition, who can blame them? If you're not at the apex you can put in the effort to reproduce but then your offspring are just faced by the same problem, one generation removed.

The majority of men born in this generation won't reproduce. For the average man, there is no sense in doing anything but devoting your life to some high-risk/high-reward strategy. I don't even know what that entails these days, but apparently it involves a lot of sports betting.

I'm normally endowed, as are like 90% of men (so I think these types of baseless insults fall flat). But if I wasn't, would you rather I pass on 3.5 inches of american steel to the next generation? Your insult stands regardless and reveals your underlying preference. If I was endowed well enough, I'm sure you would see my point.

It makes no difference personally, as a gay man who is uninterested in exploring robosexuality. I prefer to work my clankers.

tarpitt··on Apple Security Research Device
It would be. You would have more eyeballs if you had an open bootloader instead of this program they're offering.
tarpitt··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
Im running Qwen 3.8 Flash Next with an abliteration LoRA, its pretty good. I only really use claude sonnet outside of it, and it is on par

K3 and GLM 5.3 flash are pretty mid by comparison when you consider how much more it will take to run them

tarpitt··on Dessa: Conversation Model trained only on speech
so pretty much anyone who isn't amish?

In the future you won't be able to tell.

tarpitt··on Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone
I considered getting another pixel with grapheneOS or calyxOS a couple years ago. It's definitely an option, and you can get used-but-still-supported pixels for like $100.

I bought a fp4 from murena because it is supported by postmarketOS, and the postmarketOS support has kept improving. I think the end goal is to run some sort of convergent linux that is as similar to desktop linux in environment as possible. That removes the requirement to completely re-write all the userspace tools for android.

grapheneOS is a dead end as long as it is android based and google and OEMs that are indifferent to open source plight lead android development. A very well written dead-end but a developmental dead end nonetheless.

GrapheneOS developers won't support other platforms because they don't have extensive enough trusted computing "security" features. Trusted computing the nail which seals its own coffin and locks anyone out of running their own OS.

tarpitt··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
I think the solution is a system like cryptocurrency to where the responsibility, liability, custody, and capability to defend oneself lies in the end user.

It doesn't even need to be decentralized: GNU Taler is one example that gets posted here a lot.

Any attempt to retrofit the old system of banking will only make it harder to replace by a system with better underlying assumptions.

tarpitt··on Canadians are running out of time to oppose Bill C-22
traitor to what? what does our country even stand for?
tarpitt··on Kimi K3.1 Pro and K3.1 Pro Highspeed
Hardening against what? Apologies if I am being dense here.

The way I see it, automated systems should basicially have access to the financial system anyways. This is some of the appeal of cryptocurrency.

Sybil resistance built into the traditional financial system (for example firewalling based on residential IP, requiring banking apps, etc.) is a massive annoyance that can obviously by circumvented at scale.

tarpitt··on Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone
It does not make sense for someone to lose faith in apple because someone else was able to run a modified imessage app.

For apple to entertain this idea is to create more problems for themselves in the long run.

If you understand this from my perspective, which is that these actions are motivated by a desire for more control. It begins to make more sense. If you can benefit from increased control, then these unreasonable expectations of security against your customers (held by other customers) are a desirable problem to have as opposed to an increasing burden.

Imagine the same being said of a car manufacturer. "We need to install security measures in place to prevent you from modifiying your car because other people may see that modified versions of our cars exist and that tarnishes our brand somehow".

As long there is no reason to allow companies to exert this control over consumers, it just allows the manufacturer to enforce a total monopoly on the post-market.

tarpitt··on Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone
Who bears the security risk? The user.

The only security risk for apple is a job security risk if the ecosystem lock-in is eroded.

tarpitt··on Getting ready to operate GNU Taler in Germany
>What capabilities do they have to transfer money around without being surveilled?

It's basicially david chaum's blind-signature money idea. It's centralized but the central issuer can't connect the outputs to the inputs. (but unique inputs signed by the issuer correspond to unique outputs)

>Also are transactions final and irreversible?

I think so unless you are able to reveal the secrets of the transaction. Hmm, however revealing the secret to someone is basicially same as spending it to them (analgous to releasing a signed and finalized transaction into the mempool in cryptocurrency). It's finalized by the issuer signing it.

Like you basicially send the vendor the secret, and then they hand it in to the coin issuer and wait for the issuer to sign a new input, before giving you the merchandise. So idk how it would work reversing the transactions

tarpitt··on Do Spammers Deserve Death?
The solution is to add a small fee to each message proportional to the cost of reading it. This was the original idea behind hashcash before bitcoin used it for PoW. But you could also do it with a micropayments system such that the recipient splits some reward.
tarpitt··on What shall I teach my son?
I mean one example is like a dampened spring system or RLC circuits or something. You can simplify a lot of systems down to those types of simple physics systems you learn about in class.

A lot of it I think is just training people to adopt a "physics-like" or "math-like" way of thinking and giving them a general overview of how things work.

tarpitt··on What shall I teach my son?
Here is an example of a practical optimization problem:

A factory needs to produce 12,000 components per year. Each production run costs $300 to set up, and storing one component costs $4 per year. What production quantity Q minimizes the annual setup and storage costs?

tarpitt··on What shall I teach my son?
The transition to mass media and recording media is what has made performance art an infeasible career for all but a tiny minority of high-performers.

I need to eat man

tarpitt··on What shall I teach my son?
>Machines may do tasks, but they can never do work, for that toil and sacrifice is an innately human action that we’ve staunchly refused to surrender.

You can keep toiling for mud pies. The way I see it, there are two options: let go or be dragged

tarpitt··on What shall I teach my son?
By the time they reach adulthood this aspect of robotics will be solved. I give it about 5 years.
← PreviousPage 2 of 5Next →