Hacker News Reader

throwawayy6767on Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors

People do pay for quality journalism. Democracy and the press did fine before the adtech industry thank you very much

throwawayy6767on Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors

If content is truly legitimate, people will pay a fair price for it. If your business model collapses without ads, maybe you didn't deserve one to begin with

throwawayy6767on What agents mean for Rust (and vice versa)

Tooling and libraries matter much more than semantics for language use, and training data is crucial for that

throwawayy6767on Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors

Why not just ban all ads?

throwawayy6767on Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?

I don't have a horse in the "is nicotine good/bad" race, but having lots of references and being argued to death isn't a proxy for being true. Gwern is a former wikipedia admin so peppering everything with references and going line by line, usenet style, to demolish someone's argument is his bread and butter. That just makes him an excellent rhetorician in the online community of people who relate to this argumentative style (typically people who read wikipedia a lot), not a source of truth. When it comes to fields I know a bit more about it's pretty easy to see through the irrelevant citation gish gallop.

throwawayy6767on What agents mean for Rust (and vice versa)

Rust is fast, both at run and compile time (both important for the speed of the agent loop), its nazi compiler excludes many categories of errors that LLMs might make, the compiler's helpful error messages give precious hints for the agent to iterate upon, it's relatively new so not encumbered with half a century of legacy cruft with obsolete syntax, it has many modern first class features, it neatly compiles into a single portable executable. It's the language that's best positioned to mitigate the issues of LLMs while leveraging their (and its own) strength.

throwawayy6767on What agents mean for Rust (and vice versa)

Just like many open source maintainers lectured their unhappy users that their broken and featureless software was given for free and they should make PRs instead of complaining.

Be careful what you wish for, etc

throwawayy6767on What agents mean for Rust (and vice versa)

The size of the training data also matters. Turns out the Rust Evangelist Task Force was right to push it on HN all along

throwawayy6767on Strafe: A new open-source, E2E Encrypted, and federated alternative to Discord

This post genuinely made me laugh in anticipation of the replies it'd trigger, have an upvote friend

throwawayy6767on Why Sweden is abandoning its cashless society

https://www.parlament.gv.at/dokument/XXVI/J/3563/fnameorig_7...

https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/christchurch-atte...

I don't have a horse in this race and didn't even know who this noname Austrian firebrand was prior to this discussion but the evidence is not exactly hard to find. By all means feel free to deny, shoot the messenger, call me names, etc. Won't change anything, people can just fact check stuff themselves

throwawayy6767on Why Sweden is abandoning its cashless society

Ukraine's admin life is extremely well digitized, moreso than most developed countries. You can do pretty much anything with the Dia app. Most amazingly it's a very recent development

throwawayy6767on Why Sweden is abandoning its cashless society

A cursory look up of the dude very quickly turned up links with far-right terrorist and Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant, including receiving money from him, so I don't think it's the "opinion" that's the issue.

Replying to your edit: this is not a discussion about whether debanking or state control of the financial system is good or bad in general. I don't have a much opinion on such a complex topic (though I do hope that your principled opposition to state debanking also extends to muslims). What I replied to is your allegation of that he was debanked for his "opinions", which is categorically false. He was put on some sort of list, rightly or wrongly, because he had links with a far-right terrorist* who shot and killed dozens of people at a mosque. You omitting that fact and crying about authoritarianism when confronted leads me to think that you are not arguing in good faith.

*in the strictest definition of the word: openly subscribing (and self-describing) to far-right ideologies, and committing acts of terror

throwawayy6767on Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?

Not sure about the verbosity but that's probably where the useless and annoying claudisms come from, they are rewarded by (rationalist adjacent) users because they feel good about understanding the jargon and it reinforces the feeling of communicating with a superior alien intelligence (and that oneself is also somewhat superior for being able to understand it).

throwawayy6767on Why is every rationalist blog post way too long?

It's a mix of bad writing ability, contrived arguments (coming up with weird hypotheticals or simulating what an opponent would say), cargo-culting rationalist thought leaders (Yarvin, Scott, Yudkowsky, gwern) and the concealing of unsavory ideas.

There's also a culture of not knowing when to stop posting and touch grass - when all your friends are way too online and probably also rationalists and much of your identity and status is tied to online posting, you invest a lot in cultivating that social identity and signaling to your community, even to a degree that would look unhealthy to normies.

throwawayy6767on A plea not to use uv-build

You, like the other commenter, disregarded the core argument of the matter in favor of contrarianness for its own sake: are you trying to argue that building literally everything from source is cool and good because it's niche and weird, whereas Linux was niche and weird once but it's cool and good now? As I said, Linux had and still has clear advantages over Windows to the point that Microsoft felt threatened by it fairly soon (cue Ballmer's chair throwing, cancer remark, etc.) and tried to undermine it before giving up with Nadella. What, exactly, are the obvious and objective upsides of compiling everything from source? Many posters in the thread dispelled performance-maxxing as a meme so it can't be that. You are comparing apples to oranges here.

throwawayy6767on A plea not to use uv-build

The vast majority of desktop Linux users run Ubuntu (initial motto: Linux for human beings). So one may argue the literal opposite of what you wrote, in that if Canonical didn't invest into making a Linux distro that's accessible to normal people, it wouldn't have the relevance it now does. On top of that, Linux has (or had) a number of clear advantages over Windows that dwarf the presumed upsides of compiling everything from source vs. downloading builds.

There's not much of an argument for adopting obscure niche practices for their own sake

throwawayy6767on Ukraine Is Successfully Bombing the Heart of Russia's Disinformation Machine

>They went in with 90k troops, that barely enough to "take" even a smaller city like Kiev. The goal was to enforce a political outcome to this acute crisis outside of a total war. Initially, this succeeded with the peace talks in Istanbul and Russian troops retreated. Finally, the West (Boris Johnson, Victoria Nuland, Biden) promised full NATO support for Ukraine and Zelensky smashed the peace treaty into the trashcan. That's when the Ukraine army started its counter-offensive and pushed the Russians far back into the eastern parts of the Donbass. That's when Russia commenced to a slow and grinding war of attrition with the goal of removing the russophobic Zelensky regime propped up by the West.

This + the use of 'Great Patriotic War' shows you're not really worth arguing with, but still - you do know people can trivially look up and fact check the bit of fanfic you just wrote, right?

throwawayy6767on A plea not to use uv-build

Maybe it's time to grow up and download binary builds like a normal person. I had my 'let's compile the linux kernel from source for 3.5% hypothetical performance gains' phase but you can't expect professional devs to cater to source-obsessed hobbyists

throwawayy6767on Ukraine Is Successfully Bombing the Heart of Russia's Disinformation Machine

Ukraine has been bombing Moscow and Putin's residences and assassinating his friends without any nuclear retaliation so we can be reasonably (if not completely) sure that if the mafia boss were trigger happy we'd know it already.

The truth is that no one has any idea how the war will unfold and attrition can simmer a long time without any clear resolution or winner at all, even between seemingly unbalanced belligerents. See Iran vs Iraq, Saudi vs Yemen, USSR vs Afghanistan, etc. People who are too used to video game map painting tend to underestimate the capabilities of million-strong modern states engaged in an existential war - as the saying goes, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

The only conceivable way this resolves in the near future is if Putin gets offed somehow but given how mortally scared he seems to be of drones and his own elites it doesn't seem likely

throwawayy6767on Ukraine Is Successfully Bombing the Heart of Russia's Disinformation Machine

>This is a war of attrition

Why'd they initially plan to capture Kiev in 3 days then

>the goal is to minimize losses of Russian troops and maximize destruction of Ukrainian troops and infrastructure

Why do they have to recruit in prisons and offer ungodly recruitment bonuses then

>The goal is not to take land, that what the west doesn't understand.

Why does Putin maintain his maximalist goals and requests the entirety of the Donbass he failed to take as a precondition for a ceasefire then

>At some point Ukrainian lines will crumble and then everything will unfold quickly.

People been saying that for three years. Any time now, you just wait

throwawayy6767on Ukraine Is Successfully Bombing the Heart of Russia's Disinformation Machine

Why are they struggling to take the Donbass though

throwawayy6767on Bumble bought for $1.3B in 'bet on the future of humanity'

What is the 'bet on the future humanity' about and what does it have to do with a dating app? Not at all clear from reading the article.

throwawayy6767on Gemini 4 Argon

If you can't afford a Google engineer's high-end device that doesn't lag you don't matter to them :)

throwawayy6767on Fable Took My Job

If this were true scaling or hypergrowth wouldn't exist

throwawayy6767on BB(10) > Graham's Number

Why is math interesting or relevant at all? Why do anything indeed other than sex and eating?

throwawayy6767on Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy

I did say 'at least'

throwawayy6767on Fable Took My Job

That's dumb and just an excuse. If it were true, why not keep the whole team and empower them and deliver 10x the existing value?

The dark truth is that tech executives have been extremely pissed off by tech workers in the 2010s leveraging their specialist knowledge into exorbitant salaries, autonomous working conditions and even political demands (remember the Google in China backlash?), and they are now using AI as an excuse to do mass layoffs in order to scare the uppity proles-craftsmen into falling in line. As Kalecki said, they value discipline in the factories more than raw profits

throwawayy6767on Recursive self-improvement through collective intelligence

>I don't think this was, or is, true: https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-analysi... - even from a vibe check alone, it was pretty clear that K3 was missing Fable's special sauce, especially for more hands-on problems

What special sauce exactly? Refusing to work on any problems remotely connected to biology (including e.g. the book of Genesis)?

>The Chinese model lag depends on who you ask, but the current estimate seems to be about four months: https://stateofopensource.ai/

Benchmaxxing aside, most actual performance is now harness and orchestration dependent and the difference between frontier US and Chinese models is dim as best for virtually all practical tasks. The vast majority of people don't need to solve Navier-Stokes

throwawayy6767on Recursive self-improvement through collective intelligence

People said the same about mythos, and o3, and gpt-4.

Most of the very recent spectacular achievements (math conjectures) were done by leveraging datacenter capacity (throwing agents and millions' worth of compute at the wall until something sticks), not any secret sauce intelligence.

throwawayy6767on Zod 4.6.6 compromised by malware?

What are we looking at exactly? Gia Tan situation? Prompt injection?