HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

treetalker

3,268 karma · joined August 6, 2023

realtreetalker@gmail.com

Pas de publicité, SVP

Unless personally requested, sales outreach and advertisements are unwelcome.

submissionscomments
treetalker··on Oversupply of oil could create glut of 4M barrels a day, says energy watchdog
(November 2025)
treetalker··on Ask HN: What's your favorite children's books?
A Rule Is to Break: A Child’s Guide to Anarchy by John Seven
treetalker··on Trump calls for stop to attacks on Russian oil refineries, Zelenskyy replacement
Higher chances of impeachment and conviction after the midterms means Russia is looking to close out its position for maximum profit.
treetalker··on High Expectations: An Observational Study of Programming and Cannabis
Without misspelling, by date: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
treetalker··on Hegseth Wants Public to Watch First Firing Squad Execution Since WWII
“Thou shalt not kill.”

“Did I stutter?” —God, probably

treetalker··on Fort Hood attacker's execution by firing squad will be livestreamed
Now where did we put that superior intelligence? It was just here a second ago …
treetalker··on Ask HN: Any Insight Here into French High School Unrest?
Protest (to include property destruction) is a core component of French culture and both expected and generally tolerated even when disapproved of and quashed or, more typically, allowed to fizzle out on its own.

French national soccer team lost? Burn cars to show disapproval. Team won? Burn cars to celebrate.

Seems to me that that cultural aspect + general teenage angst + current generation’s diminished prospects + French national debt + seedy element’s use of more-peaceful protests as an excuse to piggyback in order to commit violence and destroy property for fun = current situation.

treetalker··on Mumsnet denies using AI for content after prompt appears on message board
> … it fed speculation about Mumsnet’s use of AI, with one user saying: “We might as well just go and do something else then.”

This sparked joy, thanks.

treetalker··on Fastmail – Grouped Mailbox
Great to see. But this seems like a feature that should be added:

> Groups work using search operators like from:, to:, subject: and is:. They can’t search the body of a message, so plain words like meeting won’t work as a group on their own.

treetalker··on California wine glut sends premium bottles to Costco, others
Apparently you now need to waive your class-action rights to read newspaper articles.
treetalker··on AI won't suppress legal rates
FWIW, my sense as an appellate practitioner (by definition, in the role of viewing and critiquing not only the strategies and actions of clients but more importantly the work of other attorneys, trial judges, and appellate judges) is that, over the past 3–5 years, clients, trial counsel, trial judging, and appellate opinions have all gotten far worse. Every day I see mistakes in the fundamentals of practice — logic and what used to be taken for common sense are out the window, and it’s as if people aren’t bothering to take 30 quiet minutes to sit back and ponder the matters at hand. Gut feelings and “pantsing” hold sway.

Just my impressions. Of course it’s not universally true, but overall this is my sense. Not sure that it’s a result of AI (come to your own conclusions) but I think it plays a part.

treetalker··on Evaluating OCR on the Community Memory Corpus
Is there a website of record to stay abreast of the state of the art in OCR? It seems like it changes frequently.

Last I heard, the native MacOS models were super good for both text and handwriting on consumer hardware and in moderately sized batches.

treetalker··on EmbeddingGemma 2: An open, lightweight multimodal embedding model
I haven’t tried it yet, but, for law practice, I could imagine using it to search a case file for “undamaged roof before Hurricane Katrina” and “damaged roof after Hurricane Katrina” and being able to locate both deposition testimony and pertinent photographs in the body of evidence.
treetalker··on EmbeddingGemma 2: An open, lightweight multimodal embedding model
> Building local multimodal search with this would be amazing.

(lawyer here) — I’m curious: for what you’re describing, wouldn’t the machine need to be constantly running/updating the embeddings to take updated and new files into account? If so, how would that computation load compare to, say, Spotlight constantly updating its index?

treetalker··on Altman: The world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of AI
No, but court is, and his sister has made the allegations there in order to establish them as legal facts.
treetalker··on Can you predict earthquakes?
Yes!

Accurately? No.

treetalker··on One person can now be a quorum at the SEC
From footnote 6:

> See 5 U.S.C. 804(3)(C) (the term “rule” does not include “any rule of agency organization, procedure, or practice that does not substantially affect the rights or obligations of non-agency parties”).

But query whether giving an individual plenary Commission power could “substantially affect the rights or obligations of non-agency parties”.

treetalker··on Edward "BigBalls" Coristine
His grandfather was a KGB double agent. Totally normal and not suspicious.
treetalker··on Calling AI 'other intelligence' better describes the advent of a new lifeform
Believe it or not, calls on .oi domains.
treetalker··on Extra Big Ass Intelligence
*OW! My Big Balls!
treetalker··on Ask HN: Why can AI solve Navier-Stokes but not write in a human-like way?
FWIW, I have been pleasantly surprised with the writing quality of GPT 6 Luna. It’s not particularly smart/insightful on its own, but I get good results when having it summarize or rephrase techbrospeak. It also produces coherent and easy-reading drafts from outlines and bullet points, and it generally follows instructions well in these domains.
treetalker··on Trump's AI rebrand causes 'unprecedented' demand for Slovenian website names
cui bono

> It's like Lenin said, you look for the person who will benefit… and, uh, uh, you know… You know, you'll uh, uh—well, you know what I'm trying to say…

— The Dude

treetalker··on A 20-year-long permanent cookie: America.gov and tracking
Saffron Impersonator
treetalker··on Don't be fooled–LLMs don't reason
Sure thing; it’s a Brett Terpstra creation.

Textise is similar and also doubles as a poor man’s text-only browser. https://www.textise.net/referrer

Both Marky and Textise work in some places where the other doesn’t.

Obviously you (or your LLM) can throw together JavaScript bookmarklets to convert whatever page you’re on. The tools’ homepages might have premade ones, I forget.

treetalker··on Don't be fooled–LLMs don't reason
Agreed, especially because it also seems to defeat Reader mode. Try running it through Marky and then previewing: https://heckyesmarkdown.com/preview.cgi?readability=1&inline...
treetalker··on Exhaling may speed up reaction times
Perhaps this is related?

“Slow breathing impacts inter-organ dynamics modulating brain function and risk behavior” — https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(26)00339-9

Finding was that “prolonged exhalation increases risky decisions by increasing reward sensitivity”.

treetalker··on America.gov goes crazy on "play Minecraft"
Good thing: since removed!

Big Brother reads HN, it seems.

The rest of the uncanny valley is still there, though (bike shop with horseshoe; veteran on pickup truck next to rat-king seagulls; etc.).

treetalker··on Anthropic's IPO Prospectus Is a Fucking Doozy
> > The more they lose, the more they win!

American zeitgeist.

treetalker··on America.gov goes crazy on "play Minecraft"
Not sure about everyone else, but when I first opened the page, I see a background image of a kid in ice skates, face-planted on a frozen pond — and, below the question What can America do for you?, the prefilled text in the search box says Try 'How can I invest in my child's future?'.

And I'll be damned if that doesn't sum up the last 10–12 years.

treetalker··on Pledge signed by President Trump and top AI leaders misspells the United States
<superior intelligence>
← PreviousPage 2 of 34Next →