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unyttigfjelltol

4,292 karma · joined April 16, 2016

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unyttigfjelltol··on My AI agents found an unmapped Maya site?
As the tech matures folks will align around RAG with authenticated data sources meaning the models will create demand for licensing of originals that did not previously exist.
unyttigfjelltol··on Why are we still working this hard?
Answer: People are reluctant to live in 2026 the way they did in 1973.

The additional compensation is a statistical artifact that accounts for air conditioning, iPhones, reliable cars that last 20 years, the Internet, etc.

unyttigfjelltol··on Every AI model has the same "controversial" take on humans
Most species compete at the critical boundary, crowd out competitors.

Humans on the other hand co-opt, arguably, sort of like a virus. Our ultimate foe isn’t other organisms, but nothingness, because you can’t co-opt nothingness into an ally or tool.

unyttigfjelltol··on Treachery in the Rodin Museum 3D scan verdict
Or because they are ignorant, scared and facing a technological disruption that might threaten the value of the original, which is the very reason the museum exists. You get a similar dynamic with over-enthusiastic corporate takedown notices.

I read it like this: the museum wanted to safely preserve the original so they made a digital copy and hid it in a drawer. The author pointed out this was not lawful, and the museum panicked because they intended it as a digital copy protected similarly to the original. So, commendations to the appeals court for identifying the key philosophical issue; regrets that they ignored the actual law.

unyttigfjelltol··on ADHD, autism or complex trauma? [pdf]
An experience that produces grit and resilience in one person, in another produces visits to a mental health practitioner 20 years later. The practitioner is confused and writes an article: did the event produce the long-delayed visit, or the person’s inherent way of interacting with the world?

To state the question correctly, is to imply the answer. Declaring all events that subjectively motivate a mental health visit as “trauma” is to allow private realities and have the patient determine the standard of care. Factually, we all know that if someone insists on holding onto a minor slight for an extended time, this is rarely about the event itself. The mental health community got waaaayyyy off track with this radical expansion of the concept of trauma.

unyttigfjelltol··on Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border
> It's immensely different. Leaps and bounds different. Why? [O]nce you have been told to unlock the device, you're already in a legally binding process.

From a factual point of view, rather than the narrow legal one offered, it is not materially different to delete a phone in anticipation of a future search. In most cases, outside the customs context, it's just harder for the government to prove obstruction of justice.

What's different here is that the government only had a right to search the phone in relation to the border, and the government used that right not just to search for contraband like the law anticipates. If someone dumped their contraband and made it disappear before actually crossing a border, would that be an evidence-related crime? What if they thought about a contraband conspiracy, and then intentionally forgot? What if the customs office presented a form to all travelers, well in advance of formal screening, that they must preserve their contraband henceforth? And then they decided not to smuggle it? Interesting questions legally, but factually, considering criminal charges in those scenarios over the evidentiary situation would be pretty silly.

So then, when you delete purportedly contraband data at the border, have you really just done a public service of removing one more potentially contraband item from border inspection? Or is it that once any of us create data in the vicinity of a border or in a context where we might approach a border in the future with the access device or storage medium, do we all have a duty to preserve it for inspection until the customs authorities get around to inspecting us? Or is it just that this series of hypotheticals illustrate that we have here an epic mash-up of misinterpretation here?

unyttigfjelltol··on Microsoft Israel chief leaves amid ethical controversy
Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran— all of them have both an armed force and weapons to fight with. Hamas in particular, instigated the hot conflict that started Oct. 7 2023, and prolonged it through hostage-taking and active participation in armed conflict.

All these Iran-backed forces are formally allied into an Axis of Resistance, and their main success so far has been to confuse people like you about who holds the moral and ethical high ground. The reason they sought to sow doubt and confusion is to isolate Israel so they can destroy the nation, the whole thing, as they continuously have campaigned to do for perhaps 70 years.

unyttigfjelltol··on Your phone is about to stop being yours
Hey, I’ve side loaded and F-Droided and all that. But here’s the thing: I just need the phone to work, minimally spy on me, and not turn into some horrible malware sinkhole. Google and their OEM ecosystem lost my confidence on all three counts.

One thing I used to side load or F-Droid was a keyboard, to circumvent what I perceived as privacy violations. But my selection Year 0 got forked or disappeared by Year 2, idk when or why, and thats a glaring security or privacy risk that I don’t have time to monitor and figure.

I actually thought Google’s solution in the article was charming— toggle developer mode. If you’re in developer mode you know you’ve got something to monitor and mitigate. Smartphones just aren’t powerful enough to use for their own defense at a consumer level against professionalized hackers, and from a product positioning perspective Google’s move is completely defensible.

unyttigfjelltol··on Your phone is about to stop being yours
Security is essential for an appliance like a smart phone. I fight the general purpose computing battle on my desktop with Linux, but on my phone I just need something that won’t be hacked.
unyttigfjelltol··on An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below
I disagree. They could fire Claude and their legal counsel could pursue claims (if there were any, idk)-- the accountability model is similar. Anthropic probably promised no particular outcome, but then what employee does?

And in the reverse, if a person makes a series of impulsive, damaging decisions, they probably will not be able to accurately explain why they did it, because neither the brain nor physiology are tuned to permit it.

Seems pretty much the same to me.

unyttigfjelltol··on Tariffs Raised Consumers' Prices, but the Refunds Go Only to Businesses
> journalists in media, classically inept at any economic analysis

It’s just the NYT. Let’s not demean the rest of the media for the faults of the NYT.

unyttigfjelltol··on F-35 is built for the wrong war
Russian self-image is protector of the family of Slavic people and nations. Resorting openly to destruction of a Slavic people would be an incoherent tactic.

That self-perception lowered the gate for interference in Ukrainian affairs in the first place, but also set a ceiling on escalation.

unyttigfjelltol··on Show HN: Hormuz Havoc, a satirical game that got overrun by AI bots in 24 hours
Weak gameplay. It’s a turn-by-turn war strategy game where all the levers are “Go on FOX and friends”. What’s particularly strange is how backward the critique is. How about this— for your encore, write the same game from the IRGC perspective. It goes— the US seeks peace; fund foreign militias, try to assassinate a former President. Said former president is reelected and after being unable to close a peace deal, attacks you. You— demonstrate your strategic deterrence by bombing a half-dozen neutral nations and mining an international waterway. Etc.
unyttigfjelltol··on US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire
> play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Yeah, the game Iran is now trying to play is called “Pipelines and Pirates”.

There’s actually a ship deployed to the region right now named after the standard US response to this game, the USS Tripoli.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War

unyttigfjelltol··on US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire
> Iran didn't escalate against anyone except their aggressors.

This is categorically false. Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, Qatar, (Kuwait,) even Oman and Turkey at various times, and Cyprus. Iran demonstrated superiority in only one respect during this war, and that was in recruiting otherwise well-meaning, levelheaded figures in media and government, even religious leaders, to spout incoherent nonsense as you did here.

unyttigfjelltol··on Common drug tests lead to tens of thousands wrongful arrests a year
It's obviously a problem with efficiency, resources and incentives. Earlier court dates is reshuffling deck chairs on the titanic, basically after the ship sank.

Since the problem is about labs and technology, and that the state labs declared themselves too busy to do justice, the solution is to provide accountability for those decision-makers. Just to reinforce: the reporter read the label on these field drug tests police were using to charge crimes, and ascertained that they were unfit for this use; yet the state lab which should have been broadcasting this information to the police, not only failed, but refused to test the same articles for months and months, until the case was literally at trial. I know it wouldn't make good press, but this story should be "labs, labs, labs, what in the world is wrong with state labs". You can't fix it with new laws, you need better people in charge of these labs.

unyttigfjelltol··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
If you start with the view that Israel has a right to exist, like Kuwait has a right to exist, what common ground then is possible with the IRGC? Did Saddam Hussein think it was a winning strategy to lecture the world about Kuwaitis pulling the strings in the original Desert Storm?

The IRGC and Iranian leadership assume that since Israel is just one nation, and not a big one, that they really really want to annihilate, it should be no big deal for everyone else to accept. But that is a dangerous, even existential proposal on both sides, as the IRGC knows, partly because the US position worldwide is about projecting security for partners.

Iran actually occupies a mirror position regarding the Palestinians, who have fought and suffered greatly. So Iran strives to reverse the positions of the Israelis and Palestinians— not to raise all ships, but swap them— which isn’t a moral cause from an impartial perspective, it’s just picking a different winner.

The US and Israel sought peace through negotiations for decades regarding the Palestinians, while Iran has continually plotted and waged war, which it now has on its home soil. The US and Israel have genuinely sought to peacefully resolve the situation, while Iran has not, not in my lifetime.

unyttigfjelltol··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
Trump’s bargaining position has been: stop raising foreign armies to attack Israel; stop trying to sneak into the nuclear club, because we know what you’re going to do.

Translated to human terms: stop threatening the US and its allies.

The US position is not sadism, it’s how every nation except Iran tolerates one another, live and let live.

Russia and the US— they competed strongly with one another during the Cold War but generally respected red lines. Russia withdrew its kinetic threat from Cuba, the US knew circa 1998 that expanding NATO through the old Warsaw Pact would make no friends in Moscow. Strong, rules-based brinksmanship all the way around.

Iran is just about ideological extremism. Sometimes there are rules, or used to be, but the IRGC signed up a bunch of unprofessional clowns to wage total war on its behalf and, at core, talks like “mutually assured destruction” would be a total “win”, provided Israel was on the other side. If either superpower exposed that kind of philosophy in the Cold War can you imagine the calamity? It’s inherently destabilizing.

unyttigfjelltol··on F-15E jet shot down over Iran
Iran has for nearly fifty years pursued unilateral hostilities against the US and Israel, including funding numerous terrorist groups and militias to wage war on them. It can’t negotiate its way out of this quagmire because the IRGC’s core ideology and mission is hatred (and hostage-taking).

In addition to waging continuous offensive militia operations, it’s been cultivating a conventional and nuclear offensive option which it most definitely would use if it had it, because again, the IRGC’s reason for existence is to “resist” Israel and the US, by which they mean obliterate those nations. What Trump recently has been saying about Iran is exactly what Iran has been saying for decades about the US and Israel.

One of those militias went all Leroy Jenkins in 2023 and prematurely initiated the current hot war, which Iran is losing. In frustration, Iran has embarked on a terror campaign of bombing neutral neighbors to punish them for … friendly diplomacy with the US I guess, and bombing civilians in Israel. And annexing an international waterway.

What Trump and folks on this board don’t seem to realize is that war with Iran is more like fighting a bunch of lawyers. You hurt them kinetically and they make you feel like you hurt yourself, get all confused. They slaughter 35k of their own people and shut off the Internet; the US mixes up the boundaries of an IRGC naval base in a much more constrained horror and the UN starts strutting around.

Narratives do matter for winning wars and between Trump derangement syndrome and the IRGC’s natural cleverness at permanent victimhood, it’s the narrative that’s at risk in a war between great nations that, unfortunately, sadly has been perfectly inevitable for decades.

unyttigfjelltol··on What Is Copilot Exactly?
The weird thing is some of the capabilities of these different Copilots are completely different, even though presented in the same way. The real pain begins when you assume consistent handling of links to objects in M365. It’s far less intuitive than even this article suggests. Two different prompts even in the same browser tab, different Copilots, different capabilities interacting with the rest of M365.
unyttigfjelltol··on I am definitely missing the pre-AI writing era
AI can take a rough draft, clean it up and shorten it as much as you want. The suggestions very often expose ambiguities in the original text. If you think the LLM got it wrong, it’s nearly often the LLM overreading some feature of the original that you failed to catch, which is precisely what you’d want out of your proofreader.

Yes, LLMs reduce the individual charm of prose, but the critique itself carries a romantic notion that we all loved the idiosyncratic failures of convention and meaning which went into highly identifiable personal styles, and which often go missing from LLM-edited work.

unyttigfjelltol··on FTC action against Match and OkCupid for deceiving users, sharing personal data
It’s more like “strike one,” and sets up a clear standard for what happens if this continues, as it did in another well-known case.[1]

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/facebook-agrees-pay-...

unyttigfjelltol··on Mystery jump in oil trading ahead of Trump post draws scrutiny
I think you’re just seeing the logic of US defense by offense, and the reason why the excursion was launched as it was three weeks ago.

If you step back, in 1979 Iran launched a revolution that had an avowed goal of “death to America”. If the Iranians play the kinetic scenario to the bitter end, they simply are demonstrating this was not mere poetry and there never was any other off-ramp, just tactically deciding at what relative strength these two systems will collide.

So Iran loses by demonstrating irrational resolve in antisocial tactics, like firing missiles randomly at neutral neighbors, which is the same precondition you take as gating victory. Conflicts are played out in the real world specifically to resolve inconsistent modeling like this held by different sides, and all parties would be well served by finding a better way to resolve the conflicting modeling here, because the most likely scenario currently is that everyone loses.

unyttigfjelltol··on Mystery jump in oil trading ahead of Trump post draws scrutiny
1. By a show of hands, who was surprised that the cataclysmic warnings of the weekend subsided into talk of diplomacy on Monday?

2. Let’s hypothesize the US gov’t or allies did pre-release this info to traders as a policy tool, inviting them to sell oil profitably, shaping the later price action . In a practical sense they may have brought more speculators to the short side than otherwise would have been there; is that scenario really beyond the pale?

3. News of war and sovereign relations on an international stage necessarily will test the boundaries of traditional law of confidentiality and fair practices.

unyttigfjelltol··on War prediction markets are a national-security threat
Yeah, I was recalling public references to Husayn ibn Ali (Haider) [1] preparing for battle. This individual is revered for both martyrdom and victory, so I guess which one he had in mind is technically ambiguous…. It’s also the same figure that the Iranians referenced after his death .[2]

[1] https://nypost.com/2025/06/18/world-news/iran-supreme-leader...

[2] https://www.news18.com/world/in-the-name-of-haidar-last-post...

unyttigfjelltol··on War prediction markets are a national-security threat
Folks, the President announced the attack and rough date ten days in advance.[1] He did the same exact thing in 2025, with strikes beginning on the 61st day after a 60-day deadline.[2]

This particular market wasn’t about the likelihood of a strike but the probability of radical success. It seems at least possible in the circumstances that the Iran Supreme leader chose his own fate, which was inherently predicable and also exactly what I seem to recall him publicly predicting, albeit without a strict deadline.[3]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c86yjnw4x49o

[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/trump-says-he-g...

[3] https://www.malaysianow.com/news/2026/03/01/khamenei-killed-...

unyttigfjelltol··on Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs
No, Trump manufactured negotiating leverage out of thin air— nothing, really. He extracted concessions on something like a bluff. Plus, didn’t he also extract a budget that in retrospect wasn’t appropriate had the tariff revenue been removed?
unyttigfjelltol··on OpenAI reaches deal to deploy AI models on U.S. DoW classified network
This says OpenAI is happy with the law and DoW policy, and thinks those protections are adequate. In contrast, Anthropic seems to have imposed additional contractual guardrails, blocking apparently legal DoW use cases.

Was it a subtly different contract, or a notice of dispute? Unclear.

unyttigfjelltol··on The Pentagon threatens Anthropic
Techno futurist:

1. Builds tool extremely capable of mass surveillance and running autonomous warfighting capabilities.

2. Expresses shock — shock — when the Department of War insists on using the tool for mass surveillance and autonomous warfighting systems.

unyttigfjelltol··on Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective
The answer is to keep the same number of stops but run two or more vehicles simultaneously. Or open more doors. Or expedite fares.

The authors get mixed up equating count of marked stops with dwell time. Running leapfrogging vehicles , or numerous other strategies, reduces dwell time because one boards passengers and the other disembarks at any given stop or vice versa.

In fact, I’d argue bus fare gates, steps, 1-door loading and traffic signal/stop interactions are far more significant than stop count.

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